The 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Grief

When grief arrives — and it arrives for all of us eventually — most of us are utterly unprepared for what it actually feels like. We've been given a cultural script that doesn't match our reality, and the gap between what we expected and what we're experiencing can feel profoundly isolating.

Here are five things I wish someone had told me, and that I now share with every client who walks through my door.

1. Grief Isn't Linear

You may have heard of the "five stages of grief" — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. While these stages can be useful as a map, they were never meant to be a rigid sequence. Real grief moves in spirals, not straight lines.

You might feel "fine" for two weeks and then be flattened by a wave of sorrow triggered by a smell, a date, a piece of music. That doesn't mean you've gone backwards. It means you're human.

2. Grief Lives in the Body

Many people are surprised to discover that grief is a physical experience as well as an emotional one. Exhaustion, chest tightness, changes in appetite, difficulty concentrating, physical aching — these are all normal grief responses. Your body is carrying the weight of the loss just as much as your mind is.

This is one of the reasons I use EFT (tapping) in my grief work — because it directly addresses the nervous system, releasing the stored emotional charge from the body as well as the mind.

3. Grief Can Be About More Than the Death

When we lose someone, we are rarely grieving just their physical absence. We are also grieving:

The future we had imagined with them
The person we were when they were alive
Things that were left unsaid or unresolved
The role they played in our daily life — the witness to our story
Sometimes, a complicated relationship that can't now be repaired

Understanding the full picture of your loss is one of the most important parts of grief recovery work.

4. Unexpressed Grief Doesn't Disappear

If you've been "holding it together" for everyone else, or keeping yourself too busy to feel, or telling yourself you should be over it by now — please hear this: grief that isn't expressed doesn't go away. It goes underground.

Unexpressed grief can show up as anxiety, irritability, difficulty sleeping, physical illness, a general sense of numbness, or a feeling of being "stuck" in life. It will find a way out, eventually. Far better to give it a safe space now.

5. You Are Allowed to Still Be Grieving

There is no deadline. A year, two years, five years — it doesn't matter. If your loss is still affecting you, that is not a failure. It is a reflection of the depth of your love. And help is still available, regardless of when your loss occurred.

If any of these resonated with you today, you might find it helpful to explore one-to-one Grief Recovery support. I offer sessions both online across the UK and face-to-face in Thurso, Caithness.