Coping with Grief and Loss: Stages of Grief and How to Heal
How to Cope With Grief and Loss
Grief is one of the hardest human experiences one can go through and, interestingly enough, one that all of us will experience at some point in our lives. Whether it comes from losing a loved one, a beloved pet, the end of a relationship, or even the loss of a dream, grief makes us reconsider the way we see ourselves and the world around us.
If you are grieving right now, you might feel overwhelmed, exhausted, confused, or angry… and sometimes all of that at once. I understand — you want these feelings to go away and to move forward. If you are grieving a relationship, you might have heard that it takes about half the time you were together to get over your ex. And for those who have been in a relationship for a decade, don’t worry — this claim is not supported by research. The truth is that there is no exact timeline to move forward, nor a single correct way to grieve. Healing from loss is deeply personal, and while grief often follows recognizable emotional patterns, it rarely moves in a linear way. The positive news is that understanding both the emotional stages of grief and the healing tasks involved can help normalize your experience and offer a more gentle and compassionate path forward.
Grief is More Complex Than Feeling Sad About Your Loss
A loss can affect your emotions, relationships, and even your beliefs about life. Grief may show up physically through changes in sleep, appetite, energy, muscle tension, or even stomach discomfort. Emotionally, people often experience shock, anger, guilt, fear, loneliness, or even relief in certain circumstances. Mentally, grief can make it harder to concentrate, make decisions, or feel organized. Socially, it may create a sense of isolation or feeling different from others. Spiritually, grief can lead to questioning beliefs, searching for meaning, or redefining faith or personal values.
Before I started working at TSG, I spent some time volunteering at the Red Cross. I once had to attend to an older woman who collapsed from a heart attack on the street and later passed away. When the paramedics came, they asked me to accompany the woman’s husband (we’ll call him Matt for story purposes) home. Matt was in complete shock: he started talking non-stop about his life achievements and dreams as though nothing had happened. After a few minutes, I intervened and asked Matt if he wanted to call any family members to notify them of what had happened… and that was the second something clicked in his brain and he crumbled in tears. At the time, I witnessed what seemed like an “improper” reaction for someone who may have just lost their life companion, but through time I learned that everyone’s way of coping with grief can look vastly different.
These reactions are not right or wrong — they are just your brain’s way of trying to cope with a massive shock to the system. They are signs that something deeply meaningful has changed.
Many people expect grief to look like a cloud of sadness that follows them for a specific amount of time, when in reality, grief touches nearly every part of your life — and now you have to rebuild your life around that loss. How long does that take? It really depends on many factors. People tend to believe that the loss shrinks over time, when in reality, it is you who grow around it.
The 5 Stages of Grief
In case this concept feels foreign to you, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the stages of grief as composed of 5 distinct stages. These are not meant to be completed in order or experienced only once. Think of them as emotional experiences that people move through, revisit, and sometimes experience simultaneously.
Denial
Denial often appears as shock, disbelief, or emotional numbness (as our friend Matt’s story illustrates above). It protects us from feeling everything at once — like a filter that allows your brain to gradually absorb the reality of the loss without collapsing.
Anger
Anger may be directed at elements surrounding the death event, other people, medical systems, oneself, or even the person who died.
Bargaining
Bargaining often sounds like “what if” or “if only” thinking. It reflects our natural desire to regain control after something was suddenly taken away. Most of the time, people are aware that their actions would most likely not change the outcome, but they often feel as though there was something else they could have done to prevent it. This is called the “fallacy of control.”
Depression
This stage often involves deep sadness, withdrawal, and loss of interest in daily activities. It reflects the necessary adjustment to life after loss.
Acceptance
Acceptance is the final stage in which the loss has been processed and life has been accommodated to the loss. This does not mean forgetting the person who is gone or being “okay.” It means learning to live alongside the reality of the loss while continuing to move forward. This stage is a key milestone in the loss recovery process.
Gentle Ways to Support Healing
While the stages of grief describe the emotional part of the process people go through when experiencing a loss, psychologist J. William Worden provided 4 practical tools, or “active tasks,” that people can use to process loss in a natural and proactive way.
Task 1: Accept the Reality of the Loss
Accepting loss is often slower and more complex than people expect. Even when we intellectually understand that someone is gone, accepting your new reality can take time.
Task 2: Experience the Pain of Grief
One sentence: allow yourself to feel. Avoiding or suppressing that pain may feel protective in the short term, but like any emotion you suppress, it will eventually come out when you least expect it. Allowing yourself to feel and express grief without judgment helps the healing process unfold naturally. A word of caution: grief often comes with guilt or self-criticism. Try speaking to yourself with the same gentleness you would offer someone you love.
Task 3: Adjust to Life Without What Was Lost
Loss often changes daily routines, personal identity, and even belief systems. Maintaining small daily routines — such as regular meals, sleep patterns, or movement — can help stabilize your nervous system during emotional turbulence. You may also find yourself adjusting to new responsibilities or roles, sometimes ones that are imposed rather than chosen. Healing includes learning how to live in this changed reality, and that is what makes it so tough.
Task 4: Maintain a Connection While Moving Forward
That connection would be with others and with the person you loved. Grieving people often inadvertently isolate themselves, so leaning on trusted friends, family, or therapists can provide emotional support and grounding. Additionally, it can help to find ways to maintain an emotional connection with what or who was lost — through cherished items, celebrating meaningful occasions, or sharing meaningful memories — while still allowing yourself to build a meaningful future.
Why Grief Often Comes in Waves
Many people worry when grief resurfaces after feeling better for a while. Anniversaries, holidays, memories, smells, or unexpected reminders can bring those painful emotions back. This does not mean healing has failed. Grief tends to move in waves rather than straight lines. Trust the process.
When Grief Feels Especially Heavy
Some losses are particularly complex, including sudden deaths, deaths of young people, or deaths that occurred during traumatic events. When grief begins to interfere significantly with daily functioning or feels unbearable, seeking professional support can be a powerful step toward loss recovery.
Trauma vs. Grief: Understanding the Difference
Sometimes people say, “I don’t know if this is grief… or something else.” That question matters. Grief and trauma can overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Grief often sounds like: “I miss them” or “I can’t believe they’re gone,” while trauma often sounds like: “I can’t stop seeing what happened,” “I feel on edge all the time,” or “The world doesn’t feel safe anymore.”
Grief is about missing what is no longer there and wishing it still were — missing the person or thing itself. Trauma, on the other hand, is an overwhelming experience that keeps pulling you back and makes you question your sense of safety or reality — processing the impact.
Traumatic grief happens when the trauma response interferes with the natural grieving process. Instead of feeling sadness and longing, a person may feel stuck in avoidance, hypervigilance, rumination, or flashbacks. It becomes difficult to access the grief because the nervous system is stuck in survival mode.
In traumatic grief treatment, one key step is identifying what is grief and what is trauma. When you lose someone or something, it becomes crucial to distinguish between the two. Why? Because they heal differently.
Grief often needs:
• Permission to feel pain
• A safe space to remember what you lost
• Time to be ready to tell the story
• Connection and personal meaning
While trauma often needs:
• Nervous system regulation
• Increasing feelings of safety
• Releasing trauma from the body
• Reprocessing of overwhelming memories
While grief is not something to eliminate, the traumatic element associated with it needs to be addressed by a professional if present.
Therapist tip: A practical tool we often use during sessions is called controlled grief. This is particularly helpful for people who feel overwhelmed by waves of grief, especially when trauma is involved. It looks like setting aside time to look at photos of that person, share memories about them, engage with cherished items, and overall… just feel connected to them for a few minutes in a safe and non-judgmental space. You can replicate this at home as long as your grief feels manageable and this experience is well tolerated emotionally. Give it a try!
Trauma Therapy Treatment Options
When trauma symptoms are present, trauma therapy may include a range of evidence-based approaches:
• EMDR
• Brainspotting
• Somatic and mind-body therapies
• Trauma-Focused CBT
• Narrative Exposure Therapy
Therapists at The Sterling Group understand grief and offer many of these modalities. We work with teens, young adults, and parents navigating life challenges such as grief, anxiety, work stress, and other life adjustments.
About the Author
Andrea Bernad-Barnola is a Clinical Supervisor and a therapist at The Sterling Group, where she supports individuals and couples navigating life transitions, career shifts, and identity exploration. With extensive experience in the mental health field and a passion for living authentically, Andrea helps clients reconnect with their values, process emotional trauma, and build lives that feel aligned and meaningful. She is trained in trauma-informed modalities including TF-CBT, EMDR, and DBT, which she integrates to help clients not just heal, but thrive.
When she’s not leading her team or meeting with clients, you’ll find her dreaming up new ways to make mental health care more accessible, spending time with her husband and their rotating crew of dog-sitting companions, or planning her next adventure.
Interested in working with Andrea? Reach out to The Sterling Group for a free consultation today.
