When Grief Refuses to Follow the Rules
I used to think grief had a timeline.
Trigger warning: this essay touches on topics of grief including death and suicide.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please contact 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You deserve support.
After my brother died by suicide, I caught myself doing the math. How long would it take until I was “back to normal”? How long until people would stop looking at me like they were sorry for me? Or until I could have a normal day where I didn’t think about how my life was completely different? I wanted the grief period to be over as quickly as possible so I could get back to normality.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me:
There is no normal to get back to. And grief, especially complex grief, isn’t the kind of thing you can shortcut.
What Makes Grief “Complex”
Let me tell you what complex grief actually looks like, because I think we assume that grief is just about death or sadness. But grief is actually about loss of any kind that fundamentally changes who you are.
Think of it this way: typical grief is like a single layer cake. It’s painful, it’s heavy, it’s one thing you’re carrying. Complex grief is like a layer cake: grief stacked on top of grief, stacked on top of shame, stacked on top of managing other people’s reactions, stacked on top of trauma. It’s when loss gets complicated by circumstances that make it even harder to process.
Typical grief tends to have a natural rhythm. You feel the pain, you let yourself feel it, you talk about the person or what you lost, and you gradually integrate that loss into your new life. The waves get further apart over time, and you can imagine a future even while you’re sad. You’re moving through it.
Complex grief is when you get stuck. When the grief doesn’t soften over time, in fact, it can intensify or stay exactly as raw as it was months or years ago.
Here’s where high achievers get it wrong: they think if they just work hard enough at grieving, they’ll “graduate” from it faster. But grief is a process, not a performance review. There’s no gold star for finishing ahead of schedule.
Here are just a few examples of what complex grief looks like.
When someone dies by suicide or overdose. Suddenly you’re not just grieving, you’re managing everyone else’s discomfort. When someone asks how they died, you’re calculating whether you can say the actual truth or whether you need to say something vague. There’s grief, plus shame, plus managing other people’s expectations.
Leaving an abusive relationship. You’re grieving the person you thought they were, the future you’d imagined, the version of yourself you lost while trying to make it work. But when people find out it was abusive, they say, “Oh, you should be relieved it’s over.” They don’t understand that you can be grateful you left and still be completely devastated.
Losing a job central to your identity. People tell you “it’s just a job” or “you’ll find something better.” But you lost more than a paycheck. You lost your daily sense of purpose, professional relationships, the version of yourself who knew exactly what they were doing.
Becoming a mother. This is such a profound example of complex grief because you’re simultaneously celebrating and grieving. You’re grieving your old body, your old identity, your autonomy, your sleep, your spontaneity, your career trajectory, your relationship with your partner the way it was. Maybe you’re grieving the expectations you held about motherhood in contrast with the reality. And you’re supposed to be purely joyful about it because you have this beautiful baby… but you’re allowed to grieve who you were while loving who you’re becoming.
Signs You’re Dealing With Complex Grief
How do you know you’re dealing with complex grief? It’s not entirely black and white, but there are a few distinctive signs marked by their intensity and persistence:
You might have this intense yearning for what you lost that doesn’t go away, even after a year or more. You might feel like your life has no meaning without what you lost. You may find yourself avoiding all reminders or you can’t stop seeking them out. The thoughts about the loss feel as fresh and painful as they did in the beginning. You might feel like a part of you died with the loss. Often you’re stuck in the loop of “what if” and “if only”: what if I had left sooner? What if I had seen the signs? If only I had done something differently. You keep circling around the same painful thoughts instead of moving through them.
People say time heals all wounds. But this is the grief that needs more than time. It needs specific support, specific strategies, because the normal process of grieving has gotten derailed by complications.
If you’re relating to what I’m saying, it doesn’t mean you’re broken or doing it wrong. It means your grief has layers that are too heavy to carry alone.
Seven Strategies That Actually Help
1. Stop Performing Your Grief
Release yourself from any pressure to grieve “correctly” and give yourself permission to grieve authentically, even if it’s messy.
Maybe you jumped right back into work after a loss because you want to appear strong. Maybe you’re a new mom posting beautiful nursery photos while privately crying because you don’t recognize your body or your life.
The biggest thing I had to learn when I lost my brother was that I didn’t have to be a good griever for anyone. Grief looks different for us all.
During the day, I was a dutiful soldier. I helped my parents with logistics, answered messages with carefully crafted responses showing I was sad but coping, devastated but not falling apart. I showed up to work and acted like someone handling it remarkably well. I thought this was strength. I thought this was honoring him, to not let his death derail my life, to keep achieving.
Then I’d get into bed at night and I’d shatter under the weight of the day’s performance. I’d cry so hard I’d wake up with my pillowcase soaked, my eyes swollen, my chest physically aching. I’d stuff my face into pillows so no one would hear. Even in my own grief, I was managing other people’s comfort.
Here’s how you can care for your grief better than I did:
Start saying no to things that require you to perform being okay. If someone invites you somewhere and you don’t have the energy to put on a brave face, say: “I’m not up for that right now, but I appreciate you thinking of me.”
Practice being honest when people ask how you’re doing. Instead of automatically saying “I’m fine,” try “I’m having a hard day” or “This week has been really tough.”
For high achievers especially, this means releasing yourself from the timeline. You might need more time than you think is reasonable. You might need more time than other people think is reasonable. That doesn’t mean you’re failing, it means you’re being honest about what you actually need.
2. Lean Into Your Support Network
This is crucial for high achievers who are used to holding it together for everyone else. You need at least one person or space where you don’t have to perform.
This might be a therapist—and if you’re dealing with complex grief, I really encourage finding one who specializes in grief or trauma. It might be a close friend who can handle big feelings without trying to fix them. It might be a support group where everyone understands your specific kind of loss.
Identify one person you could be more honest with, and practice letting yourself be real with them this week. It can be as simple as “I’m not actually doing as well as I seem” or “I’m struggling more than I’m letting on.”
3. Let Your Grief Speak
Complex grief comes with feelings that are hard to talk about: shame, guilt, anger, relief, confusion. These feelings need somewhere to go, and rituals can help contain them.
Try this: Get a journal specifically for grief. When the hard feelings show up, write them out without holding back.
Or pick one small ritual you can do when grief feels too big: light a candle and sit with it for a few minutes, go for a walk and talk your feelings out loud, play a song that reminds you of them. The ritual doesn’t have to be elaborate, it just has to give the feeling somewhere to be.
4. Own Your Grief Story
The shame around stigmatized loss, suicide, overdose, anything people don’t know how to talk about—is real and heavy. Every time you edit the story or skip over details, you’re carrying other people’s discomfort on top of your own grief.
Find one space where you can say it plainly. A therapist’s office, a support group specifically for your type of loss, one trusted friend. Practice saying your truth out loud: “My brother died by suicide” or “My mother died of an overdose” or whatever your truth is. You don’t have to tell everyone. You get to choose who knows and how much you share. But having at least one space where you can be completely honest about all of it—the anger, the confusion, the guilt, the what-ifs—is essential.
5. Track Patterns Without Trying to Control the Grief
Get a journal or use a notes app on your phone. On days when grief blindsides you, write down what happened: “Grief showed up today. I was [where/doing what]. I felt [describe it]. What helped: [anything that brought even slight relief].”
Over time, you might start to notice patterns. Maybe certain dates are harder: their birthday, the anniversary, holidays. Maybe certain triggers consistently bring it up—being around families, seeing someone who looks like them, certain songs or smells. Maybe certain times of day or seasons are more tender.
This isn’t about controlling when grief shows up… you can’t. It’s about recognizing patterns so it feels less like being ambushed and more like “Oh, this makes sense. This is a hard week. I can be gentle with myself.” You can start planning ahead: “The anniversary is coming up. I’m going to clear my schedule that day and ask my friend to check in on me.”
6. Release Yourself From Guilt About Laughing or Enjoying Life
This was one of the hardest things for me to learn. Every time I caught myself laughing, I’d feel immediate guilt. How could I be happy when he was gone?
Maybe you can’t laugh at a joke without feeling guilty—like joy is somehow betraying the enormity of the sadness. You can’t have fun without this voice asking, “What kind of person enjoys themselves when someone they love is gone?” You treat happiness like you’re betraying what you lost. Like every moment of lightness is evidence that it didn’t matter enough.
Here’s what you need to understand: It’s normal to feel guilt. That doesn’t mean it’s your fault.
Grief is a whole body experience. Your computer wouldn’t run normally with 100 windows open. So why do you expect your brain to when you’re processing grief and doing all the other things you do in your life? Things will be slower and harder than they used to be for a while, and that’s a normal part of grief.
You think that honoring what you lost means staying stuck in grief forever. You think that if you move forward, if you laugh, if you build a good life, it means you’ve forgotten or it didn’t matter enough. But that’s not how healing works.
When joy shows up, instead of immediately shutting it down with guilt, pause. Notice it. Say to yourself: “This is how I honor what I lost—by living the kind of life that makes grief worth carrying, because it means I had something worth losing.” Then let yourself have the moment of joy.
Here’s something you can actually do: The next time you laugh or feel lightness in the middle of your grief, tell yourself “I’m healing.” Because you are. Being able to have a moment of lightness means that there’s a small part of you that has space for the good. You’re retraining your brain to understand that living doesn’t dishonor what you lost or your pain—it honors the fact that it existed and it mattered.
Let yourself enjoy the good. Say yes when a friend invites you over for dinner. Every small moment of pleasure you allow yourself without self-punishment is practice for living a full life alongside your grief.
7. Let Grief Change You Instead of Destroy You
You’re not who you were before this loss and you never will be again. And here’s the truth: accepting this is much easier than fighting it.
Everything we experience, good or bad, is always changing us. We’re changing every day. Yet so often, I see people fight and try to go back to a version of themselves that they were before the grief ever came along. Instead, you can welcome the new version of you. After all, she’s you, but with more strength and wisdom.
Before this happened, maybe you thought if you just worked hard enough, planned well enough, stayed in control, you could prevent bad things from happening. Maybe you built your whole identity around being capable and having it together: the person with the impressive job title, the person in the relationship, the person who had it all figured out.
And then this loss came and shattered all those illusions about control and certainty.
So what if you let your grief transform you rather than destroy you? Grief cracks us open. It breaks down the walls we’ve built and the stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are and how the world works. And yes, that breaking is painful. But in that cracked-open space, there’s also an opportunity to rebuild differently, to build a life based on what actually matters to you and not what you think you’re supposed to be doing.
Maybe losing someone has made you braver about taking risks because you’ve already survived something devastating. Maybe leaving an abusive relationship has taught you what you will and won’t tolerate, and has shown you your own strength. Maybe losing your job has forced you to separate your worth from your productivity, and has given you space to figure out what you actually want. Maybe becoming a mother has shown you what you’re capable of, and has clarified what actually matters versus what you thought mattered before.
Ask yourself:
Who do I want to be in the face of grief?
How do I want to show up on the other side of this?
What’s this grief teaching me about what matters?
What small change could I make that would honor what I’ve learned?
If I stopped living for other people’s approval, what would I do differently?
What would it look like to build a life that makes grief worth carrying?
The answers might be big: “I’m going to quit my corporate job and train for something completely different.” Or “I’m going to set boundaries I’ve never set before.” Or “I’m going to stop pretending motherhood is only beautiful and start being honest about how hard it is.”
My brother’s death made me braver. It made me move to a new city and eventually a new country. It made me leave my comfortable way of life to embrace a remote lifestyle I could only have dreamt of. It made me care less about the approval of others and care more about building a life I felt proud of living. And while I would love to bring him back if I could, I’m also immensely grateful for the person his death helped me to become.
You get to let this grief change you. You get to let it reshape your priorities, your relationships, your entire life. And that’s not dishonoring what you lost. That’s taking what you’ve learned and building something meaningful from these broken pieces.
What I Want You to Remember
Grief can’t be optimized or performed. It can only be carried. Complex grief isn’t supposed to follow anyone’s timeline, but it does require support, honesty, letting yourself feel your feelings, and especially letting yourself laugh.
You’re not too broken, too sensitive, too slow, or too stuck to build a good life after this loss. You’ve got to be willing to be messy, to not have it figured out, to need more time than you think is reasonable. And that’s how healing actually happens: in small, imperfect steps, not perfect performance.
Your grief is evidence of your love. And your love doesn’t end just because they did. It just has to find new ways to exist in the world: through how you live, how you love others, how you honor what they meant to you by building a life that matters.
Be gentle with yourself. This is so much harder than anyone who hasn’t been through it can understand. You’re doing better than you think you are, even on the days when you’re barely holding it together.
And when you’re ready, which might not be today, but someday, consider this: What kind of life might you build from these broken pieces? What would it look like to let grief transform you rather than destroy you?
You don’t have to answer that now. But I promise you, the answer will find you when you’re ready.
Listen to the full conversation
If this resonated, I go deeper in this week’s podcast. We talk about complex grief, why it gets stuck, and seven strategies you can start using right away.
In this episode you’ll hear:
The layer cake analogy that makes complex grief make sense
How to stop performing your grief, with simple phrases you can borrow
How to build a grief menu so blindsides feel less overwhelming
What to do with the guilt that shows up when joy returns
Listen now: Apple · Spotify · Substack
Watch now: YouTube
With care,
Dr. Therese 💜