Grief After Loss: When Love Has Nowhere Left to Go

Four months after her mother died, Ploy was back at work as usual. Everyone who saw her said the same thing: she has come to terms with it.

Then one afternoon she walked past the snack shelves in the supermarket, and her hand reached automatically for the ones her mother liked — the ones she had bought for her every week. In the space of a second she realized there was nobody left to buy them for. Something rose up in her until her chest was tight. She left the trolley in front of that shelf, walked out, and sat crying alone in her car.

The week before, someone well-meaning had said to her, “it has been months now. You’ve made peace with it. Time to move forward.” And that sentence started Ploy doubting herself: “is there something wrong with me? Why am I still this sad?”

Grief is not an illness. It is love that is still here

Grief is a natural human response to the loss of someone we love. It is not a disorder to be cured quickly, and there is no single correct way to do it.

It is often said that grief is love with nowhere left to go after the person we love has gone. That may explain why the feeling is so heavy: the more we loved, the larger the space they left behind.

Grief does not occur only in the mind. It affects the body too — exhaustion, worse sleep, appetite gone, a mental fog that makes thinking difficult, even a dull physical ache. These are ordinary parts of loss, not signs that you are getting worse.

The misunderstanding about the “five stages of grief”

Many people have heard of the five stages of grief — that one must pass through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance, in that order — and come to believe that if their own feelings do not follow the sequence, they must be grieving incorrectly.

The reality is that grief does not travel in a straight line. It tends to arrive in waves. Some days are calm; some days you are knocked over without warning; and it circles back without any fixed order. That your grief does not match the five-stage pattern does not mean anything is wrong with you. It means you are a human being grieving in your own way.

We do not get past grief. We gradually grow around it

There is an image that explains this well. Picture a ball inside a glass jar.

In the early period after a loss, the ball of grief is nearly the size of the whole jar. It presses against every side, so that almost everything in life is touched by the pain. Many people assume that as time passes this ball will shrink. What usually happens is different. The ball may not shrink at all. It is the jar of our life that gradually grows larger around it.

Which means grief is still there, and still just as heavy on the days when the wave comes in. But around that ball, room for a life gradually grows: ordinary days, laughter, new meanings finding their way in. So we do not get past grief until it disappears. We learn to hold it within a life that has become wider.

Healing does not mean forgetting

One belief that creates unnecessary suffering is the idea that healing has to come with “letting go” of the person who died — as though we must forget them before we can walk on.

Contemporary thinking in the field of loss sees it differently. Healing does not mean severing the bond. It means gradually finding a new place for that relationship within us. The person we love has not vanished from who we are; they remain in memory, in the values they taught us, in certain habits we picked up from them. Keeping that love and carrying it forward with us is therefore not grief that refuses to end. It is one gentle form of healing.

When grief needs additional care

For most people, grief gradually becomes easier to carry with time and with appropriate support, even though it does not disappear altogether. For some, grief stays severe and consuming for long enough that little else is possible. In those cases, asking for help from a mental-health professional is the right thing to do, and it is not a sign of weakness. The same is true when severe depression comes alongside it: appropriate care is something you deserve.

In terms of caring for the mind, hypnotherapy is not a tool for erasing grief or hurrying it to an end — grief is not something that should be eliminated, but a process that needs to be held. What it may help support are certain kinds of suffering that often accompany a loss: things left unresolved, sleeplessness, overwhelming anxiety, or images that stay lodged in cases where the death itself was traumatic.

Back to Ploy

What Ploy needed that day was not to be told to make peace and move forward, and not to be measured against whether she ought to have finished grieving. It was for someone to tell her that the grief still with her is ordinary — that it is the trace of the love she has for her mother, not a fault to be hurriedly fixed.

Waves of grief may keep arriving on days she is not ready for them. But as time passes, the life around that grief will gradually widen, until she can stand and take each wave without falling — and can carry the love she has for her mother forward, in her own way.

At NBRH we work on the principle of Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy: adjusting the nervous system’s patterns of response, and behavior, systematically. But where loss is concerned, the goal is not to make grief go away, because grief is part of love. What we can do is help body and mind meet each wave a little more gently, and help life gradually grow around that grief again, at the pace that is yours.

If the voice inside tends to judge you on the days you are struggling, “What Self-Compassion Is” may be worth reading. And if the loss is affecting your sleep and your body, “Why the Brain Reads Everything as a Threat” may help steady this period.