JOURNAL
Grief and loss: Making space for all feelings without rushing to healing
Your feelings are hurt. Deeply, profoundly hurt. Someone precious to you is gone, and the world feels different in ways you never expected. That ache in your chest isn't something to fix—it's information about how much that person mattered to you.
At Hurt Feelings, we don't believe in rushing grief or pretending it follows neat timelines. Your emotional reality matters exactly as it is, messy feelings and all.
Despite what you might have heard, grief doesn't unfold in orderly stages that you check off one by one. The famous five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were originally developed by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 to describe how terminally ill patients faced their own death, not how people grieve after losing someone they love.
These stages "are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief." Yet somehow our culture has turned them into a checklist, leaving grieving people feeling broken when their experience doesn't match the supposed progression.
Your grief doesn't need to follow anyone else's map. Grief comes in waves and it can feel like nothing will ever be right again. But gradually most people find that the pain eases, and it is possible to accept what has happened. The timeline for this is yours alone.
Grief brings up every feeling imaginable, often all at once. You might feel:
Death does not erase the interactions you've had with a person who's passed on. Erasing your negative experiences and memories of that person can delay your progress in coping with loss. You can be sad and angry at the same time.
This includes feeling angry at the person who died. That doesn't make you a bad person—it makes you human. Complex relationships don't suddenly become simple because someone dies.
Sometimes grief gets stuck. Complicated grief occurs when "the adaptation process is slowed or halted by complications, and the symptoms of acute grief persist indefinitely." This affects approximately 7-10% of bereaved adults and is now recognized as prolonged grief disorder.
Complicated grief involves "overwhelming, intrusive or preoccupying thoughts about loss" and "feeling intense longing or emotional pain" that continues for at least one year after the loss for adults, or six months for children and adolescents.
Signs that grief might be complicated include:
This isn't a character flaw or a sign you loved them "too much." It's a genuine condition that can benefit from specialized treatment approaches like Complicated Grief Treatment.
Our culture is deeply uncomfortable with sustained emotional pain. People often pressure grieving individuals to "move on" or "find closure," as if grief were a problem to solve rather than love with nowhere to go.
The truth is more nuanced. Healing happens gradually; it can't be forced or hurried—and there is no "normal" timetable for grieving. Your job isn't to get over this loss—it's to learn how to carry it forward in a way that honors both your pain and your capacity to live.
This doesn't mean staying stuck in acute grief indefinitely. It means allowing the natural process of integration to unfold without forcing it into timelines that make other people comfortable.
Rather than "getting over" grief, many people find the concept of "growing around grief" more helpful. In this model, "your grief remains the same but, as you grow as a person, it starts to take up less space in your life."
Healing doesn't mean forgetting or no longer feeling sad about your loss. It means developing the capacity to hold your grief alongside other experiences—joy, connection, purpose, love. The grief doesn't disappear; it becomes integrated into the larger story of your life.
Some days will be harder than others. Anniversaries, holidays, or unexpected reminders might bring waves of fresh grief years later. This isn't a setback—it's normal. Even with successful adaptation, "intensity of grief may wax and wane" in response to triggers, but these surges "become shorter and more manageable" over time.
Your grief belongs to you. It reflects the uniqueness of your relationship with the person you lost and your own way of processing profound change. There's no universal timeline, no required emotional trajectory, no "right" way to grieve.
What you need is permission to feel everything that comes up without apologizing for it. Your hurt feelings—all of them—are valid responses to genuine loss. They don't need to be fixed, minimized, or rushed through. They need to be witnessed, honored, and given the space they require.
This is where narrative therapy becomes particularly powerful in grief work. Instead of viewing yourself as broken or stuck, you can begin to see grief as one chapter in your larger life story. You get to decide what this experience means and how it shapes the person you're becoming.
Grief is not a mental illness, but it can benefit enormously from professional support, especially when:
At Hurt Feelings, we approach grief work from a place of deep respect for your experience. We won't rush you toward acceptance or pressure you to "move on." Instead, we'll help you explore what this loss means in the context of your life story and support you in authoring new chapters that honor both your grief and your capacity for growth.
Grief hurts because love matters. Your feelings—all of them—make complete sense given what you've lost. There's no timeline for healing, no stages to complete, no graduation ceremony where you're declared "done" with grief.
What there is: your own deep wisdom about what you need, the possibility of carrying love forward even in the face of loss, and the fundamental truth that your emotional reality deserves respect exactly as it is.
Your hurt feelings aren't a problem to solve. They're a testament to the depth of human connection and the courage it takes to love in a world where loss is inevitable. That's not something to rush through—it's something to honor.
If you're struggling with grief or loss, remember that seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness. Your story matters, including the painful chapters, and you don't have to navigate this alone.