Grief is not only tears — it is a process that follows every big change

You landed the job you had dreamed of — and spent your first evening in the new office in tears. You moved into the flat you had longed for — and a week later something tightened in you at the thought of your mother’s kitchen. A child left for university, a relationship ran its course, a friendship cooled, the body no longer manages what it managed at thirty. And through all of it a quiet voice keeps asking: “Why am I sad? Nothing bad has happened.”

That is precisely the misconception I meet again and again: the belief that sadness belongs only to death and funerals. In truth, grief accompanies every significant change — including the ones we chose and wanted. Because every change, however good, takes something away: an old role, an old setting, an old self, the picture we had of how things would be. And where there is loss, there is grieving — whether or not we call it that.

In this piece I want to show you what sadness is actually for, why the famous “stages of grief” do not mean what most people think, how grieving really unfolds according to current understanding — and what happens when we refuse to acknowledge sadness, in ourselves or in others.

Sadness is not a malfunction — it is work the psyche is doing

Let us start with the basic question: what purpose does sadness serve? If it were nothing but suffering without a function, evolution would have erased it long ago. It has not — it has kept it in all people, in every culture.

The British psychiatrist John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, understood grief as the other side of love: because we are creatures who attach deeply, the loss of an attachment triggers a built-in response in us — protest, longing, searching, and only then the gradual acceptance that what was is no longer. Sadness, then, is the price we pay for the capacity to connect. Anyone incapable of attaching would never grieve — but would never love either.

Sadness also has entirely practical jobs to do. It slows us down — and that very slowing, which we so often experience as the problem, is part of how it works: it pulls us out of everyday rushing so the psyche can process what has happened and redraw the inner map of a world in which the lost thing no longer appears. Sadness also communicates — it tells us what truly mattered to us, and it tells others that we need closeness. Tears and a sad face are among the most powerful signals for compassion that human communication has. The sadness you feel is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that something mattered to you.

It is worth knowing that grieving is not only a mental process — it involves the whole body. In their review article, Zisook and Shear describe how acute grief is often accompanied by fatigue, disturbed sleep and appetite, tightness in the chest, waves that arrive without warning, and difficulties with attention and memory. If after a major loss or a major change you have ever thought you were losing your mind, because you keep forgetting things and a wave of tears washes over you in the middle of a shop — you are not losing it. Your organism is doing one of the most demanding pieces of work it knows, and it is spending real resources to do it.

Every change is also a loss — even the one you wanted

Now to the part that is talked about least. We grieve even when nobody has died. Some examples I meet most often in my work with people:

• When you outgrow your parents: the moment you see that your parents could not give you what you needed — or that they are different from the way you long wanted to see them. This is grieving for the parents you did not have, while the ones you do have are still alive. The same applies when you decide to go your own way and disappoint their expectations — I wrote about how to stay yourself and stay in relationship at the same time in my piece on differentiation.
• When you change career or retire: with work we lose not only income but identity, the structure of the day, a sense of usefulness, and the people alongside whom we spent more waking hours than with our own family.
• When relationships change: a separation is obvious grieving; less obvious is the grief around a friend’s wedding, the birth of a child, a move to another town — when the relationship does not disappear, but is never again what it was.
• When the body or your health changes: a diagnosis, an injury, ageing — the loss of a body you could rely on.
• When a wish comes true: a new job, a new city, a child, independence. A chosen change buries the old life too — and nowhere is it written that a chosen loss may not be grieved.

Because we do not recognise these losses as losses, the sadness that comes with them often arrives without permission — and we mistake it for ingratitude, weakness or “some strange kind of depression”. In fact it is the healthiest part of us doing its job: saying goodbye to what is no longer there, so that what is here can truly arrive.

Kübler-Ross: what she actually said and what she did not

If you know one thing about grieving, it is probably the “stages”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The model was described in 1969 by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying — but a few points are essential here, because her model is so often used wrongly today.

First: Kübler-Ross did not describe these stages in bereaved people, but in dying patients — in people facing their own approaching death. Only later were they transposed onto grieving. Second: she herself stressed that the stages are not a ladder we climb rung by rung. They are not sequential, they are not obligatory, not everyone goes through them, and not in that order. Grieving is not a staircase — it is more like weather: calm today, a wave of anger tomorrow, and next week the longing you thought was over. If you measure your grieving against the picture of tidy stages, you will almost certainly conclude that you are grieving wrongly. You are not grieving wrongly — the model was presented too rigidly.

And third: research over recent decades shows that grieving unfolds far more variously than was long assumed. The psychologist George Bonanno has shown through longitudinal studies that the most common response to loss is not prolonged suffering at all, but resilience: most people, in deep sadness, retain the ability to function, experience bright moments too, and gradually stabilise — not because they did not care, but because the psyche is surprisingly well equipped for loss. Laughter in the middle of grieving is not a betrayal. It is part of a healthy process.

The dual process model: grieving is oscillation, not drowning

The most useful contemporary description of grieving was published in 1999 by the Dutch researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. Their dual process model says that healthy grieving is not made up of one task, but of oscillation between two orientations.

The first is loss orientation: memories, tears, longing, conversations about what was, returning to photographs, a sense of emptiness. This is what we traditionally picture as “grief work”.

The second is restoration orientation: arranging a new everyday life, new roles and skills, relationships, work, plans — and also breaks from sadness: an evening when a film makes you laugh; a day when the loss does not cross your mind at all.

The model’s key message is that healthy grieving oscillates between the two — like breathing. The oscillation is not a sign of indecision or shallowness; it is the mechanism that lets the psyche process the pain in pieces and recover in between. Trouble arises when the oscillation stalls at one pole: someone stuck only in loss sinks; someone anchored only in restoration, skipping over the sadness with work, a move or a new relationship, usually meets it later — often in the body, or at the next loss, which opens up all the previous ones. The infographic below sums up this oscillation.

Grieving that begins before the loss

A chapter of its own is the sadness that arrives in advance. Anticipatory grief is a process that begins while the loss is not yet here but is already visible on the horizon: with a loved one’s dementia, as they slowly disappear even while sitting beside you; with an incurable illness; in a relationship both of us quietly know is ending; in the months before a child leaves home.

This form of grieving is especially confusing, because it runs alongside hope and alongside caring for what is still here. People often feel guilty about it — “how can I grieve for someone who is still alive?” — or feel like traitors, as though sadness might summon the loss. In fact the opposite is true: through a gradual farewell, the psyche spreads out work that would be too heavy all at once. Anticipatory sadness does not mean you have given up on the person or the relationship. It means you can already see the truth — and that your inner world is slowly adjusting to it, as best it can.

Unacknowledged grief: when the world says you have no right to mourn

The American researcher Kenneth Doka gave a name to something I meet surprisingly often in my work with people: disenfranchised grief — grief that is unacknowledged or dispossessed. It is grieving that those around us do not grant the right to exist, because the loss is not on the list of “official” reasons for sadness.

It includes: the loss of a beloved animal (“it was only a dog”), miscarriage and unsuccessful fertility treatment (“it wasn’t a child yet”), the end of a relationship nobody knew about, the loss involved in moving, grieving for an ex-partner you “no longer have the right” to grieve after a separation, the losses of dementia, the sadness of retirement, and grieving that lasts “too long” for other people’s taste. The message from those around us is always the same: your sadness is not justified, so hide it.

The consequence is a double weight: a person carries the loss and, on top of it, the burden of concealing it — with no rituals, no compassion, no words to make the loss real. Unacknowledged grief therefore often does not pass but settles: into irritability, listlessness, physical symptoms, sudden tears “for no reason”. If you recognise yourself in this, the first step is simple and hard at once: acknowledge your loss at least to yourself. What mattered to you, mattered. Full stop. Nobody else has the authority to judge that on your behalf.

Permission to grieve — and when to look for support

So what does sadness need? Less than we think, and at the same time more than we usually allow ourselves: time, space and a witness. Time, because grieving is not a project with a deadline — every process runs at its own pace. Space, because tears you keep swallowing never do their work. And a witness, because sadness, like every deep experience, is lighter when someone sees it and can stay with it without hurrying to fix it with advice and “it’ll get better”.

With unacknowledged losses, something else helps too — something “official” losses have built in and yours may not: ritual. Funerals, wakes and candles are not merely custom — they are how a community makes a loss real and gives it a frame. For losses without a funeral you can create such a frame yourself: a letter written to the old life, or to a person who is no longer part of your everyday; a walk to a place that held a story; an evening when you raise a glass to the loss with someone and say what it gave you. It may sound sentimental until you do it — and afterwards many describe the same thing: something finally settles into place.

Most grieving passes without professional help — that is important to know. It does make sense to seek support when the oscillation stalls: if after a long time you still cannot find your way back into life, if the sadness turns into numbness or hopelessness, if you avoid it so successfully that you no longer feel it at all but do feel its consequences — or if the loss has opened older, never finished stories. In myself I have experienced how readily the body stores what we do not cry out and presents the bill later; I have described how I learned this on the page My Approach. In my work I also accompany people through separations and life transitions — if you feel your loss could use a witness, you are welcome to get in touch.

I also spoke on Instagram about the fact that sadness accompanies not only death, but every significant change:

Žalost ne pride samo ob smrti. Pride ob vsaki spremembi, ki nekaj vzame — tudi ob tisti, ki si jo želel.