How Do I Know if I’ve Been Grieving Too Long (Or Too Hard)?

Rather than “Am I grieving for too long?” we should ask, “Where in the project of grief am I stuck?”

In our grief therapy, patients will sometimes ask if there is a possibility of grieving too long or too hard. The truth is grief is quite a beast. Everyone’s experience of grief is different and there are a variety of events in our lives that involve grief beyond a death or a loss. Because of this, there is no absolute “right” measure for how long or hard one is supposed to grieve. It’s important to think of grief as a process—something to work through rather than get over. Grief is a project of sorts, a set of emotional tasks that take time and effort. 

More than worrying about typical timelines for grief, a better question is: Where in the process of grief am I stuck? Very often stuck grief is self-diagnosed as grief that is too much or too obsessed. The individual who is suffering frequently has attempted to resolve that grief by minimizing it or “getting over it” rather than directing attention fully toward the grief. Resolving grief involves welcoming feeling quite bad so that one can ultimately arrive at relief. At times, we, as grief therapists, feel like plumbers—exploring grief, its complexities, and its antecedents in order to find ways to get it unstuck.

Resisting grief (and its associated feelings) can create a scenario where grief is at the center of one’s life

One of the common causes of stuckness with grief is avoiding it or ignoring its complexity. In particular, avoiding grief can create a scenario where grief is at the center of one’s life, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s like the wisdom that follows the rhetorical command, “Don’t think about purple bunny rabbits.” Inevitably, purple bunny rabbits become all we can think about.

Similarly, when we resist grief, we also resist the feelings that come from painful experiences. This has the opposite effect than intended. The avoidance—the extra effort not to think about something—takes on its own shape. In this sense, grief moves into the realm of the unconscious. This unprocessed grief still affects us enormously but in ways that are out of view, encoded into many other parts of our lives.

When we grieve something new, we are often also grieving things from the past

This unprocessed grief can be further complicated by the fact that older incomplete grief projects can be raised by new experiences of loss. Often when we experience hurt or loss and aren’t able to fully work through it, we nonetheless get used to living with this unhealed wound (and so often mistake this for a kind of healing rather than a tolerance of something unhealed). We work through experiences as well or as poorly as we do and yet we carry on. Unresolved grief is as much of a part of us as resolved grief.

Because of the nature of relationships, new losses and ruptures can then tear at similar parts of us as the old. Think of this like an old shoulder injury that never healed right. When the shoulder endures a new blow, you feel both the pain of the new injury and the older injury that never healed. Likewise, grieving the death of a friend can be upended because of an incomplete project of grief regarding the childhood death of a parent.

This can be both confusing and an opportunity. Over time, unsettled grief becomes calcified and harder to consciously access. When we experience another loss that tears at a similar part of ourselves, there can be pain in opening up that old wound, but that pain also gives us access to finally grieve what we couldn’t before.

How do we get grief unstuck?: We integrate it

The project of getting grief unstuck is largely one of acceptance—or what might be a helpful reframing, integration. It’s worth noting that grief very often happens well without therapeutic intervention in the form of grief therapy. Our bodies tend to work through hard experiences well and, absent a serious disruption like something vital missing to support grief or conditions that make grief unsafe, we tend to integrate somewhat naturally. Many of the cultural rites and modes of doing grief such as funerals and other related practices of support are especially meaningful and useful for integrating grief.

Yet, trauma is real. Traumatic experiences can overwhelm us and pose a challenge to integrate. It’s helpful to consider, alongside making room to make sense of trauma when it comes, a broader category of experiences that might be seen as formative. These are experiences—good, bad, and otherwise—that form us. Once they’ve happened, who we are cannot be separated from them having happened.

We need to work to understand our lives as the totality of what’s happened to us, including experiences of loss and pain. This is not to say that bad experiences are not bad experiences. Pain and rupture are good to avoid and yet they can’t be. Moving on isn’t possible without facing the ways that all of these experiences—all of these griefs—are a part of us.