Grief is one of those complex emotions that doesn’t just end. It evolves. After trauma, loss, divorce, or heartbreak, we often imagine grief as something we “get over.” Maybe that’s just my expectation is that I should just get “over it”. “I deserve better, move on” Ariana Grande’s song “Thank U, Next” playing in my head. But grief doesn’t always leave, it simply changes form. Sometimes it feels like it returns unannounced, like a tide pulling at your feet after you thought you were safe.

Why Grief Comes Back (Psychology & Neuroscience)

Grief isn’t a problem of memory, it’s a relationship with absence and missing. Neuroscientists describe grief as part of the brain’s social-attachment system. When a familiar connection changes or ends, the brain continues to seek that connection, even long after loss. Almost like a familiarity. This helps explain why grief can resurface in unexpected moments, anniversaries, holidays, stress, transitions, or even random reminders. 

Psychologists also emphasize that grief isn’t a “stage process” that ends in a neat line. Instead, it’s better described as a wave pattern, sometimes calm and slow, sometimes intense and unexpected but each wave teaches integration rather than elimination of pain.

How Grief Shows Up and Sometimes Shows Up Again

1. Sudden Emotional Waves
A song, a smell, an old message and suddenly you’re right back in the moment. It’s almost like time traveling and it all happens so fast without any control. Of course, the amount of time you spend in that grief I believe can be in your control but the initial hit of grief, I do not believe can be controlled. 

2. Physical Sensations
Heart soreness, increased heart rate and breathing, fatigue. Grief doesn’t just live in emotions, it can turn into physical symptoms. 

3. Emotional Numbness
Sometimes grief shows up as nothing at all. It’s just black or blank. That’s still grief, just stagnant grief. They say you have to move through the stages of grief. But each stage doesn’t have an expiration time. It’s up to you to move through them. 

4. Recurrence During Life Transitions
Major changes, endings and beginnings, often activate dormant grief. It’s not regression, it’s reprocessing. It’s grief coming to the surface to be recognized and addressed. I think that’s why grieving someone you love who has died is so hard. 

Supportive Ways to Navigate Recurring Grief

Normalize the Waves
Grief isn’t a battle to win, it’s an experience to feel and understand. Telling yourself “I shouldn’t feel this anymore” only creates shame around natural feelings. Emotions exist for a reason, we are humans with human emotions. Give your grief and emotions the time it needs, work through them, set them down and keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

Ritualize Your Grief
Rituals, either big or small, can help externalize internal states. Lighting a candle, journaling, a walk at a certain time of day, or even saying a short affirmation can provide structure to emotions. I find affirmations to be very helpful in my daily practice of mindfulness and healing. 

Name the Grief
Labeling emotion. Similar to my previous blog, labeling emotions is a great tool to give it attention in order to work through it. “This is grief.” “Grief, I do not have time for you today.” It has been shown in psychology to reduce emotional intensity and help regulate the nervous system.

Ground Your Body
Breathwork or meditation, gentle movement such as yoga, or mindful stretching help anchor you in the present when grief feels like an ocean pulling you under.

Seek Connection
Grief loves silence. We do not want to give grief what it wants. So seek connection, even small gestures of connection help rewire attachment patterns. A friend’s text, a support group, or therapy isn’t weakness, it’s adaptive healing. 

Let me be the one to tell you that YOU ARE NOT A BURDEN reaching out to a friend for support. I cannot tell you how many times my friends have told me “I didn’t want to burden you with what I was going through.” GET. THAT. NONSENSE. OUT. OF. HERE. 

If you have good friends and family, I assure you your friends WANT to be supportive for you in your time of need. It’s easy to have friends during all the best parts of your life, of course. But friends matter the most when you’re at the low parts of your life. 

Don’t do a disservice to yourself or offend your friends by making that judgement before allowing them to make that judgement. Have open communication and be vulnerable. 

A Compassionate Reminder

Recurrence isn’t failure.
Regression isn’t weakness.
Grief doesn’t leave because you work hard to get rid of it, it leaves when it’s been felt deeply and accepted kindly.

Grief is not a loop you’re stuck in, grief is like the sea. It’s a process that are like waves you’re learning to integrate.

Just because the pain resurfaces doesn’t mean you haven’t healed. It’s normal, it’s not your fault and you didn’t do anything wrong. Be kind to your grief, be kind to yourself. 

This too, shall pass.