How Do We Decide What’s ‘Normal’ In Grief?

“You’ve got to stop doing that.” my well-meaning friend replied when I told her months after my boyfriend died that all I listen to is the Hamilton soundtrack and re-read our text messages. Her words clearly stuck around for awhile. Not because she meant harm, but because her words echoed the same message I was already hearing everywhere (including myself): you’re not grieving right. While I can understand her intention, it didn’t change how I felt or coped- it just changed who I opened up to. Eventually, that circle got smaller and smaller until the only person I felt like I could talk about my grief with was my own therapist. 

I didn’t realize it then, but my friend was voicing a belief many people hold, often without even knowing it: that grief is something to get through quickly, quietly, and with as little disruption to others as possible. Society places way too many expectations on grieving people:

You have to be sad—but not too sad.

Not for too long.

And definitely not sad like that.

Don’t talk about it too much.

But if you don’t mention it, I’ll assume you’re fine.

And if you do, I’ll give you a cliché and change the subject.

But where the hell did these rules come from in the first place?

Grief, for a lot of human history, was messy, public, and communal. People wailed, wore black, lit candles, and built altars. It was witnessed. But somewhere along the way, especially in Western culture, we started trying to contain it. Make it quieter. Cleaner. More private. We began treating grief less like something to live through and more like something to fix.

Grief has continued to be pathologized (much to my dismay). The DSM-5 now includes “prolonged grief disorder”, a diagnosis meant to identify when grief becomes debilitating, which according to the DSM is one year (-literally screaming internally-). For some, it’s a helpful recognition that loss can completely unravel a life, but I worry that it further contributes to grief being looked at as a problem to be solved, instead of a natural and painful part of being human. I believe there are ways to recognize death’s impact on life without pathology. 

Many of our beliefs about grief are shaped much earlier in the homes we grew up in. How did your family handle pain? Emotions? Grief? If you were raised in a family that didn’t talk about death, that avoided emotions, or that prided itself on being “strong,” you may have learned early that grief is something to hide. On the other hand, if you witnessed open mourning or were invited to talk about loss, you may carry a different kind of permission. These early messages, spoken or unspoken, can become the internal voices we hear years later, telling us whether we’re grieving “right” or not.

Add to all of this a society obsessed with productivity, positivity, and emotional neatness, and we get a very narrow window of what’s considered “acceptable” grief. Anything too raw, too long, too visible makes people uncomfortable (and we don’t even have definitions for these terms- it’s just whatever the person you’re in front of decides it should be). 

But grief doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t care about checklists or calendars. And maybe the problem isn’t how we grieve, but what we’ve been taught to expect from it.

It’s a language of love, and longing, and absence, and like any deep language, it takes time to speak it fully.

So if you're grieving and wondering whether you're doing it “right”, please know this: the fact that it doesn’t look like anyone else’s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It means it’s yours.

We don’t need better advice for grieving. We need more permission. To feel what we feel. To say the thing out loud. To remember without apologizing. To carry it how we need to, for as long as we need to. 

Interested in starting grief therapy? Reach out here to see if we’d be a good fit.