GRIEF…IT’S COMPLICATED
When Grief Doesn't Move
Everyone told you it would get easier. The casseroles arrived, kindly and well meant, from people who had no idea what else to do. You thanked them and let the dishes sit because who can eat when you have lost something or someone you love ? Then the casseroles stopped, the sympathy cards got put away, and the people around you quietly went back to their lives. You didn’t.
Months have passed, maybe years, and the loss is still the first thing you feel when you wake up. You replay the last conversation. You avoid the restaurant, the song, the drawer with their handwriting in it. Or you can't stop going back to all of it. People have started to hint, gently or not, that you should be "further along" by now. Those people are not you and your grief is carried in exactly the way you carry it, but it doesn’t have to LOOK like this forever.
If that's where you are, I want to say this plainly: there is nothing wrong with you. But there may be something stuck, and stuck grief has a name. Clinicians call it complicated grief, or prolonged grief, and it is one of the most treatable things I see in my practice.
why grief is so complicated?
Grief itself is not a disorder . It is love with nowhere to go, and in mourning it changes shape over time. The waves still come, but they become softer and you begin to tread water, then your feet touch the ground, and the feeling of drowning lessens . Life slowly grows around the loss.
Complicated grief is what happens when that process stalls. The early stage of grief, the stage that is supposed to be unbearable for a while, doesn't soften. A year or more after the loss, you are still living inside the first weeks. The pain stays as sharp, the longing as constant, and the loss stays at the center of everything. It feels all consuming because it is.
Two things complicated grief is not. It is not depression, although the two often travel together and depression nestles comfortably with all of the feeling that range from every single one we name in the stages, yet some simply cannot be named. However, can be treated side by side because truth be told they all hold the same weight and take up space in a container that is not built to maintain the constant fear of letting go. Let me tell you.. this is not a failure of any kind whether you call it faith, strength, or love. If anything, it tends to show up in people who loved deeply and had no safe place to put that love down. The loss is a suitcase you are simply unwilling to unpack so you watch it lay open. You close it and save it for tomorrow… Often the love is for someone or something we have not even recognized yet. I have come to call this fragmented grief, and it has its own treatment goals and interwoven modalities, tailored to you. Sometimes the grief you are feeling is not yours, but sometimes it actually represents the you that was when you were the version that has not yet shifted. That is ok and we can walk through it together.
The Energy of Loss
Grief is not only an emotion. It is energy, and it behaves like energy. When someone we love leaves, the bond between you does not vanish. It is severed on one end (the physical) and left live on the other, and that open current has to go somewhere. In most people it drops into the body and the energetic field as density: a heaviness in the chest, a fog around the head, a frequency so low that joy, appetite, and connection may seem that it cannot reach you.
In my work I often feel this before a client can name it. The field is dim and contracted, pulled inward around the wound… Complicated and confusing.. scary and sometimes regretful. Grief, energetically, is a system that has stopped circulating and feels constricted. The love is still attempting to move toward the person, but nothing feels like it is flowing back and nothing is flowing out into your own life. Every day the body spends its energy holding that open line, which is why grief is so exhausting and why it so often makes us sick.
The work is not to shut the current down, and it is not to cling. When we look closely at the pieces we are holding so tightly, they are rarely the person. They are our own feelings of attachment and fear: the fear of forgetting, the fear of who we are without them, the fear that releasing the weight means releasing them. Those pieces can be let go, not all at once but in small fragments at a time, through talk therapy that names them and energy work such as Reiki that moves them. Each fragment that leaves makes room for the energy of the loss to flow through you instead of pooling inside you, until what remains is connection rather than weight.
When you’re stuck in grief…
No checklist can tell you how you should feel. But if a year or more has passed and several of these are still daily companions, grief may have become stuck and even more complicated to navigate. Here are some signs:
An ache or longing for the person that is as intense as it was in the first weeks
Avoiding anything that reminds you of them, or the opposite, being unable to stop seeking those reminders out
Feeling that a part of you died with them, or that life without them has no point
Bitterness, anger, or guilt about the death that hasn’t eased
Difficulty trusting people or letting anyone close since the loss
Numbness, as if you are watching your own life through glass
Struggling to keep up with work, relationships, or daily routines because the grief takes up all the room
A heaviness or static in your energy field that no amount of rest clears
A dimmed quality to everything, as if the color and charge have drained out of your life
Many people also notice their body holding the grief: exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, a tight chest, a stomach that never settles, getting sick more than usual. In my work, grief rarely lives only in the mind.
Why WHY WHY….
Grief stalls for reasons, and none of them are the same. The most common ones I see:
The loss was sudden or violent. Accidents, overdoses, suicide, homicide, a diagnosis that moved too fast. The mind had no time to prepare, and the shock can freeze the grief in place.
The relationship was unfinished. Estrangement, conflict, words never said or said too late. Grieving someone you had a complicated relationship with is often harder than grieving someone you had a simple one with, because you are mourning the relationship you had and the one you never got.
The loss carried trauma. If you were present at the death, found the person, or spent months as a caregiver watching them decline, the memories can behave like trauma memories. Intrusive, vivid, and stuck on replay. Grief and trauma have to be treated together when that's the case.
You were already carrying too much. Earlier losses that were never grieved, a history of abuse or narcissistic relationships, anxiety or depression. A new loss lands on top of everything that came before it.
You had to do it alone. Grief needs witnesses. People whose loss wasn't recognized by others (a miscarriage, an ex-partner, a pet, a death the family doesn't talk about) or who had to "stay strong" for everyone else often have grief that never got to be spoken out loud.
Life didn't let you stop. You had children to raise, a business to run, a parent to care for. The grief got shelved, and it is still on the shelf, waiting.
The grief has no name. Not every loss is a death. I specialize in the grief that goes unnamed: the grief of ourselves as we expand. Outgrowing a marriage, a faith, a career, a family role, a version of you that kept you safe but can no longer come with you. Nobody sends a card for that loss, so most people never recognize it as grief at all. It shows up instead as restlessness, guilt, or a heaviness with no obvious cause. Across the board this is the biggest and most powerful life changing I have witnessed and been through.. and inevitably we all feel it. This one is collective.
How Grief Counseling Helps
The goal of grief counseling is not to get over the loss. You will not, and no good therapist will ask you to. The goal is to get the grief moving again, so that it can do what grief is meant to do: change you, and then let you live.
In my practice that work usually has a few parts.
Telling the story, all the way through if you need to as many times as you need to. guided meditation and light hypnosis along with energy movement to help the nervous system release the frozen moments.
Making room for the hard feelings. Guilt, anger, relief, resentment. The feelings people are ashamed of are usually the ones keeping the grief stuck. Saying them out loud to someone who does not flinch is often the turning point. We need space in our own containers, and we are often still holding the energy of the one we lost, hoping to heal them. The flow is stopped.
Staying connected to the person. Healthy grief is not about letting go. It is about finding a new way to hold the relationship, through ritual, memory, writing, or simply talking about them without apologizing for it. We work on building a bond that can travel forward with you.
Rebuilding a life that includes the loss. Somewhere along the way, grief convinces people that moving forward is a betrayal. We untangle that, gently, and start reconnecting you to the people, places, and parts of yourself that have been on hold.
Releasing what no longer serves. For the unnamed grief of outgrowing a life, I lean on existential work and meditation. Existentialism gives us honest language for the questions underneath: who am I without this, and what am I here for now. Meditation gives the body a way to shed what the mind has already decided to release. Together they let you grieve the old self with respect, and then set it down.
This work draws on existential therapy, which takes seriously the questions grief raises about meaning and mortality, and on the integrative, trauma-informed approach I use with every client. Sessions are available in person at my Metairie office or by telehealth.
Where the Body and Spirit Come In
Grief is not only a thought process, and I don't treat it as one. For clients who want it, I pair talk therapy with energy healing, including Reiki, to help the body let go of what it has been bracing against. People often describe the first session as the first time they have exhaled in months.
Grief tends to lodge in specific places: the heart center that closed to protect itself, the throat that swallowed what it needed to say, the gut that still braces for the next blow. Clearing the chakras and opening those channels does two things at once. It gives you the ability to let go of the weight you have been carrying, and it clears the static so you can still connect to the consciousness of the one you have lost. Clients often come out of that work with a clarity they could not reach through thinking alone: a sense of what their person would want for them, and permission to go and live it.
This is always optional and always your pace. Some clients want the clinical work only. Others find that when the body softens, the words come more easily. You get to decide what belongs in your healing.
When to Reach Out
You do not have to wait until you are falling apart. That feeling is normal, but it should not be constant. If it has been six months or more and the grief still runs your days, that is reason enough. If you are using alcohol, work, or busyness to keep from feeling it, that is reason enough. Escaping is a natural reaction, but it will not allow the stuck emotions to move, and it may even exacerbate them. The only way out is through, and you are never required to forget the loss. Together we will learn how to adapt, integrate a new view on life, and remember in healthy ways. If the people who love you are worried, or if you have started to wonder whether you want to be here at all, please reach out today. Grief counseling is one of the places where people get better, and they get better faster than they expect.
I offer grief counseling in person in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, and by telehealth across multiple states. The first step is a free consult where we talk about what you have lost and what you need. No pressure, no script.
Healing does not have to hurt. Connect for a free consult.
In gratitude,
Carey B.
Related reading: From Heaviness to Healing in Therapy and The Fall of the Narcissist.
