Complicated grief is a real, recognised experience, grief that doesn’t ease the way grief typically does. But from the inside, it often feels different than “lasting too long.” It can feel like grief that never actually arrived the way it was supposed to.
Grief isn’t one feeling anyway. It’s many, and they don’t come in any order you can predict. Sadness, anger, rage, despair. Sometimes relief, which can carry its own shame with it. Sometimes nothing you can name at all, which is still grief, just grief that hasn’t found its way out yet.
I work with grief using Compassionate Inquiry, and mindfulness. Compassionate Inquiry doesn’t organise any of this. I’m not forcing someone through stages, or towards acceptance, or closure. I’m not trying to fix grief. I sit with it, alongside the person carrying it, as I completely trust the process.
What complicated grief actually means
Clinically, complicated grief, sometimes called prolonged grief, describes grief that stays intense for an extended period, often defined as six months to a year or more, and interferes with daily life. If you’ve heard that term and wondered whether it applies to you, that’s usually what it’s pointing to.
Grief doesn’t run on a schedule, and there’s no length of time after which it becomes a problem. What I look for isn’t how long someone has been grieving, it’s whether the grief ever had real space to move at all. Often, what gets labelled “complicated” isn’t grief that’s lasted too long. It’s grief that got delayed, held off, or never fully let in, and is only now finding its way through.
That distinction matters more than the timeline does.
Why people get stuck in grief
Two things come up again and again with the people I work with.
The first is time. Most of us absorb, somewhere along the way, the idea that grief runs on a schedule, that by some point we’re meant to be over it. That belief doesn’t come from grief. It comes from everyone around us who got uncomfortable with how long it was taking. So people learn to perform being fine, while the grief keeps living underneath the performance. This is also true for anticipatory grief, the grief that begins before a loss has even happened. People often don’t acknowledge it at all, because the loss “hasn’t happened yet.”
The second is fear. Specifically, the fear of what fully feeling it might actually do to a person. Not sadness in the abstract, the real thing, fully present. Some part believes that if they let it all the way in, they won’t come back from it, that they’ll lose themselves completely. That fear is often the real obstacle, more than the grief itself. It makes sense, nobody teaches us how to stay present with something this size. So we manage it instead. We intellectualise it. We keep it at a distance. Not because we don’t want to feel it, but because some part of us doesn’t trust we’d survive feeling it.
What’s often underneath the anger
This management often shows up as anger, and anger is rarely the whole story. Anger can be a protective mechanism, to not feel pain. Underneath it there’s often sadness that hasn’t had anywhere to go yet. Anger can feel safer to hold, it has energy, somewhere to point. Sadness can feel closer to collapse. Part of the work is letting both exist. Not rushing past the anger to reach what feels like the real feeling. Not staying only in the anger because it’s easier to carry than what’s underneath it.
What I call the shattering
Some people carry this disconnected grief for years, stuck without fully feeling it, managing it through time and fear, the way the last two sections describe. From the outside, it can look like they’ve moved on.
Then something happens, sometimes something small, and it all arrives at once. I call this the shattering. It’s rarely really about whatever just happened. What breaks open is everything that’s been waiting behind it, years of it sometimes, losses a person thought they’d already dealt with, griefs they didn’t even know they were still holding.
It can feel like something has gone wrong. It hasn’t. This is what happens when grief that someone never fully let in finally meets them.
What a session actually looks like
When someone reaches this point, or wants support before reaching it, this is what I actually do. I don’t try to talk anyone out of their pain, or reframe it, or rush things along. Grief often disconnects people from what they’re feeling, so we start in the body. Where does it sit? What shape does it have? Is there heat, heaviness, tightness? The sensation isn’t the point, it’s usually just the way back to a feeling that’s become too far away to reach directly. From there, the emotion tends to surface on its own, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once.
What grief support online can offer
Not everything at once. Just noticing what’s actually here right now, this sensation, this wave, this one piece of it. Finding out it’s possible to be with it. Not fixed, not resolved, just met.
Most people find the fear of the feeling was bigger than the feeling itself, once they’re not holding it alone. That’s what witnessing does. It doesn’t make the grief smaller. It makes it possible to stay with it, because someone else is there too.
Grief doesn’t need you to understand it before you can feel it. It doesn’t need a reason, a timeline, or a lesson. It just needs somewhere to exist, without anyone rushing it, correcting it, or explaining it away.
If that’s something you’re carrying right now, whether it’s complicated grief, grief for a loss that hasn’t happened yet, or grief you’ve been stuck in for longer than anyone around you understands, this is a place for grief support online, at your pace.
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Yes. Grief isn’t limited to death. The end of a relationship, a friendship, a version of your life, or an identity you held, can all bring real grief. This work holds all of it, not only loss through death.
Anticipatory grief is grief that begins before a loss actually happens, often while caring for someone who is dying, or facing a loss you can see coming. It’s real grief, even though the loss itself hasn’t occurred yet, and people often overlook it for exactly that reason.
Complicated grief is grief that doesn’t move the way you’d expect. It can stay intense, come back strongly years later, or feel like it never fully arrived at all. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, just that the grief was delayed, held off, or never fully let in.
Grief that resurfaces long after a loss is common, especially if you pushed it aside at the time, out of necessity or self-protection. Something later can bring it all forward at once. This isn’t regression. It’s often the grief finally meeting you.