What They Don’t Tell You About Grief: 10 Hard Truths from a Seasoned Therapist

After nearly 15 years of walking with people through profound loss, these are the truths I’ve learned—not from textbooks, but from bearing witness to the most tender, human moments we rarely speak aloud. Grief isn’t clean or linear. It’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a place to be met with reverence.

1. You won’t “get better” if you won’t let yourself go there.

Grief doesn’t respond to tidy timelines, positive thinking, or your best efforts to keep it from showing. It responds to presence.

“Going there” means letting yourself touch the raw center of your sadness, rage, longing, or regret. Most people avoid it—not because they’re weak, but because they’re afraid they’ll get swallowed by it. Stuck in it. Undone by it.

But here’s the truth: you can’t heal what you won’t let yourself feel.

Grief isn’t a feeling to fix. It’s an experience to move through. And strangely, the deepest relief doesn’t come from holding it all together—it comes from allowing yourself to come undone. Not forever. Not without support. But enough to let what’s buried rise.

The only way out is through. You don’t have to do it all at once. But you do have to start.

2. Your body keeps the score—especially after a loss.

Grief doesn’t just live in your thoughts. It lives in your chest, your gut, your skin. It shows up as brain fog, panic, exhaustion, hormonal chaos, tightness you can’t stretch your way out of.

You’re not being dramatic. You’re not regressing. You’re not broken. Your body is grieving, too.

Loss shakes your foundation of safety and belonging. And your body—brilliant, intuitive, ancient—responds the way it knows how: by bracing, collapsing, going numb, staying on high alert. Even if your mind is “doing okay,” your physiology may still be trying to make sense of what just happened.

This is why somatic grief work matters. Why movement, breath, rest, and touch matter. Because grief isn't just something to talk about—it's something to tend to in the tissues.

Healing isn’t only emotional integration. It’s physical recalibration, too.

3. Just because someone had flaws doesn’t mean you loved them less.

Grief isn’t reserved for saints. You don’t have to canonize someone to mourn them. You can miss someone and be furious with them. Feel gutted by their absence and relieved the chaos is over. Long for one more day together and know it would’ve broken you.

Complicated relationships don’t end just because someone dies. In fact, death sharpens the edges. It brings old wounds and unspoken truths into sharper focus. You might find yourself defending your grief to others, or to yourself: “But they weren’t always kind,” or “We weren’t even that close,” or “I thought I’d feel more.”

But here’s the truth: most relationships are messy. Most love is, too. You’re allowed to grieve the beautiful parts—and the parts that never had a chance to be.

4. Sometimes we could have done better—and we have to learn how to live with that.

Not every goodbye is wrapped in closure. Sometimes we were avoidant, distracted, too young to know what we didn’t know. We missed the call. We held the grudge. We said something sharp that we now carry like a stone in our chest.

Grief has a way of spotlighting our regrets. And while it’s tempting to bury them in spiritual platitudes or under the phrase “they knew I loved them,” the harder work is sitting with what’s true: we’re human. Flawed. Loving in messy, imperfect ways.

Self-forgiveness isn’t a one-time act. It’s a practice. A willingness to face what hurts without letting shame take the wheel. You don’t have to justify everything. But you do have to offer yourself the same mercy you’d give someone you love.

5. You can’t live your life trying to make your departed loved one proud.

It sounds noble—like something you'd see stitched on a pillow or engraved on a memorial bench. But in practice, it can be a quiet form of self-abandonment.

I’ve sat with so many clients (and at times, myself) caught in the tension between living authentically and performing a version of themselves they think their person would approve of. But your life isn’t a legacy project. You don’t owe anyone a polished ending.

The people we lose didn’t need us to be perfect. They just needed us to be real. And that’s still true.

6. You’ll lose friends—and it won’t always be the ones you expected.

Grief doesn’t just take the person you lost. It rearranges your entire relational landscape. People you thought would show up may fall silent. Some disappear. Others offer awkward check-ins, then quietly drift away.

The hardest part? It’s not always the flaky friend who vanishes. Sometimes it’s the one who swore they’d always be there. And often, it’s not about whether they love you—it’s about whether they can tolerate your pain. Your grief might stir something in them they’ve worked hard to avoid: fear of their own future loss, sadness they can’t fix, or a belief—ingrained early—that feelings should be managed, not felt.

They might not even realize they’re stepping back. They’ll say things like, “I didn’t know what to say,” or “I thought you needed space.” But underneath, it’s often this: your pain made them feel helpless. And instead of staying, they quietly left.

I’ve seen it again and again—grief has a way of showing you who can sit in the dark with you, and who needs you to turn the light back on so they can feel better.

And sometimes—thankfully—someone you barely knew will surprise you. They won’t flinch. They’ll stay close. Grief clarifies.

7. Ritual matters more than advice.

When you’re grieving, most advice lands like static. It’s too neat, too soon, or too far from your lived experience. But ritual—quiet, personal, repeated—can cut through the noise.

Not because it fixes anything. But because it gives form to something formless.

Play the song. Wear the shirt. Light the candle. Say their name into the quiet. Do it again tomorrow. Not because you should, but because it helps you stay tethered to what still matters.

Ritual doesn’t need to be spiritual, inherited, or beautiful. It just needs to be yours. It’s how we stay in relationship after the relationship has changed. A way of saying: I remember. I care. I’m still here.

You don’t need a belief system. You need a way to come back to yourself when the world no longer feels like home.

8. Happiness is not the end goal of grief therapy.

If you're coming to grief therapy hoping to feel happy again, that’s understandable—but it’s not the whole story. Grief work isn’t about chasing joy. It’s about building capacity: for truth, for complexity, for feeling alive in the aftermath.

That might mean laughing one day and sobbing the next. Or rage. Or stillness. Or moments of meaning that don’t quite fit into words.

Happiness may come. But not because you “overcame” your grief. It arrives—quietly, unexpectedly—on the other side of presence, connection, and truth-telling. Not as a goal, but as a byproduct of living with your whole heart, even after it’s been broken.

9. Grief therapy isn’t something I do to you. It’s something we do together.

Most people arrive in therapy hoping I’ll have a plan. A process. A fix. Something clear and structured to help make the pain stop. And I get it. When your world has been cracked open, it’s natural to want someone to put it back together.

But therapy isn’t like dropping your car off at the shop. I don’t pop the hood, fix the parts, and hand you a receipt. That’s not how grief works. That’s not how healing works.

This isn’t a service. It’s a relationship. One that asks for your presence, your participation, and your willingness to sit in discomfort long enough for something real to emerge.

We don’t just talk about who you lost. We explore how that loss lives in your body, your story, your relationships, your sense of self.

No, it’s not always soothing. Sometimes therapy opens things up before it settles anything down. But you’re not here to be fixed. You’re here to be met in what’s real.

The goal isn’t closure. It’s capacity.

10. Grief isn’t linear—and neither is healing.

You’ll loop. You’ll regress. You’ll feel okay for a moment and then fall apart in the cereal aisle. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re in it. Alive. Human.

Grief doesn’t want you to get over it. It wants you to stay present to it. To move with it. To let it change you without demanding that you make it tidy.

This is the work. And it’s profound human work.