Grief: How It Can Show Up, and Why It’s So Often Misunderstood

When most people picture grief, they picture crying. Sadness. Perhaps a funeral, a period of visible mourning, and then, gradually, a return to normal. This picture isn’t wrong, exactly — but it’s incomplete, and that incompleteness leaves a lot of people confused by their own experience, wondering why what they’re going through doesn’t match what they expected grief to feel like.

Grief is far messier, more varied, and more misunderstood than the tidy version we’re often given.

Grief doesn’t always look like sadness

Grief can show up as anger, irritability, numbness, guilt, relief, anxiety, or a strange kind of restlessness that’s hard to name. It’s common to feel intensely sad one moment and completely flat the next, or to feel nothing at all for stretches of time, even when the loss was significant. None of these are signs you’re grieving “wrong.” They’re simply part of how grief actually moves through people.

It’s also common for grief to show up physically — fatigue, tension, changes in appetite or sleep, a sense of heaviness in the body that doesn’t seem tied to anything specific. Grief is not purely an emotional experience; it lives in the body as much as the mind.

Grief isn’t linear

One of the most persistent myths about grief is that it moves through neat, sequential stages, ending in a clear sense of “acceptance.” In reality, grief tends to move in waves — sometimes overwhelming, sometimes barely noticeable — often long after people expect it to have settled. A wave can be triggered by something obvious, like an anniversary, or something completely unexpected, like a smell, a song, or an offhand comment.

Grief isn’t only about death

Grief is often associated exclusively with bereavement, but people grieve all kinds of losses — the end of a relationship, a diagnosis, a miscarriage, infertility, a career that didn’t go the way they’d hoped, a friendship that faded, a version of their future that’s no longer possible, or even a role or identity they’ve had to let go of. These losses are just as real, even when there’s no funeral, no formal acknowledgement, and no obvious social permission to grieve.

This kind of grief — sometimes called disenfranchised grief — can be particularly isolating, because it often goes unrecognised by the people around you, and sometimes even by yourself.

“Shouldn’t I be over this by now?”

This is one of the most common and painful thoughts people bring to counselling. Grief has no universal schedule, and comparing your timeline to some imagined “normal” pace only adds guilt to an already heavy experience. Grief that resurfaces years later isn’t a sign that something’s wrong — it’s simply evidence of how much the loss mattered.

Grief and complicated relationships

Grief is often assumed to correlate with how much someone was loved, but it’s frequently more complicated than that. Grieving someone you had a difficult, painful, or unresolved relationship with can bring a confusing mix of sadness, anger, guilt, and even relief — all at once. This kind of grief deserves just as much space and understanding as any other.

Why misunderstanding grief makes it harder to carry

When grief doesn’t match the expected picture — when it looks like anger instead of tears, or when it seems to be “over” and then isn’t — people often start to doubt themselves, wonder if they’re handling it wrong, or withdraw from talking about it altogether. This misunderstanding, more than the grief itself, is often what makes the experience feel so isolating.

Being told, clearly, that what you’re experiencing is a normal and valid form of grief can bring genuine relief, even when it doesn’t take the pain away.

If grief has been bringing up thoughts of not wanting to be here, please know support is available: Lifeline (13 11 14) offers 24/7 crisis support, and I’m always happy to help point you toward the right resources.