Grief is not something to solve
Why the urge to 'fix' grief keeps it exactly where it is — and what happens when you give it a different role.
We grew up with the idea that you solve problems. Something is wrong, you find a solution, you execute it, and things get better. That works fine for a leaky tap or a conflict at work. But grief doesn’t work that way.
Most people try anyway. And that’s understandable — it feels unbearable, so you look for something to make it bearable. You try to understand it, to analyse it, to give it a place. You keep busy, fill your diary, think: if I just keep going, it’ll pass. Or you search for the right book, the right podcast, the right sentence that will finally put the grief to rest.
And sometimes that helps, briefly. But the feeling comes back. The same sharpness, the same heaviness. Because grief is not a problem with a solution. It’s something that needs room — and room is exactly what we rarely give it.
What I regularly see in my work is that fix-it thinking locks grief in place more tightly. The more you try to solve it, the more you push against it. And everything you push against pushes back. The grief becomes something that shouldn’t be there, something you need to overcome. And that makes it bigger, not smaller.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from this. Not just the weight of the grief itself, but the weight of constantly trying to do something about it. Analysing, strategising, reading, researching — all in service of a solution that doesn’t exist. The energy you spend fighting the grief is energy you don’t have for your daily life. And when none of it works, you add failure on top of grief: I can’t even fix this.
Your environment often reinforces this without meaning to. “Have you tried something?” “Maybe you should talk to someone.” “It helps to do something creative with it.” All well-intentioned, but underneath every suggestion sits the same message: this needs to be fixed. You need to be fixed. And that message is precisely what keeps the grief in place.
It helps to see grief as something that is there, not something that needs to go. Like rain. You can be angry at the rain, you can try to stay dry, but you can’t stop the rain. What you can do is learn to move with it. That’s something very different from solving it.
In my work with IEMT, I don’t try to remove grief. The memory stays, the missing stays — that’s yours, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere. What can shift is the sharpness. The overwhelm. The feeling of being flooded every time you think about it. With calm eye movements, your brain gets a chance to process that emotional charge differently. Not gone, but softer. Just enough to be able to breathe again.
That’s not a solution. That’s movement. And the difference matters.
The paradox is this: when you stop trying to fix the grief, it often begins to shift on its own. Not because you did something clever, but because you stopped blocking its natural movement. Grief wants to move — that’s its nature. It’s the fixing, the fighting, the forcing that keeps it frozen.
Grief that’s allowed to move changes shape on its own. Not on command, not according to a schedule, but in its own way. The sharp edges soften. Room appears beside the missing. Not because you solved it, but because you let it be what it is.
Sometimes the hardest step isn’t the grief itself, but stopping the attempt to fix it. That feels unfamiliar. We’re not trained to let things exist without doing something about them. But sometimes that is exactly what’s needed: allowing. Not resigning, not giving up — allowing. Making room for it and seeing what happens when it’s allowed to be there.
And if that’s hard to do alone — if you notice you keep falling back into searching for solutions while the feeling doesn’t shift — then it can help to ask someone to be there with you. Not someone who solves it for you, but someone who stands beside you while it moves.
Would you like to look at that calmly? Book a conversation — no obligation, just a first conversation.