When grief stays

Someone told me recently that she’d been ‘functioning normally again’ for two years. Work was fine, the children looked after, the house in order. And yet, she said, something in her wasn’t moving with the rest. As if a part of her had stayed standing on the day the news came, while the rest of her life carried on.

That is often what unprocessed grief is. Not the visible, intense grief of the first weeks — everyone recognises that. But the grief that never found a place, and so keeps simmering, just below the surface.

You rarely notice it by its intensity. You notice it by the way it keeps returning. A song, a smell, a date on the calendar, and suddenly something heavy is sitting on your chest again. Or you notice it in the emptiness instead: things that used to move you now leave you cold. You avoid places and conversations without quite admitting it to yourself.

And it’s not just in your head. Your body carries it too. Tension in your chest or shoulders that always seems to be there. Sleep that doesn’t quite work — you wake up and don’t feel rested, or you lie awake at night turning things over for no clear reason. A kind of restlessness, as if your nervous system is always slightly ‘on’. People assume it’s stress or burnout, but sometimes it’s grief making itself felt through your body because it has nowhere else to go.

The world around you has little language for this. After a few months, people stop asking. The quiet agreement is that you’ve ‘moved on’. So you act as if you have — for others, and after a while for yourself.

And then the doubting starts. It’s been so long already. Others have had it so much worse. I should be over this by now. That self-judgment is treacherous, because it holds the grief even more tightly in place. If you don’t allow yourself to feel what’s there, it can’t shift either. A cycle forms: the grief isn’t allowed to be there, so it goes underground, and underground it stays intact.

What I see again and again in my work is that this doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. Grief keeps no schedule. It only becomes a problem when it gets stuck: when the charge can’t shift and so keeps announcing itself, sometimes years later, sometimes as a tiredness or irritability you can’t pin to anything.

There’s a reason it works this way. When a loss is too overwhelming, your brain stores the memory differently from normal. Ordinary memories get ‘filed away’ — they have a beginning, a middle, an end. You can think back to them without being overwhelmed. But with an overwhelming loss, the emotional charge doesn’t get properly processed. The memory stays ‘live’, as if it’s still happening. That’s why a smell or a song can bring everything flooding back at full intensity, as if no time has passed at all. That isn’t weakness — it’s how your brain protected you in the moment. The problem is that the protection stays active long after the danger has passed.

The difference between grieving and getting stuck isn’t in how much you feel, but in whether it’s moving. Grief that’s allowed to run its course slowly changes shape. Stuck grief stays the same — just as sharp, just as close, however long ago it was.

In my work I use IEMT to get that stuck feeling moving again. With calm eye movements, the stored emotional charge can soften. The memory stays — it doesn’t need to go anywhere — but the overwhelming feeling shifts. It sounds simple, and in a way it is. But the shift that can follow is deep, sometimes surprisingly fast.

What makes this realisation so important is that it changes what help looks like. If the charge is stored deeper than conscious thought, then the way in is also deeper than conscious thought. That doesn’t mean thinking and talking are useless — they have their place. But when the feeling doesn’t shift no matter how much you understand it, that’s a sign that the entry point needs to be different.

The first step usually isn’t ‘solving’ it. It’s noticing. Where does it sit, when does it surface, and what sentence about yourself did you start believing after the loss? Often there’s more held in place in that one sentence than you’d think.

If you recognise this in yourself and you’d like to look calmly at what’s going on, a conversation can be a beginning. No obligation — just to see whether it clicks.