Am I grieving for too long?

There can be a lot of pressure hidden inside the question, “Shouldn’t my grief have changed by now?”

Other people may be returning to “normal” while your life still feels clearly divided into a before and an after. Maybe you’re back at work, dealing with practical things and getting through the day, but something quite ordinary can suddenly bring the loss straight back into the room.

It can be easy to start evaluating your grief as though it were progress on a project, or a status bar filling up: I should be crying less by now. I should have more energy. Other people must be getting bored of hearing about it so I’d better keep it to myself.

But grief doesn’t follow a neat timetable. The NHS describes a wide range of experiences including sadness, anger, exhaustion, guilt, numbness and powerful feelings that can appear unexpectedly. People don’t necessarily move through these experiences in an orderly sequence either.

I think there can be two difficult experiences happening at once: the loss itself, and the judgement we place on ourselves for the way we are responding to it.

Counselling cannot make somebody stop being important to you, and it doesn’t need to hurry you towards being “over” what happened. Sometimes it can provide somewhere that your grief is still allowed to exist and felt with another person, including the complicated or contradictory parts that can be difficult to explain elsewhere.

If you recognise yourself in this, it might be worth asking: whose timetable are you measuring your grief against?