One of the most common things I hear in the therapy room is some version of “I should be over this by now.” It usually arrives wrapped in guilt, as if grief has an expiry date, and staying attached to someone who died means something has gone wrong.
It has not.
For decades, popular culture has borrowed a model that was never meant to describe grief in general. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced her five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on her work with terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths, not with people mourning someone else’s loss (Kübler-Ross, 1969). Somewhere along the way, that framework got repurposed as a checklist for grief itself, implying a tidy, linear march toward “acceptance” and then closure. Real grief rarely walks a straight line.
Grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut offered a different picture in what’s known as the dual process model. Rather than moving through fixed stages, people tend to oscillate: some days are spent facing the loss directly, and others are spent on the practical business of rebuilding a life, work, relationships, and the ordinary tasks of living (Stroebe & Schut, 1999). Both are part of grieving. Neither one means you’re further along than the other.
There’s also a body of work known as continuing bonds theory, which challenges the older idea that healthy grieving means severing your attachment to the person who died. Instead, it suggests that maintaining a bond, through memory, ritual, or carrying someone’s values forward, is a normal and often healthy part of adapting to loss (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996).
That matches what I see so often in sessions. Clients arrive believing they need to “get over” their loss, as though the goal is to stop feeling it. But grief isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s something you learn to live alongside. When a client realises there’s no pressure to “get over it”, something shifts. They can finally explore what that person meant to them, what they gave, what they taught, what they would want carried forward. Grief, in this sense, is often described as love with nowhere left to go. The work isn’t to make the missing stop. It’s finding new ways to keep expressing that love: in how you raise your children, the traditions you keep, the values you carry, the stories you tell.
The goal was never to stop hurting. It’s to acknowledge the pain, hold it alongside everything that person meant, and find purpose even in the middle of loss.
So if you are grieving, and someone, including yourself, is telling you it’s time to move on, you’re allowed to set that aside.
There is no correct pace and no finish line.
There is only the slow, ongoing work of rebuilding a life that still has room in it for the person you lost, and finding, in your own time, new ways to express that love.
References
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis.