Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 3 | Written Reflection

A few weeks ago marked twenty one years since my dad passed away. Twenty one years sounds like enough time that people quietly assume the grief must be finished by now, that after two decades life has surely settled into something that doesn’t hurt anymore. But here’s the thing about grief that took me a long time to actually understand. Time changes our lives. It doesn’t erase our love. This particular anniversary had me thinking not only about my dad, but about the way we talk about loss altogether, because I’ve started to wonder whether we’ve been having the wrong conversation about it for a very long time.

For years, most of us were handed one specific picture of grief, a beginning, a middle, an end, stages you move through in order until you land somewhere called acceptance, a finish line you eventually cross. If you’ve ever lived through real loss, I want to ask honestly, has that ever actually matched your experience. Mine never has. I’ve experienced grief in the middle of ordinary Tuesdays, while laughing with friends, standing in a supermarket, hearing a song I hadn’t heard in years, celebrating a milestone I desperately wished my dad could have seen. And then there are days I don’t think about him at all. All of that is true simultaneously, and none of it cancels the rest out.

So rather than talk about getting over grief, I want to talk about what loss actually does, how it moves, how it shows up in the most ordinary moments, and what modern psychology has come to understand about all of it that I genuinely wish someone had told me twenty one years ago.

Start with the model most of us grew up on, the five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It gave a great many people a language for feelings they didn’t previously know how to name, and I don’t want to dismiss that entirely. But my honest problem with it is that it quietly taught us grief has an order, this feeling first, then that one, and eventually you arrive somewhere final. When your own grief refuses to cooperate with that order, it becomes very easy to start believing something is wrong with you specifically. Imagine it’s been eight months since you lost someone. You wake up one Saturday completely at peace, go about your morning, feel almost normal, maybe even genuinely good. Then that afternoon you drive past a place the two of you used to stop at together, and out of nowhere you’re crying in the car. That evening you’re at a friend’s gathering, laughing properly, and then on the drive home the missing hits so hard you have to pull over. Measured against the stage model, that looks like chaos, like you’ve gone backwards, like you’re somehow doing it wrong. I don’t think you have. I think you’ve simply experienced what it actually means to be human, and this is roughly where modern psychology has quietly shifted its thinking, away from grief as a straight road with mile markers, and toward something considerably more fluid, something that moves with us rather than in front of us.

The first framework worth properly unpacking is what psychologists call the dual process model, a fairly recent idea, only really formalised in the late nineteen nineties, which tells you something on its own about how long the older picture held sway. The theory describes us moving back and forth between two kinds of coping. One is loss oriented, the crying, the yearning, looking through old photos, feeling the full weight of what’s gone. The other is restoration oriented, getting on with things, paying the bills, going to work, making decisions about a life that now looks different than it used to. Both of those are grief. Not one followed by the other in sequence, but both running in the background of the same day, sometimes the same hour. Picture someone who’s just lost a spouse. In loss oriented mode, they might spend an evening going through old photographs, calling family to talk about the person, sitting in the quiet missing them terribly. The next morning, in restoration mode, that same person is on the phone to the bank sorting out a joint account, working out the washing machine because it was never their job before, planning dinner because the children still need to eat. Researchers have found that oscillating between the two, rather than getting permanently stuck in either, is actually the healthier pattern. It’s also why grief can blindside you in the most ordinary places. You’re at work, fully in restoration mode, functioning completely normally, and then a smell or a song or a stranger’s laugh flips you straight back into loss mode without warning. That isn’t a setback. That’s the system doing precisely what it’s designed to do.

The second shift is one I find genuinely moving. For most of the last century, the dominant idea in psychology was that healthy grieving meant withdrawing your emotional attachment from the person who’d died so that energy could eventually be reinvested elsewhere, essentially let go, move on, find closure. It wasn’t until the nineteen nineties that this got properly challenged, when a body of research pushed back hard, proposing something called continuing bonds, the idea that maintaining an ongoing inner relationship with someone who’s died is often not only normal but genuinely healthy. You start seeing it everywhere once you know to look for it. Someone setting a place at the table on the anniversary of a parent’s death. A person talking out loud to a lost partner while making a difficult decision, wondering what they’d say. A woman cooking her late grandmother’s recipe exactly the way she was taught, right down to the specific pot. A father who still asks his late son’s old friends how they’re doing, because staying connected to them keeps a thread of the relationship alive. It’s someone finding a new way to carry a relationship that changed shape but never actually ended. I think about my own dad differently now than I did as a little girl. Back then, grief was mostly the raw missing of him. Now it’s wondering what he’d say about a decision I’m making, recognising a mannerism of mine that’s actually entirely his. Those were never signs that I hadn’t moved on. They’re the relationship still going, simply in a different form than it used to take.

The third framework only really gained traction from the late nineties onward, called meaning reconstruction. Its core idea is that loss doesn’t only remove someone or something from our lives, it disrupts the story we were telling about who we are and where our life was headed. So the real work of grief was never finding a tidy reason for what happened, it’s rebuilding a sense of self and a story afterward. In practice that might look like someone who built their entire identity around being a parent now having to work out who she is once her youngest leaves home, or after a child dies, the loss reaching far beyond the person themselves into the entire architecture of daily life and self image. It might look like someone who defined themselves by a career being retrenched at fifty five, losing not only the salary but the answer to who am I when someone asks what you do. It might be someone whose marriage ends after twenty years having to rebuild an identity that isn’t simply half of a couple anymore. What researchers kept finding is that two people can go through what looks like an identical loss and come out completely differently, because the reconstruction work is so intensely personal. One person becomes withdrawn and cautious for a season. Another throws themselves into something new entirely, a cause, a skill, a way of helping others walk through the same thing, almost as though the loss demanded a new purpose to make sense of the space it left behind. Neither response is more correct than the other. They’re simply different answers to the same underlying question of who am I now that this has happened. Healing, I’ve come to think, was never really about returning to who we were before. Sometimes that person genuinely doesn’t exist anymore. What we’re actually doing, slowly and imperfectly, is becoming who we are because of what happened, not instead of it, but alongside it.

Something worth saying clearly, because it gets missed constantly, is that loss doesn’t only happen when someone dies. We grieve the end of relationships, the family we’d hoped to have, a career that never became what we’d pictured, our health, our sense of safety, the version of ourselves that existed before everything changed. If you’ve ever had to let go of something that genuinely shaped who you are, everything described above, the oscillation, the continuing bond, the rebuilding of identity, applies to you too, even if no funeral was ever held for it.

This is really where grief stops feeling like its own separate category of experience and starts looking a great deal more like life itself, because none of us actually live in straight lines. Our lives are constantly swinging between opposites, joy and disappointment, certainty and uncertainty, connection and loneliness. Someone gets engaged the same week another couple signs divorce papers. A baby is born while a family gathers for a funeral across town. We laugh through tears, we make five year plans while quietly carrying disappointment about the last five. Life has never asked us to feel only one thing at a time, so perhaps grief isn’t the exception to how life works. Perhaps it’s simply the clearest, loudest example of what life has always been asking of us, to hold two truths at once and keep going anyway.

This conversation also lands differently depending on where you live, and here in South Africa I think a lot of us become fluent in loss earlier than we’d like. For some families it’s death directly. For others it’s watching a parent lose a job and feeling uncertainty settle over an entire household. It’s addiction slowly changing someone you used to recognise. It’s a friend emigrating because opportunity got harder to find here, grieving them almost as though they’d died, except they’re only ever a video call away, which somehow becomes its own particular ache. It’s communities carrying the weight of violence, road accidents, illness, sometimes not one dramatic moment but many smaller losses quietly stacking on top of each other across years. There’s a term psychologists use for this, cumulative loss, the idea that our losses rarely arrive in isolation, one sharpening our awareness of another, a new goodbye quietly waking an older one we’d thought was long settled. This is partly why grief can sometimes land far harder than the immediate event alone seems to justify. A colleague resigning might trigger something that has very little to do with the colleague at all, and everything to do with every other goodbye already stacked up underneath it. It isn’t always about what happened today specifically. Sometimes today’s loss simply brushes directly against every loss that came before it. I think a lot of South Africans understand this instinctively, even without the terminology attached to it, a nation of people who’ve, in different ways, learned to keep living while carrying something genuinely heavy, not because we’re extraordinary, but because life required it of us.

Alongside that, though, there’s something genuinely beautiful in how we tend to grieve together here. When someone dies, people arrive. Neighbours cook meals, churches open their doors, someone makes tea, someone quietly washes the dishes that have piled up because nobody’s had the energy, someone simply sits with you long after everyone else has gone home. There’s an instinctive understanding that grief was never something one person should have to carry alone, and I think modern psychology, for all its research and frameworks, is only now properly catching up to that. Healing doesn’t only happen inside one person’s head. It happens between people, in shared stories, in being remembered out loud, in someone simply saying tell me about them.

What’s taken me the better part of twenty one years to really notice is that loss doesn’t only change how we feel internally. Over time it changes how we move through the world and how we treat other people. You can usually tell when someone has been humbled by life, not broken, humbled, a particular quality to them, a slower temper, less certainty about how other people’s lives should go, more curiosity about what someone might actually be carrying beneath the version of them you’re currently seeing. It’s a small, interesting detail that the word human shares its roots with humility and humus, the Latin word for soil, ground that gets broken open and still somehow manages to grow things. I don’t think that’s the whole story of grief, but it’s a decent reminder that being shaped and worked by loss isn’t the same thing as being ruined by it. I don’t mean loss makes anyone wiser overnight, or somehow better than someone who’s been through less. I think it simply softens some of our certainty. It reminds us that we genuinely never know what someone else has walked through. The person serving your coffee might be grieving a marriage that ended last month. The colleague who seems distracted may have spent last night in a hospital waiting room. The teacher standing in front of a classroom may have lost a parent this year and still shown up anyway, because life doesn’t stop for any of us, no matter what’s been taken. We rarely see the whole story, and maybe that’s especially true here, where we live so closely alongside one another, each carrying histories and losses that aren’t always visible on the surface.

So if there’s one thing worth taking from all of this, it’s that there’s no correct order to grieve in, and no deadline attached to it either. You can oscillate between missing someone and functioning perfectly well within the space of a single afternoon, and that isn’t failure, that’s the dual process model doing exactly what it’s meant to do. You can keep talking to someone who’s gone, keep cooking their recipes, keep asking what they’d think, and that isn’t denial, that’s a continuing bond, and it’s healthy. You can spend years working out who you are now that this has happened to you, and that isn’t being stuck, that’s meaning reconstruction, and it’s real work. Healing was never about becoming who you were before the loss. It’s about slowly becoming who you are because of it.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.