Why Does Grief Come in Waves?
Why loss can feel quiet one moment and overwhelming the next.
Emotional Patterns | 15 min read
You can be okay in the morning.
You make coffee.
You answer a message.
You go to work.
You laugh at something you didn't expect to find funny.
For a moment, life feels almost ordinary again.
Then a song begins playing.
You catch a familiar scent.
You drive past a place you haven't thought about in months.
You reach for your phone before remembering there is no one to call.
And suddenly, the loss feels as though it happened yesterday.
Why Does Grief Do That?
Why can you feel steady one moment and overwhelmed the next?
And why, just when you think you're beginning to move forward, can something seemingly insignificant bring it all rushing back?
It can feel as though you've gone backwards.
But contemporary grief research gives us another way of understanding what may be happening.
Grief is not simply sadness.
It can affect how we remember, attach, anticipate, regulate, understand ourselves and imagine our future.
And perhaps most importantly:
A wave of grief does not necessarily mean you are going backwards.
What's Happening
One of the strangest experiences in grief is knowing something has changed, while part of you still expects life to feel the same—or someone you love to be as they were before.
You wake for a fraction of a second before remembering.
You hear something funny and think:
I have to tell them.
You walk into a room and almost expect to see them sitting in their usual place.
You know they are gone.
So why can part of you seem not to know?
Your Whole System Is Learning a New Reality
Here is something many people are never told about grief:
Your whole system may have to learn a new reality long after you understand that something—or someone—you deeply valued has changed or is no longer there.
Your mind may understand what happened.
But the rest of your system—your brain, body, routines, attachment patterns, nervous system and expectations—may still be adjusting to what that change means.
Our brains learn from repeated experience and use what they have learned to anticipate what is likely to happen next.
When someone has been part of your life for years or decades, their presence becomes woven into thousands of those expectations.
Dad calls on Sunday.
Mom sits there at Christmas.
Your partner is beside you when you wake up.
Your sister understands the story without you explaining the beginning.
Your friend is the person you text when that happens.
These aren't only memories.
They become part of what your brain has learned about how your world works.
Research in grief neuroscience suggests that grieving involves an important form of learning.
This work brings neuroscience and attachment theory together to help explain a profound contradiction after loss.
Part of you knows:
Something has changed. They may be gone, changed, or no longer available to you in the way they once were.
But years of attachment have taught your system:
This person exists. They are part of my world. I know how to find them.
Before loss, that expectation made perfect sense.
If someone you loved was not beside you, they were somewhere else.
At work.
Downstairs.
At the store.
On the other end of the phone.
Absence was temporary.
When someone dies, a relationship ends through divorce or separation, or a person changes profoundly through mental health struggles, the attachment system can be confronted with a reality it has little experience predicting.
They are absent, changed, or no longer available to you in the way they once were.
Your whole system now has to adjust to a reality that may contradict years of learned expectations.
That adjustment does not happen simply because you intellectually understand what has happened.
You can understand a loss in a single devastating moment.
But the thousands of expectations built across a relationship do not disappear in that same moment.
This may help explain one of grief's most painful contradictions:
You can know a relationship has changed and still, for a moment, expect things to be as they were. You can know someone is gone and still expect them to come home.
There is nothing foolish about reaching for the phone.
Nothing strange about briefly expecting to hear their voice.
Your system spent years learning their presence.
Now it is learning a different reality.
And that takes time.
Grief Is Not Only About Death
We most often use the word grief when someone dies.
But we can grieve other profound losses too.
The end of a significant relationship can bring yearning, disrupted routines, changes in identity, intrusive memories and the painful adjustment to a future that no longer looks the way you expected.
A breakup and a death are different kinds of loss.
But both can disrupt attachment.
The person you once expected to call is no longer the person you call.
The routines that included them no longer do.
And sometimes what hurts isn't only losing the relationship that existed.
You may also be grieving the future you thought you were going to have.
The holidays you imagined.
The home you pictured.
The places you thought you would go.
The person you expected to grow old beside.
The version of yourself that existed inside that relationship.
Sometimes we grieve what happened.
Sometimes we grieve what will now never happen.
And that can be a profound loss too.
Why You Still Reach for Someone Who Is Gone
There is another piece of grief neuroscience that is rarely discussed outside research settings.
Researchers have investigated not only systems associated with emotional pain, but also systems involved in attachment, motivation, reward and seeking.
In one small brain-imaging study, bereaved women were shown photographs and words associated with the person who had died.
Among women experiencing what researchers then termed complicated grief, reminders of the deceased were associated with greater activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in reward and motivated behaviour.
That activity was also associated with greater yearning.
This does not mean grief is an addiction.
It does not mean everyone's brain responds identically.
And an experience as complex as grief cannot be reduced to a single brain region.
But it offers a fascinating way to understand something grieving people have described for generations:
Grief can contain an urge to seek.
You reach for the phone.
Look toward their chair.
Replay the voicemail.
Return to photographs.
Want to tell them what happened today.
Sometimes grief doesn't feel like crying.
Sometimes it feels like reaching for someone who is no longer there in the way they once were
Perhaps yearning is not simply sadness.
Sometimes it is the ache of attachment still reaching toward someone it has learned to expect.
Why a Song Can Undo an Entire Afternoon
Then there are the waves that seem to come from nowhere.
A song.
A smell.
A restaurant.
A particular date.
Someone walking ahead of you with the same gait.
Suddenly your chest tightens or tears appear before you've fully understood what happened.
Memory does not operate like a filing cabinet where we deliberately select a folder labelled with someone's name.
Memories are interconnected with sensory information, places, emotions and experiences.
The smell of a particular meal may carry Sunday dinners with your family.
A song may carry a car ride from twenty years ago.
A season may carry traditions you didn't realize your mind was anticipating.
Sometimes the emotional response seems to arrive before you consciously understand the connection.
This can make grief feel unpredictable.
But perhaps the wave didn't come from nowhere.
Something touched a memory that was already there.
The song didn't erase your healing.
It touched something that still matters.
It reminded you of your connection.
The Body Grieves Too
We often speak about grief as though it lives entirely in our emotions.
It doesn't.
Bereavement research has associated grief with changes in sleep, concentration, fatigue and stress-related physiological processes.
This does not mean every headache, sleepless night or physical symptom following loss should be attributed to grief.
Physical symptoms deserve appropriate medical attention.
But it reminds us of something important:
The body participates in loss.
Perhaps sleep has become fragmented.
Meals are irregular.
Concentration requires more effort.
The person who was woven into your everyday life may no longer be there in the same way.
There are phone calls to make.
Possessions to sort.
Forms to complete.
People to notify.
Perhaps there was caregiving, prolonged stress or uncertainty before the loss—and exhaustion long before you even recognized yourself as grieving.
Sometimes grief isn't asking only for emotional energy.
Your whole system is adapting.
So perhaps the question doesn't always need to be:
What's wrong with me?
Sometimes a different question is:
What has my whole system been carrying?
When Grief Becomes “I Should Have…”
There is another kind of wave.
It often arrives quietly.
I should have called.
I should have noticed.
Why didn't I ask more questions?
I shouldn't have said that.
I should have been there.
What if I had done something differently?
And underneath all of those questions may be one that is much harder to say:
Did I fail them somehow?
Psychologists call some of these thoughts counterfactual thinking—mentally constructing an alternative version of what happened.
If only I had done X, perhaps Y would not have happened.
Research on bereavement suggests that these if only thoughts, particularly when they become repetitive and self-blaming, can be associated with more severe grief.
And these thoughts can be a natural part of trying to make sense of loss.
After a loss or profound change, an ordinary moment can suddenly acquire enormous significance because now you know what happened next.
Today, you know which conversation was the last conversation.
You know which Christmas was the last Christmas.
You know what happened after that doctor's appointment.
You know which goodbye was actually goodbye.
But the person you were then did not necessarily know any of those things.
And yet grief can ask that earlier version of you to account for decisions using knowledge only the present version possesses.
That is an impossible standard.
When the Mind Tries to Rewrite the Ending
There may be another reason if only can become so powerful.
Loss can bring us face-to-face with one of the hardest realities to accept:
There are things we cannot control.
Sometimes:
If only I had…
is easier to hold than:
There may have been nothing I could have done.
Because the first possibility leaves us with the illusion that the outcome could have been controlled.
The second asks us to face uncertainty.
None of this means every feeling of guilt is misplaced.
Relationships are imperfect.
We make mistakes.
We lose patience.
We say things we wish we hadn't.
There may be things we genuinely regret.
Grief does not require us to pretend otherwise.
But:
Regret and responsibility are not always the same thing.
And neither requires a lifetime of self-punishment.
Sometimes we need to look at the whole relationship instead of allowing grief to isolate one moment.
The conversations.
The arguments.
The laughter.
The ordinary Tuesdays.
The things you did say.
The things you didn't.
The ways you showed up.
The times you couldn't.
The love that existed alongside all of that imperfection.
Grief has a way of putting one moment on trial while forgetting an entire relationship existed around it.
And if you find yourself questioning everything you did, remember:
The person looking backward knows how the story ended.
The person living it did not.
Why Every Loss Can Feel Different
Another quiet source of self-doubt can appear when we compare grief.
Why did this loss affect me more than another?
Why am I grieving my friend differently than I grieved a relative?
Why has losing my godchild affected me this deeply?
Why am I coping differently this time?
And sometimes:
Does this mean I loved one person more?
Grief does not offer such a simple equation.
Different people occupy different places within us.
A spouse may be woven into your daily routine, physical environment, finances, identity, intimacy and imagined future.
A parent may carry history, protection, approval, conflict, belonging—or simply the knowledge that somewhere in the world you are still someone's child.
A sibling may hold a version of your childhood almost no one else remembers.
A close friend may know parts of you your family never knew.
A godchild, niece or nephew may represent tenderness, responsibility, possibility and a future you expected to witness.
And the death of a child can challenge assumptions that feel fundamental: that children should outlive the adults who love them, that there should have been more time, that their story should have continued.
These losses do not need to be ranked.
They are different relationships.
And different relationships create different absences.
Sometimes a difficult relationship produces intense grief too.
You may grieve what the relationship was.
But you may also grieve what it never became.
The apology that will never arrive.
The conversation you thought there would eventually be time to have.
The reconciliation that is no longer possible.
The parent you kept hoping might one day understand.
The sibling relationship you imagined repairing.
Death can close not only a life.
It can close a possibility.
So if you grieve two people differently, resist using the intensity of your pain as a measurement of your love.
Different grief does not mean lesser love.
Sometimes it simply means this person occupied a different place in your life—and therefore left a different space behind.
Is the First Loss the Worst?
Maybe you remember the first loss that truly changed your understanding of grief.
Before it, loss may have been something you understood intellectually.
After it, loss became something you knew.
Perhaps it was a death.
A divorce.
The end of a relationship you thought would last.
An estrangement from someone you loved.
Watching someone you love change profoundly may stir the grief of another relationship that changed or ended in a very different way.
The first profound loss can introduce us to realities we may never have had to face before.
People can still exist and no longer be part of our lives in the way they once were.
Relationships can end before we are ready.
People can change.
People can die.
A future we were certain of can disappear.
Life can divide itself into before and after.
But does that make the first profound loss the worst?
Not necessarily.
Grief doesn't follow a timeline or hierarchy.
A later loss may involve a deeper attachment.
A different relationship.
A traumatic or unexpected ending.
Less support.
More unfinished business.
Or it may arrive at a point when you simply have fewer emotional resources available.
And sometimes a new loss touches an old one.
A funeral reminds you of another funeral.
A divorce awakens the abandonment you felt after an earlier breakup.
An estrangement reminds you of someone else you once lost.
Watching someone change through mental illness may stir the grief of another relationship that disappeared in a very different way.
That does not necessarily mean the earlier grief was unresolved.
Memory connects experiences.
So does attachment.
Sometimes today's grief carries echoes of yesterday's losses.
Previous loss may give us language, perspective and proof that the intensity of grief can change.
It can also leave us tired.
There is no rule saying grief becomes easier because you've experienced it before.
And there is no rule saying your first loss must always be the one that affected you most.
When Loss Feels Like a Betrayal
There is a feeling people may be reluctant to admit.
Anger at the person you lost—or at how the relationship changed.
How could you leave me?
You were supposed to be here.
We had plans.
You promised.
I need you.
How am I supposed to do this without you?
Then another part of you answers:
They may not have chosen this either.
Of course you know that.
But knowing something intellectually does not always determine what we feel.
They may not have intended to leave or abandon you.
But you are experiencing their absence.
If it was your partner, perhaps you were supposed to grow old together.
If it was your parent, perhaps some part of you assumed they would always be there.
If it was your friend, perhaps you expected decades more conversations.
If it was a child, perhaps the very order you believed life should follow feels violated.
So underneath:
How could you leave me?
may be something much more vulnerable:
I wasn't ready to live in a world without you.
Anger does not cancel love.
Feeling abandoned does not mean you believe the person deliberately abandoned you.
Sometimes we are not angry with the person at all.
We are angry that love did not get the ending we thought it would.
Grief Doesn't Follow Five Neat Stages
Most of us have heard about the five stages of grief:
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance.
They are so embedded in popular culture that people sometimes use them to determine whether they are grieving correctly.
But grief research gives us a much more nuanced picture.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her framework through her work involving people facing terminal illness.
The stages were subsequently applied much more broadly to bereavement.
Contemporary grief research does not suggest that everyone must pass through five emotions in a particular sequence before arriving at acceptance.
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut's Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement offers another way of understanding grief.
They describe movement between two orientations.
Sometimes we turn toward the loss.
We remember.
Yearn.
Cry.
Look at photographs.
Talk about the person.
At other times, attention turns toward rebuilding life.
We return to responsibilities.
Meet a friend.
Laugh.
Solve a problem.
Make plans.
This movement is called oscillation.
Not stages.
Movement.
Back and forth.
Their model contains an especially important idea:
Taking respite from grief can be part of adapting to grief.
You do not need to remain immersed in pain every moment to prove that someone mattered.
You can cry at breakfast...
and laugh at dinner.
You can desperately miss someone...
and enjoy an afternoon with friends.
You can have an unbearable Tuesday...
and a surprisingly peaceful Wednesday.
Neither day tells you how deeply you loved them.
And neither day alone tells you whether you are healing.
Why Happiness Can Feel Wrong
Then one day something unexpected happens.
You laugh.
Really laugh.
Maybe for a few seconds, you forget.
Then you remember.
And guilt arrives.
How can I be happy when they're gone?
Does enjoying my life mean I'm leaving them behind?
But grief and joy are not mutually exclusive.
Love and sadness.
Gratitude and anger.
Longing and hope.
Grief and joy.
More than one truth can exist at the same time.
Feeling alive again is not evidence that you have forgotten.
Nor is suffering indefinitely the price you must pay for having loved deeply.
Perhaps We Don't “Move On”
There is another phrase grieving people often hear:
Eventually you'll move on.
For some, those words feel unbearable.
Because moving on sounds like leaving someone behind.
Bereavement theory offers another possibility.
Research on continuing bonds challenged the assumption that healthy grieving necessarily requires severing our psychological connection with someone who died.
Instead, connection may change.
You cook your mother's recipe.
Repeat something your father always said.
Wear your partner's watch.
Tell your children stories about their grandparent.
Make a decision and wonder what your sister would have told you.
Continue a tradition they started.
Live differently because of something they taught you.
The relationship as you knew it has ended or changed.
But its influence may continue through memory, identity, values, traditions and the person you became through knowing them.
The relationship does not necessarily disappear. Its form changes.
Perhaps healing does not always mean letting go.
Perhaps part of grieving is discovering how to carry a relationship that can no longer exist in the way it once did.
What to Try When the Wave Comes
Grief is not something you need to solve.
There is no exercise that removes loss.
But when a wave arrives, we can learn to meet ourselves differently.
Reflect
Before judging the wave, become curious.
Instead of:
Why am I back here?
ask:
What touched the loss today?
Was it a memory?
A place?
A date?
Something you wished you could tell them?
Something wonderful happened—and they were the person you wanted to tell?
Sometimes understanding what the moment touched changes how we experience it.
Regulate
You don't necessarily need to make the emotion disappear.
Begin with where you are.
Feel your feet against the floor.
Notice the chair supporting you.
Look around the room.
Allow your breathing to settle naturally rather than forcing it.
Give yourself permission to feel what is present.
Regulation isn't about telling yourself not to grieve.
It is creating enough steadiness to remain with yourself while you do.
Reorient
Eventually, the intensity of a wave changes.
When you are ready, reconnect with the life around you.
Make the tea.
Step outside.
Call someone.
Return to what you were doing.
Light a candle.
Say their name.
Continue the tradition.
Reorientation is not leaving someone behind.
It is allowing remembrance and living to occupy the same life.
Gentle Practice
The next time a wave of grief catches you unexpectedly, notice the first thing you tell yourself.
If it sounds like:
I shouldn't still feel like this.
I thought I was doing better.
Why am I back here again?
Pause.
Try replacing it with:
Something reminded me that I loved deeply.
One interpretation turns the wave into evidence that something is wrong.
The other recognizes what the wave may also contain:
Connection.
Memory.
Attachment.
Love.
You don't need to fix the moment.
Let it be a moment.
Spiritude Reflection
Grief is the inner shift between the life you knew and the reality you now have to live.
Healing is not leaving love behind—it is discovering how to carry it differently.
Closing Thought
If grief returned today after being quiet for weeks, you have not necessarily gone backwards.
A memory does not erase your healing.
A tear does not cancel your progress.
A difficult anniversary does not return you to the beginning.
What you lost mattered.
Your brain remembers.
Your body remembers.
You remember.
And slowly, over time, something changes.
Not necessarily the love.
Not necessarily the missing.
But perhaps the way you learn to carry them.
You do not have to leave love behind in order to continue living.
Sometimes healing is not learning how to stop missing someone.
It is learning that you can miss them—and still keep becoming.
A Space for What You're Carrying
Some experiences are not meant to be rushed through or neatly resolved.
Spiritude offers a reflective space to explore what you are carrying, understand what may be happening beneath the surface, and reconnect with yourself as you move forward.
Private sessions are currently full, with new spaces opening in October.
If something in this article gave words to what you have been carrying, you don't have to explore it alone.
To express your interest in an October private session, email Spiritude at connect@spiritudewellness.com. We'll be in touch as new spaces become available.
Other Insights You May Find Helpful
Can Trauma Be Passed Down?
Sometimes what we carry did not begin with us.
Explore how family experiences, learned patterns, and emerging research in epigenetics may help us understand what can travel across generations.
Read: Can Trauma Be Passed Down →
Further Exploration
O'Connor, M.-F., & Seeley, S. H. (2022). Grieving as a form of learning: Insights from neuroscience applied to grief and loss. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 317–322.
Explores grief through neuroscience, learning and attachment, including why the brain may continue predicting the presence of someone who has died.
O'Connor, M.-F., Wellisch, D. K., Stanton, A. L., Eisenberger, N. I., Irwin, M. R., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center. NeuroImage, 42(2), 969–972.
An early neuroimaging study exploring yearning and reward-related neural activity in complicated grief. The study was small, so its findings should be interpreted as one contribution to a developing area of research rather than a complete explanation of grief.
Eisma, M. C., van der Laan, J. F., de Boer, N., Doornbos, M., Brouwer, C., & Epstude, K. (2026). Undoing death: Counterfactual thinking and emotional adaptation to bereavement. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 92, 102103.
Examines the “if only” thinking that can follow bereavement and the relationship between self-referential counterfactual thoughts and grief.
Neimeyer, R. A., Pitcho-Prelorentzos, S., & Mahat-Shamir, M. (2021). “If only…”: Counterfactual thinking in bereavement. Death Studies, 45(9), 692–701.
Explores how attempts to mentally rewrite a loss can relate to meaning reconstruction and grief.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.
Introduced the influential model of oscillation between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping and the importance of respite from grief.
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief.
Foundational work that challenged the assumption that healthy adaptation requires severing psychological connection with the deceased.
Knowles, L. M., Ruiz, J. M., & O'Connor, M.-F. (2019). A systematic review of the association between bereavement and biomarkers of immune function. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(5), 415–433.
Reviews research on bereavement and physiological processes, helping ground the understanding that significant loss can involve the body as well as emotion.
This article is intended for education and reflection and is not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Grief varies greatly from person to person. Physical symptoms should not automatically be attributed to grief. If grief feels persistently overwhelming, significantly interferes with daily life, or you are concerned about your physical or emotional wellbeing, consider speaking with an appropriately qualified healthcare or mental health professional.
