We've all seen TV shows, or even heard friends say "I'm in the denial phase," or "I've gone into the anger phase," and we get a sense that grief is like a math formula where if we progress through the stages, in incremental steps that only last so long, all will be fine. But looking at grief in stages is cognitive model that doesn't necessarily explain how actual individual human beings process a deep sense of loss. There are many grief models out there, listing different stages, or tasks, or whatever. There is also a sense that grief only happens when there has been death. But death is only one kind of loss. We can grieve for many things, including things that haven't happened yet! we feel loss for resources, opportunities, dreams even. The brain is loss adverse. We tend to feel more pain over loss than we do pleasure over gain. But the brain also has a way to get through that pain: the grief process. Being able to take a loss and recover is why we have grief as an emotion. We learn things about ourselves, the world, and others going through the process and recover from losses with a different sort of enrichment. Grief is not a formula for "getting over" it is something gone through.
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