The Tides of Grief

Grief rarely unfolds in neat, predictable stages. Instead, it moves like the sea, sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent, always shifting. Many people who come to grief counseling describe being surprised by the rhythm of their mourning. One day, they may feel a sense of relief or stability, as though they are moving forward; the next, a sudden wave of sorrow crashes over them, leaving them breathless. This ebb and flow can feel confusing or even discouraging, as if they are “doing grief wrong.” Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, the tides of grief are part of the mind’s natural and necessary way of working through profound loss.

Grief is Not Linear

Popular culture often suggests that grief follows an orderly progression of stages, but lived experience rarely conforms to this model. A memory, a scent, a season, or even an unconscious association may bring the loss into sharp relief again, just when someone felt they were beginning to find steadiness. In grief counseling, this non-linear movement is recognized and honored. Rather than seeing these fluctuations as setbacks, therapy helps us understand them as part of the deeper rhythm of mourning.

The mind cannot metabolize loss all at once. To fully face the reality of absence would be overwhelming, so our inner world organizes grief in alternating currents. It allows us to face some of it, then retreat from it, then return again. In this way, grief is not a straight line but a spiral, circling back to familiar themes while opening new spaces for understanding and integration.

The Unconscious Work of Mourning

Freud described mourning as a psychic process in which the mind gradually withdraws its emotional investment from the lost person and reinvests it elsewhere. This does not mean forgetting our loved ones or becoming indifferent to them or to their loss, but involves the sometimes slow process of acceptance. This “withdrawing” does not happen simply by choice or conscious decision. Much of it takes place in the unconscious, where the bond with the lost figure remains alive, complex, and deeply ambivalent.

We may find ourselves dreaming of the person who has died, feeling them vividly present even as we know they are gone. Or we may sense their absence in ways that defy words, an empty seat at the table or in our chest, a silence that reverberates loudly in our moments of calm. These experiences reveal the ongoing work of the unconscious as it negotiates the unbearable fact of loss.

In grief counseling, therapists attend closely to this unconscious dimension. Mourning is not only about adjusting to external reality but also about transforming the internal world, where the lost relationship continues to live in memory, fantasy, and identification. Therapy provides a space where these inner currents can be spoken, felt, and symbolized, rather than carried silently.

Waves of Intensity

Because so much of mourning occurs unconsciously, it often returns with unexpected force. A person may be caught off guard by tears months or even years later, long after they assumed they had “moved on.” These surges of grief are not evidence of failure but of the psyche’s way of revisiting and reworking the loss. Each wave allows a new layer of meaning, conflict, or attachment to emerge into consciousness.

The intensity of grief is not only about the present loss but also about the way it resonates with past attachments—our earliest experiences of love, dependence, and absence. In this sense, grief is never just about the one we lost; it is also about the self we were with them, and the selves we have been in relation to others across our lives. As Freud also noted, even though we can identify who we lost, it is sometimes more difficult to grasp what has been lost within us as a result.

How Grief Counseling Helps

In grief counseling, the therapist becomes a companion in this ebb and flow. Rather than trying to hasten resolution, the work of therapy honors the natural tides of grief. Therapy helps a person recognize that the non-linear course of grief is normal and meaningful and explore the unconscious layers of mourning, including dreams, fantasies, and identifications with the lost person. In therapy, you can make sense of the ways grief stirs up earlier experiences of loss or longing, understand ways in which grief might be hidden in the things you move towards or try to avoid, and discover how to live with the continuing presence of the lost figure in memory and imagination.

The aim of grief counseling is not to erase grief but to help a person live alongside it, allowing sorrow to soften into a more integrated part of their inner world. The loss remains, but it becomes less overwhelming, less paralyzing, more woven into the fabric of life.

Living with the Tides

The tides of grief do not vanish, they change over time. What once felt like drowning may later feel like a deep swell, still moving, still powerful, but no longer unendurable, overwhelming, or debilitating. In this way, grief becomes not only a process of loss but also of becoming, a process of creating a new life for ourselves that incorporates the transformed relationship with the loved ones we lost. We discover that we can carry the memory of the person we loved without being crushed by their absence. We learn that mourning does not end but evolves, shaping us into someone who can live, love, and remember in new ways.

Grief counseling helps us trust these tides, to see them not as signs of weakness but as expressions of the mind’s profound and necessary work. Loss rearranges the inner world, and through the ongoing work of mourning, conscious and unconscious, we come to inhabit that world more fully, more tenderly, and with a deeper appreciation of both love and absence.

If you or a loved one is experiencing grief and navigating mourning, please don’t hesitate to contact us. You don’t need to go through this alone.

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Photo credit: Grant Durr