You’re Not Broken — You’re Mourning: A Different Way to Walk Through Grief
It all begins with an idea.
What first brought me into the field of counseling wasn’t a textbook or a career test.
It was loss.
I was 20 years old when my father died suddenly.
There’s no manual for something like that — just a deep, surreal silence that settles into your bones. For a while, I did what many do: I buried it. I stayed busy. I numbed.
But eventually, the silence got too loud to ignore.
And at some point in the middle of it, I remember thinking:
“I wonder if I can help people with this kind of pain.”
That moment — paired with a deep curiosity I’ve always had about human behavior and why we do what we do — led me to counseling. And it’s kept me here.
Because grief is part of the human experience.
And yet, so many people feel completely alone in it.
Let’s be honest: grief doesn’t follow a timeline.
It doesn’t move in five neat stages.
And it rarely — rarely — looks the way people expect it to.
Maybe you’ve lost someone to death.
Or maybe your loss was quieter — the end of a relationship, a miscarriage, an estrangement, a child you never got to meet, or a future you thought you were moving toward.
Whatever it was, it changed you.
And you may feel like the only one still carrying it.
You might wonder why it still hurts so much.
Why you still can’t sleep.
Why their name still catches in your throat.
Why you’re so tired — not just physically, but deep in your bones.
And then the question comes in quietly, but heavy:
“What’s wrong with me?”
Here’s what I want you to hear, loud and clear:
Nothing. Is. Wrong. With. You.
You’re not weak.
You’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You’re mourning.
And grief doesn’t ask us to move on — it asks us to move through.
Grief Is Not a Problem to Solve
One of the people who’s shaped my work the most is Dr. Alan Wolfelt — a longtime voice in grief care and the creator of something called the Companioning Model of Grief.
The short version?
Grief isn’t something you fix.
It’s something you witness.
You don’t need someone to cheerlead you back to “normal.”
You need someone to sit with you in the dark.
“Companioning is about being present to another person’s pain; it is not about taking away the pain.” — Alan Wolfelt
Presence over pressure.
That’s what grief needs.
Because it’s not a condition to treat — it’s a story that wants to be honored.
The Six Needs of Mourning: What Grief Is Asking For
According to Wolfelt, grief isn’t just an emotion. It’s an experience — and it has needs.
When we meet those needs, healing becomes possible. Not because the pain disappears… but because we’re no longer alone in it.
Here’s what grief might be asking from you:
1. Acknowledge the Reality of the Loss
Loss can feel surreal — especially when it’s sudden, traumatic, or tangled in complexity.
Even when your brain knows what happened, your heart might still be catching up.
You might find yourself avoiding certain dates or photos. Or reliving “that moment” over and over.
That’s not you being stuck — that’s your nervous system trying to protect you.
Healing starts slowly — in small, quiet ways — as we begin to say: this happened.
And even that takes courage.
2. Embrace the Pain of the Loss
Okay… here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
This is the one our culture skips over with phrases like “be strong” or “at least they’re in a better place.”
But grief doesn’t leave because we ignore it.
It just buries itself deeper. And buried pain? It has a habit of showing up in anxiety, exhaustion, or random emotional outbursts at Home Depot (just me?).
You’re allowed to feel it.
The anger. The guilt. The "I miss them so much I can’t breathe" ache.
That pain isn’t shameful — it’s love with nowhere to go.
3. Remember the Person (or the Loss Itself)
One of the most sacred things I get to do in sessions is ask,
“Will you introduce me to them?”
Not just what happened — but who happened.
A parent, a friend, a partner, a child… even someone you had a complicated relationship with.
Grief is love in limbo.
Remembering doesn’t mean you’re stuck in the past — it means you're continuing a relationship, symbolically, emotionally, and spiritually.
The physical presence may be gone. But the connection? That still lives in memory, story, and meaning.
4. Develop a New Self-Identity
Grief doesn’t just take something from you — it reshapes who you are.
You might find yourself asking:
Who am I without them?
Who am I if I’m not their partner anymore?
Who am I if I never become the parent I thought I would be?
This isn’t just about loss — it’s about identity.
And most people around you won’t get it. They’ll say things like “you seem like yourself again” or “you just need to get back out there.”
But identity doesn’t snap back like a rubber band.
Grief changes your shape. And part of mourning is learning to live inside this new version of yourself.
5. Search for Meaning
This doesn’t mean trying to make the loss okay.
It means holding space for the questions:
Why did this happen? What does this mean for my life? What now?
After traumatic loss, these questions feel especially raw.
There are always “why’s” and often there are no answers.
But they have to be asked. — that’s part of the healing.
6. Receive Ongoing Support
This one might be the hardest.
Because after the funeral, after the divorce, after the loss… the casseroles stop showing up.
And people — often with the best of intentions — stop checking in.
You start to feel like your sadness is too heavy. Like your grief is taking too long.
Maybe you even try to “clean it up” for others. Smile. Push through. Say you're fine.
But here’s the truth:
You were never meant to carry this alone.
Sometimes the most healing words we can hear are:
“You don’t have to be okay right now.”
Or better yet:
“You’re still allowed to miss them.”
What Grief Work Can Look Like
When I work with grieving clients, I don’t have an agenda.
You don’t have to be "done" by session six.
You don’t have to have answers.
You just have to show up — in whatever condition you’re in.
Sometimes we talk.
Sometimes we cry.
Sometimes I say the thing you’ve been afraid to admit out loud, and you say, “Exactly.”
Sometimes… we just sit in silence.
And let the grief breathe.
“Healing from grief is not about forgetting. It’s about remembering with less pain.” — Alan Wolfelt
That’s the goal.
Not to erase the loss — but to learn how to carry it in a way that feels less suffocating.
More human.
More honest.
A Gentle Invitation
If any of this resonated — if you’ve been quietly carrying grief that no one sees, or shame that it’s still this hard — please hear me:
You are not broken.
You are not grieving “too long” or “too loudly.”
You are doing something deeply human.
You are loving through loss.
And if you feel ready to be companioned in that — not fixed, not rushed, just seen — I’d be honored to walk with you.