Why does grief still hit me when I thought I was doing better?

Grief can catch you by surprise and make you wonder if you're back at the beginning.

Often, it happens after you've had a few steadier weeks. Perhaps you've laughed with a friend without feeling guilty. You've managed to concentrate at work. You've even caught yourself making plans for the future. Life hasn't felt easy, but it has felt a little more manageable.

Then something happens.

A song comes on the radio.

You catch sight of someone who looks like them.

You instinctively reach for your phone to tell them something before remembering they're no longer there.

Or perhaps there's no obvious trigger at all. You simply wake up one morning and the weight of your grief feels as heavy as it did months ago.

Those moments can feel frightening leading you to question:

"Have I gone backwards?

"Was I only pretending to cope?"

"Will I always be like this?"

If you've asked yourself any of those questions, I'd like to reassure you that you're far from alone.

In my experience as a grief and loss counsellor, this is one of the most common worries people bring into the counselling room, not because their grief has become worse, but because they thought it was supposed to stop surprising them.

Why does grief come back when I thought I was coping?

I wonder whether part of the difficulty lies in how we've come to think about healing.

Many of us grow up believing recovery is a straight line. You start to feel better, you continue feeling better, and eventually the difficult days are behind you.

Grief doesn't tend to work like that.

The death of someone important changes your life in ways that continue to unfold over time. As your life changes, your grief changes too. It doesn't disappear; it responds to new experiences, new milestones and new realisations.

Sometimes people tell me they feel almost caught off guard by their own emotions.

"I thought I'd dealt with this."

Grief isn't something we complete. It's something we gradually learn to live alongside.

That means there will still be moments that touch the places where love, loss and memory meet.

Those moments aren't a sign that you've failed. They're often a reminder of the significance of the relationship you've lost.

Have I gone backwards?

This is perhaps the question I hear most often.

It's understandable why people ask it. When today's pain feels similar to the pain you experienced months ago, it's easy to assume you've lost all the progress you thought you'd made.

Yet when we explore this together, I often notice something different. Yes, the sadness may still feel overwhelming at that moment, but you're not the same person you were six months ago.

Perhaps you recognise what you're feeling more quickly. Perhaps you reach out instead of shutting everyone out. Perhaps you know that this wave will pass, even if you can't yet believe it while you're in the middle of it.

The pain may feel familiar. You are not standing in exactly the same place.

Was I pretending to cope?

This question often comes from people who have been functioning well for a while. They've returned to work. They're managing family life. They're making plans again.

So when grief suddenly knocks the wind out of them, they wonder whether those better days were somehow false. I don't believe they were. Our emotional lives are far more complex than that. 

It's possible to have genuinely experienced moments of steadiness while still carrying profound grief. One experience doesn't cancel out the other.

In many ways, this is one of grief's greatest challenges. It asks us to hold seemingly contradictory experiences at the same time.

You can be healing and still hurting. You can be hopeful and still deeply sad. You can be building a life around your loss while continuing to miss the person every single day.

Will I always be like this?

I think what people are often asking here is something slightly different. They aren't usually asking whether they'll always love the person. They're asking whether life will always feel so unpredictable.

Whether they'll always be frightened of the next wave. Whether they'll ever be able to trust themselves again.

In my experience, what changes over time isn't that grief stops appearing. It's that the relationship you have with it begins to change.

You start recognising that a difficult day doesn't erase all the steadier ones that came before it. You become less afraid of the waves because you've lived through them before.

You begin trusting that although grief still hurts, it no longer has quite the same power to convince you that everything is falling apart.

That trust develops slowly, not because grief disappears but because you discover that you are capable of carrying it differently.

The part I'd like you to take away

If grief has caught you by surprise recently, I hope you'll resist the temptation to measure your healing by one difficult day.

A painful morning doesn't erase the steadier weeks that came before it. A wave of sadness doesn't mean you've failed. It doesn't mean you're back at the beginning.

More often, it means you've encountered another part of loving someone who is no longer physically here.

Healing isn't about reaching a point where grief never visits again. Perhaps it's about becoming less frightened when it does.

A gentle next step

If you're finding yourself questioning your progress, feeling unsettled by unexpected waves of grief or wondering whether you'll ever trust yourself again, you don't have to hold those questions on your own.

I offer grief and loss counselling, including specialist support following suicide bereavement, by telephone and online across the UK.

Together, we can make sense of your experience without judging where you are or where you think you should be. Sometimes having a safe place to explore those questions is enough to remind you that you're not back at the beginning.

You're simply continuing the very human work of learning to live alongside loss.

Joanne Reed, Grief, Loss & Suicide Bereavement Counsellor