Loss is an Injury

Over my years as a grief therapist, I’ve come to believe something that has fundamentally changed the way I understand loss: grief is not an illness. It is recovery from an injury.

Loss is the wound. Grief is the uncomfortable process by which we heal.

Like any injury, much as we may medicate it, resist it, or rush it, we cannot sidestep the discomfort of recovery. We do not heal without moving through what hurts.

I developed the Injury Model of Grief because it honors what so many grieving people already know in their bones: recuperation rarely moves steadily from worse to better. Instead, it starts, stalls, and startles us. It asks us to rest exactly when we’d rather push forward. It demands that we tolerate uncertainty, setbacks, and days where we wonder if we are making any progress at all. It often feels glacially slow, and sometimes we can only see how far we’ve come by looking back.