Grief after a death is rarely tidy. For most people, the rawest pain softens over the months that follow. That isn’t because the person matters less. It’s because life slowly makes room around the loss. Waves still come, sometimes years later, and that is part of ordinary grief too.
For some people, though, the grief doesn’t soften. A year or two on, it can feel as sharp as it did in the first weeks, and life has narrowed around it. “Complicated grief” is one of the names people use for that experience.
What the term means
“Complicated grief” is an older, informal term. In 2022 the American Psychiatric Association added prolonged grief disorder to its diagnostic manual. For adults it only applies when intense grief has continued for at least a year after the death and is getting in the way of daily life. The APA estimates that somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of bereaved adults go through grief like this.
The name matters less than what it describes: grief that has stopped moving.
What it can look like
People describe some mix of the following, most days, long after the loss:
- longing for the person that stays as intense as it was at the start
- a part of you that still can’t quite believe they’re gone
- feeling as though part of you died with them
- steering around anything that reminds you of the loss
- numbness, or a sense that life has lost its meaning without them
- loneliness, and pulling back from people and plans
All of these are part of early grief, so none of them on its own means something has gone wrong. What sets grief that has stopped moving apart is that they stay intense, and stay in charge of your days, well after the loss.
Why grief sometimes gets stuck
Anyone can find their grief getting stuck, but some losses make it more likely. Clinicians who study this, such as Dr. Katherine Shear at Columbia University, point to a few common threads:
- a sudden, violent or traumatic death
- losing a child or a partner, or someone your daily life was built around
- a relationship that was very close, or one that was strained and left things unresolved
- earlier losses, trauma, depression or anxiety
- having few people to lean on, or other heavy stresses landing at the same time
None of this is a flaw in how you’re grieving. Often it’s the size of the loss, and what it pulled out from under you, that makes it hard to find your footing again.
When the loss isn’t a death
The formal definitions only count grief after someone has died. Many people carry something just as heavy that never gets that name: a loved one’s long illness, a parent with dementia, estrangement, infertility or pregnancy loss. We’ve written about that kind of grief on our grief and loss counselling page, under “When the Loss Doesn’t Resolve”.
What helps
Grief that has stopped moving usually needs more than time. Counselling that focuses on the grief itself gives you room to face what happened at a pace you can manage, and to take up the parts of life that went on hold. Approaches designed specifically for this kind of grief have been tested in randomized trials at Columbia University. In two of those trials, roughly twice as many people improved as with a well-established therapy for depression.
Getting help doesn’t mean letting go of the person. For most people it means finding a way to carry them that hurts less and leaves more room to live.
If grief has ever brought thoughts of not wanting to be here, please don’t wait: call or text 9-8-8, Canada’s suicide crisis helpline, any time.
Talking it through
If this sounds familiar, you don’t have to wait for it to pass on its own. Our grief and loss counselling page explains how we work with grief. You can book an appointment online, or get in touch if you’d like to ask something first.