I want to tell you something I don’t talk about very often.

I am living in heart failure. Right now, today, as I write this. My ejection fraction sits around 38%. I take fifteen pills a day. I struggle to regulate my body temperature in the heat. By the end of most days I am genuinely exhausted in a way that doesn’t fully resolve with sleep. And if you passed me on the street, you would have absolutely no idea.

That invisibility is its own particular grief. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Night I Thought It Was Anxiety

I was ten weeks postpartum when I stopped being able to sleep. Not new-baby-not-sleeping. Something different. Two nights in a row where I could feel my entire heartbeat vibrating through my body. I was a psychologist. I knew what anxiety felt like. I told myself that was what this was.

After the second night, I told my partner I needed to go to the ER. Something was off in a way I couldn’t talk myself out of. I still remember sitting in a semi-private curtained area, trying to pump while waiting to find out why breathing had started to feel like work. They ran some tests. They gave me morphine. They sent me home.

I watched the show The Pitt(absolutely obsessed with it), there is a scene near the end of season two, where EMS folks place EKG leads incorrectly because of breast tissue and miss what is actually happening to a woman who is right there in front of them. I watched that scene and felt it in my whole body. Because I have lived that. They ER people sent me home. The morphine let me sleep and made me throw up. The symptoms were still there. “It was probably just postpartum.”

They told me to follow up with an internal medicine doctor.

My partner scheduled that appointment for Thursday. And I want to take a moment to say something about Dr. Rahmen, because she deserves it. She had seen these symptoms before. She looked at my EKG, told me it was abnormal, told me I might be in heart failure, and said I needed an echocardiogram as soon as possible.

I remember sitting in the car in the parking lot of a Jamba Juice after that appointment (because it was the only thing that sounded good) calling to schedule the echo. When the scheduler asked how soon I’d like to come in, I told her, “as soon as you can tell me if I’m dying or not”. She had a cancellation for Saturday at one. I took it.

My partner drove me to the same hospital that had sent me home the weekend before. He had to wait in the car because of COVID. I walked in alone.

My ejection fraction was at 10%. For context, a healthy heart pumps at somewhere between 60 and 65 percent. The echocardiogram technician asked if I was planning to stay to talk to the doctor. Something in his tone made me say yes. The doctor told me I needed to go to the emergency room immediately, that I didn’t have two to four weeks to wait for a cardiology appointment. I asked if I would have to walk or if I could get a wheelchair, because I was so short of breath and I had already walked the entire length of the building to get there because the elevator was broken.

I was admitted for five days. No visitors, again because of COVID. A four year old and an eleven week old at home. I lost twenty pounds of fluid over those five days because my heart had not been able to remove it on its own. I was also in the middle of a thyroid storm. My body was in crisis in almost every measurable way.

And then I was discharged. And thus began my education in what it actually means to live inside a grief that has no name and no finish line.

The Person I Used to Be

I have always been someone who gives everything. One hundred and fifty percent, minimum. I overcommit because for most of my life I genuinely had the capacity to handle it. Multiple projects, multiple groups, multiple responsibilities running simultaneously. I was tired sometimes, stretched thin sometimes, but I could manage it. I always could.

The first time that changed was when my brother died. My brain felt jumbled in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I couldn’t move at the same speed. Things that had always come easily suddenly required more from me than I had. Grief did that. My brother’s death is also the reason I became a psychologist, the reason grief became not just my specialty but my life’s focus, the reason the STAY framework exists at all. Eventually, I found my footing again after his death. I picked the pace back up.

Then came my diagnosis. And this time the change was not temporary.

I had to learn, slowly and against every instinct I had, how to say no to things that previously would have been an automatic yes. I had to learn to ask for help in a way that felt completely foreign to someone who had spent her whole life being hyperindependent. I had a partner and a family who showed up in ways I will be forever grateful for. And I had to let them. Which, for me, was its own kind of loss.

The grief of a chronic illness diagnosis is not a single moment. It is a continuous recalibration. Who am I now that I can’t operate the way I used to? What does it mean that my body has changed the terms on me, not temporarily but permanently? How do I hold the person I was alongside the person I am now, knowing they are not the same and never fully will be again?

I think about this a lot. I live in it every day.

S: Slow Down

This is the pillar I have the hardest relationship with. Personally, professionally, all of it.

I love to go. Movement feels productive. When I am moving I am not sitting with the daily awareness of what is happening inside my body, the reality of a heart that is working harder than it should to do things that used to cost nothing. If I just keep going, I can outpace the discomfort. I can focus on the project, the client, the next thing, the thing after that.

What I have learned, in my body more than anywhere else, is that outpacing the discomfort does not make it go away. It just means it accumulates until my body stops letting me ignore it. And my body has gotten very good at making sure I cannot ignore it.

Slowing down for me is an act of surrender that I have to choose over and over again. It is closing the laptop when I have more in me to give because I know what tomorrow will cost if I don’t. It is canceling something I wanted to do because my body needs rest more than I need to show up. It is letting the discomfort of being slower, less productive, less present than I want to be actually land instead of running past it.

It is also an invitation I try to extend to the people around me. When someone shares something hard, a diagnosis, a loss, a thing they are carrying, we do not have to rush to fix it for them. We can slow down, be in the discomfort together, and let that be enough. Most of the time it is more than enough.

T: Track the Loss

The secondary losses of a chronic illness diagnosis are enormous and they accumulate quietly and daily.

There is the stamina I don’t have anymore. The projects I have to pace differently than I want to. The relationships I cannot maintain at the frequency I would choose because I simply do not have enough energy left at the end of a day that has already taken everything. There are the pit stops my family has learned to build into every outing because of my medications and their side effects, a small logistics adjustment that is also a constant, quiet reminder that things are different now.

And then there is the thing I don’t say out loud very much. I know I will need a heart transplant at some point. I have done the research. I have sat with the question of whether I will be there for my kids’ graduations and I have had to find a way to live inside that uncertainty without letting it swallow everything else.

Tracking the loss means naming all of it. Not just the diagnosis but everything it has reorganized, everything it has taken, everything it asks of me and the people I love every single day. When I actually look at the full weight of what I am carrying, two things happen. It feels heavier for a moment. And then I stop wondering why I am tired.

You are not carrying too much. You are carrying a lot. And you have probably never counted all of it.

A: Allow Complexity

This is the pillar I feel most at home in, maybe because chronic illness has forced me to live there whether I wanted to or not.

I am angry about this diagnosis and I am grateful they eventually figured out what was wrong. I have good days and hard days and sometimes both within the same hour. I have this strange, specific window into what it means to live with invisible suffering, and I would not trade the insight it has given me for my work, and I would also give it back in a heartbeat if I could.

I have a cousin who also lives with a chronic illness. We have a running text thread and sometimes, out of nowhere, one of us will send the other just two words: “tits up”. It means today is a rough symptom day. It means I’m in it. It means you don’t have to explain anything. And every single time it makes me smile and reminds me that I am not alone in something that can feel profoundly isolating.

The complexity I sit with most, if I’m being honest, is the invisibility of it. Because my symptoms are not loud, because I look fine, it is easy for the people around me to forget that this is happening inside me all the time. And so when I have a hard day after a stretch of good days, there is this pull to apologize for it, to feel like I am being a bother, to minimize what is real because the contrast is confusing to others.

I am working on that. Reminding myself, the same way I remind my clients, that complexity does not require an explanation. Both things can be true. The good days and the hard days. The gratitude and the grief. You do not have to choose one to justify the other.

Y: Yield to the Moment

This is the muscle I feel most confident in and I think it came directly from loss.

When grief shows up, in a session, in a conversation, in my own body on a day when I have a full calendar and zero capacity, I have learned to throw the agenda out the window. Not reluctantly. Genuinely. Because I have sat with enough grief, my own and other people’s, to know that the moment in front of you is almost always more important than the plan you made for it.

When someone starts to cry in the middle of a conversation that was supposed to be about something else, I want to be the person who says, we have time, this matters, you don’t have to apologize. Because we spend so much of our lives moving through to-do lists that we forget to be human together. Connection over pain is not a detour from the real work. It is the real work.

Yielding to the moment also looks like listening to my body when it tells me that what I planned is not what today can hold. That is still hard. But it has become one of the most important things I know how to do.

What I Want You to Know

I am telling you all of this not because my story is the point. It isn’t. The point is that grief shows up in all kinds of bodies and all kinds of lives in ways that are invisible to almost everyone around us and sometimes even to ourselves.

I built the STAY framework because I believed, and still believe, that we need a different way of being with grief. One that does not rush toward resolution or demand that loss make sense on a timeline. One that makes room for the full, complicated, nonlinear reality of what it means to carry something hard and keep living anyway.

I also built it because I needed it. I still need it. Every single day.

There is grief and embarrassment in admitting that things don’t get done at the same speed and frequency and consistency that they used to. I worry sometimes that people think I am a flake, inconsistent, unreliable. When the reality is that I am living in heart failure. It takes everything I have, every day. And some days I have to prioritize rest because my body tells me in no uncertain terms that there is no other option.

If you are living with something invisible, something that costs you more than people can see, something that has changed the terms of your life in ways you are still grieving, I want you to know that I see it. Even from here. Especially from here.

You are not a flake. You are not inconsistent or lazy or difficult. You are living in something real. And that deserves to be named.

When we talk about slowing down in grief, most people picture the same thing. Someone who is moving too fast. Cleaning out closets three days after a loss. Making major decisions before the shock has even lifted. Staying relentlessly busy because stillness feels unbearable.

That is one kind of grief. It is real and it is common. But it is not the only way grief shows up.

Some grievers don’t speed up at all. They go quiet. Their inside stops. They move through their days looking functional, maybe even fine, but there is a flatness underneath it, a kind of numbness that isn’t peace. They are not rushing. They are frozen. And frozen grief, because it doesn’t look like distress from the outside, often goes completely unrecognized, even by the person experiencing it.

Both of these are grief responses. Both of them are the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do in the presence of overwhelming pain. And both of them, in their own very different ways, need the same thing. To slow down and actually be with what is there.

The first pillar of the STAY framework is Slow Down. Not as a one-size instruction. As an orientation toward presence that looks different depending on where you are starting from.

Two Ways the Nervous System Responds to Loss

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory gives us a really useful map here. When our nervous system registers threat, which is exactly what loss is, it has two primary protective responses. The first is sympathetic activation. Fight or flight. This is the grief that speeds up. The closet cleaning, the planning, the relentless forward motion, the inability to sit still. The nervous system is mobilized and it is looking for a way out of the pain.

The second is dorsal vagal shutdown. Freeze. This is the grief that goes quiet. The numbness, the flatness, the sense of going through the motions without really being inside your own life. The nervous system has assessed the threat as too overwhelming to fight or flee from, so it does what it does under extreme stress. It disconnects. It conserves. It goes somewhere else.

Neither of these responses is wrong. Neither of them is a failure of grief. They are both the body trying to protect you from something that feels unsurvivable. The problem is that in both states, the window for actual grief processing is closed. You cannot integrate a loss from inside fight or flight. You cannot integrate it from inside a freeze either. Processing requires a regulated nervous system, one that feels safe enough to actually be present with what is real.

This is why slowing down matters. Not to force feeling, and not to perform stillness, but to create the neurological conditions in which grief can actually do what it needs to do.

What Rushing Looks Like

The rusher is usually easier to spot. They are the one who had the whole house reorganized within a week. Who went back to work immediately because being at home was too hard. Who is already thinking about what comes next because sitting inside what is now feels impossible.

Underneath the speed is almost always discomfort that has nowhere safe to land. The grief is real and it is right there, but the nervous system has decided that movement is safer than stillness. And so the person keeps moving. They make decisions that probably shouldn’t be made yet. They stay busy in ways that feel productive but are actually just distance. And six months later, when the busyness finally runs out, they are blindsided by how much is still there waiting for them.

George Bonanno’s research on grief trajectories is clear on this. What looks like resilience in the early weeks is not always integration. Sometimes it is velocity. And velocity in grief has a cost that shows up later, when the system finally runs out of road.

Slowing down for the rusher means interrupting the motion. It means noticing the urge to do the next thing and pausing, even briefly, before acting on it. It means creating small pockets of stillness where the grief has permission to surface, not all at once, but incrementally, in doses the nervous system can actually tolerate.

What Freezing Looks Like

The freezer is harder to recognize, including from the inside. They are often described by the people around them as doing really well. They are functioning. They are showing up. They are not falling apart in the ways anyone expected.

But ask them what they are feeling and they will often say something like nothing. Or numb. Or like they are watching their own life from behind glass. They know the loss happened. They can talk about it factually. But the emotional reality of it hasn’t fully arrived yet, and a part of them is quietly relieved about that, and quietly terrified of what it will feel like when it does.

Dorsal shutdown is the nervous system’s most extreme protective response. It kicks in when a threat feels too big to fight or flee from. And for some losses, that is exactly what it is. The death of a child. A sudden traumatic loss. A grief that lands on top of other griefs that were never fully processed. The system looks at what has happened and says, not yet. And it goes somewhere safer until there is enough support and enough safety for the full weight of it to come through.

Slowing down for the freezer does not mean speeding up feeling. It means gently, carefully, with enough relational support around them, beginning to thaw. It means creating enough safety that the nervous system starts to believe it can come back online. It means small steps back toward presence, toward the body, toward connection, rather than pushing through the numbness or waiting for it to lift on its own.

When We Rush or Freeze Someone Else’s Grief

Here is the part that is hard to sit with. We do this to each other too.

When someone we love is grieving, our own nervous system activates alongside theirs. Grief is contagious in that way, not as a pathology but as a function of how deeply we are wired for connection. We feel something of what they are feeling. And depending on our own nervous system’s patterns, our own history with loss, our own capacity for discomfort, we respond in one of those same two ways. We rush, filling the silence with silver linings and solutions. Or we freeze, going a little distant, a little unavailable, not because we don’t care but because we don’t have the capacity to stay present with something this heavy.

Discomfort tolerance is one of the most underappreciated skills in grief support. And building it is not about being fearless in the face of someone else’s pain. It is about learning to regulate yourself enough to stay in the room.

This is co-regulation in practice. Deb Dana’s work translating polyvagal theory into clinical application describes how our nervous systems are in constant conversation with one another. When you regulate yourself, when you slow your breathing, soften your own urgency, and stay present without rushing toward resolution or going quiet with discomfort, you are offering your nervous system as a resource for theirs. A regulated presence is one of the most genuinely therapeutic things one human being can offer another. It does not require the right words. It requires staying.

What Collective Grief-Rushing and Freezing Looks Like

Families do both of these things. Some families mobilize after a loss. They handle the logistics with remarkable efficiency and keep moving forward and never quite stop long enough to ask how anyone is actually doing. Other families go quiet. The loss becomes the thing nobody talks about. The grief gets frozen into the relational system itself, showing up years later as distance or disconnection or topics that cannot be touched.

Workplaces almost universally rush. Bereavement leave that caps grief at three to five days. An expectation of full capacity within weeks. A cultural premium on resilience that leaves no room for the reality that a grieving employee is carrying something significant that does not resolve on a schedule. Research by Schuurman and Mitchell on grief-informed organizational practice describes how profoundly under-resourced most workplaces are when it comes to supporting people through loss. The cost is not just human. It is organizational. Grief that goes unaddressed does not disappear. It shows up in engagement, in relationships, in the quiet accumulation of people who are functioning but not really present.

The 60-Second Pause

Here is a simple practice that works for both the rusher and the freezer, just in different directions.

When you notice the urge to do the next thing, to fill the silence, to fix something or move toward a solution, pause. Sixty seconds. Notice what is happening in your body. Is there urgency? Tightness? A pull toward action? Just notice it without doing anything about it. That noticing, that moment of awareness before the automatic response kicks in, is already the beginning of slowing down.

If you are more likely to freeze, the sixty seconds looks a little different. When you notice the flatness, the numbness, the sense of being behind glass, pause there too. Not to force feeling, but to gently orient toward what is present. Can you feel your feet on the floor? The temperature of the air? A single sensation in your body that is real and here right now? You are not trying to crack yourself open. You are just taking one small step back toward presence.

For supporting someone else: after the sixty seconds, instead of offering a solution or going quiet with your own discomfort, try saying simply, I’m here. Tell me more. And then stay. Let the silence be part of the support rather than something to be corrected.

Orienting Toward Presence

Grief does not show up the same way for everyone. Some people speed up. Some people go still. Most people do both at different times and in different combinations, rushing in some areas of their life while going numb in others, mobilized at work and frozen at home, or the reverse.

What the STAY framework asks is not that we slow down in some universal, prescribed way. It asks that we orient toward presence. That we get curious about which direction we have moved away from our grief and start, gently and with enough support, to find our way back.

You cannot slow down if you don’t know you’re moving too fast. And you cannot thaw if you don’t know you’re frozen. But once you know, once you can name what your nervous system is doing and why, you have something to work with. That awareness is not a small thing. It is, in many ways, the whole beginning.

References

Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The other side of sadness: What the new science of bereavement tells us about life after loss. Basic Books.

Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Schuurman, D. L., & Mitchell, M. B. (2020). Becoming grief-informed: A call to action. Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children & Families.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224

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I hear a version of this almost every week, both in my office and out in the world.

Someone is struggling, really struggling, and they say something like, “I don’t know why I’m still so sad. It’s been a year.” Or, “I feel like I should be over this by now.” Or my personal favorite, “It’s not like someone died.”

Here is what I have come to understand after more than a decade of clinical work in grief and trauma: loss is never just one thing. It is a constellation. And until we start naming all the stars in that constellation, we have no idea what we are actually carrying.

That is why the second pillar of the STAY framework is so important. T is for Track the Loss. Today, we are going to get into all of it.

What Are Secondary Losses?

When something significant happens, we tend to identify the primary loss and stop there. A person dies. A job ends. A diagnosis arrives. A relationship breaks.

But underneath that primary loss is an entire ecosystem of other losses that are quietly dismantling your life at the same time. And because nobody names them, because there is no ritual or acknowledgement or language for them, they often go untracked, unwitnessed, and they accumulate.

Consider a divorce. On paper, it is one event. In reality, it can be the loss of a partner, the loss of a shared home, the loss of an in-law family you genuinely loved, the loss of financial stability, the loss of weekly routines, the loss of your sense of future, the loss of mutual friendships, and the loss of who you understood yourself to be inside that relationship.

That is not one loss. That is seven, at minimum.

When we only track the headline loss, we end up confused about why we feel as heavy as we do. We start to pathologize our own grief. We wonder why we cannot get over it. The truth is, we are not stuck. We are carrying far more than we have given ourselves permission to name.

The Most Common Secondary Losses

Let me walk you through some of the most common categories of secondary loss. I want you to read this slowly, because I want you to hear yourself in this list.

Identity Loss

When we lose someone or something significant, we often lose a version of ourselves at the same time. These are not just role changes. They are identity earthquakes.

Who am I now that I am no longer that person’s person? Who am I now that I no longer do that work? Who am I if I am not the caregiver, the partner, the employee, the patient who was healthy?

Role Loss

Closely related but distinct, role loss shows up in the caregiver who spent years organizing their entire life around someone else’s needs and suddenly has no one to care for. It shows up in the manager who loses their team in a restructure. It shows up in the friend group that dissolves after a divorce, when you are not sure which friendships were actually yours to begin with.

These roles gave our days shape and meaning and purpose. When they disappear, the absence is disorienting in ways that are hard to articulate.

Routine and Rhythm Loss

Grief absolutely demolishes routine. The morning coffee you made for two. The weekly dinner. The text you sent every day at lunch. The commute you complained about, but that secretly gave you thirty minutes of alone time to listen to your audiobook. Getting in the car and automatically calling your mom.

Routines are how we organize time and meaning. When loss disrupts them, the day itself can feel structureless and strange.

Future Loss

This is one of the most overlooked categories, and one of the most painful. We do not just grieve what was. We grieve what was supposed to be. The retirement you were going to take together. The grandchildren you imagined holding. The version of your career that was already mapped out. The next chapter that no longer exists.

Relational Loss

Sometimes a loss reshapes every relationship around it. Friends who do not know what to say and disappear. Family dynamics that shift and crack under the weight of shared grief. A partnership that cannot survive what just happened. The social identity that came with a job, a community, or a faith tradition.

Loss of the Assumed World

This is a big one. Psychologists sometimes call this the shattered assumptions framework. It is the loss of the belief system you had been operating from. The belief that bad things happen to other people. The belief that hard work protects you. The belief that your body is reliable. The belief that the future is something you can plan.

When that belief structure cracks, everything underneath it has to be rebuilt. That rebuilding is grief work, even when nothing visible has changed on the outside.

What Tracking the Loss Looks Like in Real Life

Tracking secondary loss can sound clinical until you see it in your own life. Let me make it concrete.

In the Therapy Office

A client comes in six months after losing their father. They are frustrated with themselves. They feel stuck. When we start tracking the losses together, what surfaces is that they did not just lose their dad. They lost the person who called every Sunday. They lost the family historian. They lost the role of being someone’s child. They lost the future birthdays, weddings, and small daily updates. They lost the parent they were still hoping to repair things with.

Once we named some of those, the stuckness made complete sense. They were not grieving too much. They were grieving a lot of things at once, without knowing it.

At Work

Someone loses their job. The obvious loss is the paycheck. But underneath that, they lost their daily structure. They lost their work friendships, which were some of their closest relationships. They lost confidence in their own stability and security. They lost the future and the momentum they were building toward.

A manager who understands secondary loss does not just offer a severance package. They acknowledge that what just happened is a genuine grief event that deserves real support.

A simple shift in language matters here. Instead of stopping at, “I am so sorry, that is really hard,” try asking, “What are you most worried about?” That question opens a door that condolences alone do not reach.

In Partnerships and Friendships

A miscarriage. An infertility diagnosis. A chronic illness that changes the terms of a relationship. These are losses on their own, but inside of them are secondary losses for each person individually and for the relationship itself.

The future family that existed in the imagination. The spontaneity that chronic illness can take away. The equality of health that a diagnosis disrupts.

Tracking those losses together, naming them out loud, can be one of the most connecting and validating things two people can do in the middle of shared grief.

Cumulative Grief: When Loss Compounds

Here is something that does not get talked about enough. Loss accumulates. It compounds. And when it does, we are not just grieving the most recent thing. We are grieving everything.

This is why sometimes a seemingly small loss hits harder than anyone around us understands. The death of a pet that reopens a decade of losses. The end of a friendship that carries the weight of every relationship that did not make it. The retirement that surfaces every identity shift that came before it.

Cumulative grief is real. It is one of the reasons tracking loss matters so much. When we can see the full picture, we are looking at the whole human. When we can name everything we are actually carrying, we stop pathologizing our own pain. We stop wondering why we cannot get over it. We start to understand that we are not broken. We are just carrying a lot. And we have probably been carrying it for longer than anyone knew.

A Practical Exercise: Tracking Your Own Loss

Before we close, I want to give you something practical. This is a simple exercise I use with clients that you can do right now, wherever you are.

Think about a loss you are carrying. It does not have to be the biggest one. It can be recent or something you have been living with for a while.

Now gently ask yourself these questions:

* What did I lose directly? This is the primary loss.

* What did I lose as a result?

* What role did I lose?

* What routine?

* What version of myself?

* What future did I lose?

* What relationships shifted or disappeared?

* What did I lose in terms of my sense of safety or how I understand the world?

Write it down if you can. Not to make yourself feel worse, but to finally give every piece of what you are carrying a name.

There is something that happens when we see it on paper. When it is externalized, when we name the grief outside of ourselves, it becomes easier to hold. Grief that goes unnamed just keeps showing up in ways we do not recognize and cannot explain. There is real freedom in putting it on the page.

Why This Matters

Tracking the loss is how we stop minimizing our own grief. It is how we start seeing the full weight of what we are carrying, and how we offer ourselves and the people we love the dignity of acknowledging it all.

This is the heart of the STAY framework. We do not rush. We do not fix. We do not pathologize. We slow down, we track what is actually here, and we make room for the truth that loss is rarely ever just one thing.

If today resonated, hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. And if you know someone who is tired of being told to “stay strong,” send this their way.

I hope you STAY,

Dr. Heather Taylor

P.S. In the Washington area and curious about working together? Book a consultation HERE.

P.P.S. You are receiving this Substack post because you subscribed to my mailing list. If you wish to no longer receive communication from me via Substack, feel free to unsubscribe (and I will miss you).

Dr. Heather Taylor is a licensed psychologist, grief expert, and creator of the STAY Framework for Grief Integration. She is the host of the Grief is the New Normal podcast and writes about modern grief, identity, chronic illness, and grief informed leadership. Subscribe to follow the full STAY series.

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Someone tells you they are grieving. Maybe they say it directly. Maybe it comes out sideways, in a comment about not sleeping well or feeling off or just not being themselves lately. And something in you immediately wants to help.

So you say something. You offer the reframe, the silver lining, the name of a therapist, the reminder that they are strong. You say things like “at least” and “they would have wanted you to be happy” and “have you tried getting back to your routine.” You mean every word of it. You are doing the best you can with what you were given.

And most of us were given very little when it comes to grief.

That is not a personal failure. It is a cultural one. We live in a society that has almost no framework for sitting with loss. We were handed a model that promised grief had stages, that it moved in a direction, that there was an arrival point somewhere on the other side called acceptance. And we absorbed that model so deeply that most of us genuinely believe the goal is to help people move through grief faster. To be useful. To make it better.

The problem is that grief does not get better in the way we mean when we say that. It integrates. It changes shape. It asks something of us that our instinct to fix is almost perfectly designed to avoid. And in the gap between what grievers actually need and what we have been taught to offer, a quiet and very common kind of harm gets done.

Not because we don’t care. Because we do. We just never learned how to stay with grief.

The Fix-It Reflex and Where It Comes From

The stages of grief are probably the most widely known psychological framework in the world. Most people can name them. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What most people don’t know is that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed them to describe the emotional experience of people who were dying, not the people left behind. Somewhere along the way, the model got applied to bereavement, flattened into a roadmap, and handed to grievers as though it were a prescription for how loss was supposed to go.

Researcher George Bonanno spent decades studying how people actually grieve, and what he found looked almost nothing like the stage model. Grief is far more variable, far more resilient, and far less predictable than the stages suggest. People don’t move through loss in sequence. They oscillate. They have good days inside terrible weeks. They feel fine and then a song comes on and they are completely undone. The model we were given doesn’t account for any of that.

But the deeper problem isn’t just that the model is inaccurate. It’s that it created a standard. And when grievers don’t meet that standard, when they are still not okay six months later or they feel relieved instead of devastated or they can’t locate themselves inside the stages at all, they don’t conclude that the model is wrong. They conclude that they are. That they are grieving badly. That something is broken in them.

That conclusion is one of the most consistent things I see in clinical work. People don’t come in because grief is destroying them. They come in because they believe they are doing grief wrong.

When Helping Becomes Isolating

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from grieving in a room full of people who are trying to help. The griever can feel the discomfort around them. They can see the silver linings being deployed. They understand, often without being able to name it, that their pain is activating something in the people who love them, and that the fastest way to ease the tension is to perform recovery. To say they are doing better. To make their grief a little more manageable for the room.

Grief researcher Kenneth Doka introduced the concept of disenfranchised grief to describe losses that society doesn’t openly acknowledge or validate. A miscarriage. The end of a friendship. Losing a job that was wrapped up in your identity. Grieving someone whose death was complicated. These losses don’t get rituals or casseroles or bereavement leave. They often don’t even get named as grief.

But disenfranchisement doesn’t only happen at the cultural level. It happens in living rooms and therapy offices and workplaces every time someone’s grief is met with a reframe instead of a witness. Every “at least” is a small act of disenfranchisement. Every “you seem to be doing so well” when someone is not doing well at all. The griever hears the message underneath: your pain is too much. Make it smaller.

And they do. Because what other option do they have.

What the research on nervous system regulation tells us is that this isn’t just emotionally painful. It is physiologically significant. When we are anxious or uncomfortable, as most people are when sitting with someone in acute grief, our capacity for genuine attunement narrows. We become less able to tolerate silence, less able to hold ambiguity, more driven toward action and resolution. A dysregulated supporter cannot offer a regulated presence. And a griever in the room with someone who is anxious to fix them learns very quickly that this is not a safe place to grieve.

What We Lose When Grief Goes Unwitnessed

Unprocessed grief has a long tail. Not as a moral failing or a clinical diagnosis, but as a simple reality of what happens when a significant human experience goes consistently unseen.

In clinical settings, it shows up in the person who presents with anxiety or low-grade depression years after a loss, with no clear connection made between the two. It shows up in the somatic complaints, the relational difficulties, the chronic sense of something being off without knowing why. When grief doesn’t get witnessed, it doesn’t disappear. It goes sideways. It surfaces in ways that are harder to recognize and harder to address because nobody ever named what started it.

In workplaces, the cost is significant and largely invisible. We are, as grief educator Donna Schuurman has argued, profoundly grief-illiterate as organizations. An employee returns from bereavement leave and is expected back at full capacity. A team loses a colleague and gets an email from HR. A restructure wipes out an entire department and the surviving employees are told to focus on moving forward. The grief is real. The organizational response is, almost universally, to treat it as a logistics problem rather than a human one.

In relationships, what gets lost is intimacy. When partners, friends, and family members consistently respond to grief with fixing rather than witnessing, the griever learns to grieve alone. And lonely grief is harder grief. Researcher Robert Neimeyer describes grief as a process of meaning reconstruction, the slow work of rebuilding a sense of self and world after significant loss. That work requires relational support. It cannot happen in isolation, and it cannot happen when the people offering support are too uncomfortable to stay present with what is real.

What This Actually Looks Like

A client came into session eight months after losing her mother. Details changed for privacy, but the shape of her experience is one I have seen many times. She was functioning well by every external measure. She had gone back to work, was showing up for her family, had stopped crying in the ways she expected to be crying. Almost everyone in her life had told her she was handling it so well.

She had started to wonder if something was wrong with her.

What she hadn’t been able to say to anyone, including herself, was that she was relieved. Her mother’s death had ended a relationship that was complicated and painful, one she had been grieving in various ways for years before her mother actually died. And she was carrying that relief like a shameful secret, because nothing in the cultural script for grief had given her permission to hold both things at once. The loss and the relief. The love and the anger. The sadness and the quiet, guilty sense of release.

The fix-it framework had no container for any of that. And so she had been sitting alone with it for eight months, performing the grief that felt acceptable while the actual grief went unnamed and completely unwitnessed.

Grief as a Doorway

The STAY framework was developed in response to exactly this gap. Not as a replacement for existing grief models, but as an orienting stance. A way of being with grief rather than trying to move people through it.

STAY stands for four things. Slow Down, which means reducing urgency and creating space rather than rushing toward solutions. Track the Loss, which means identifying the full weight of what has been lost, including all the secondary losses that live quietly inside the primary one. Allow Complexity, which means holding contradiction and mixed emotion without forcing resolution. And Yield to the Moment, which means responding to what grief is actually asking for right now, not what the plan says should happen.

What makes STAY different is not just its content but its underlying premise. Grief is not a detour from a normal life. It is a doorway into a deeper understanding of what mattered, what changed, and who we are becoming in the aftermath of loss. When we rush people through it, we are not helping them heal faster. We are asking them to skip the very process through which integration happens.

Psychologist Carl Rogers identified unconditional positive regard and genuine empathic understanding as the conditions that make therapeutic change possible. Decades of grief research have only deepened that finding. What grievers need, above almost everything else, is to feel genuinely witnessed. Not coached. Not reframed. Not managed toward acceptance. Witnessed.

That is what STAY is built around. The radical, quietly countercultural idea that the most helpful thing we can do for a grieving person is to stop trying to fix them and learn, instead, how to stay.

A Different Kind of Support

Another client, a manager, came in struggling in ways he couldn’t quite name. His company had gone through a significant round of layoffs. He had kept his job. He felt embarrassed about struggling because technically, he hadn’t lost anything.

When we started tracking the losses together, a whole landscape emerged. The colleagues who had become close friends, gone overnight. The team culture he had spent years building, dismantled in a single afternoon. His own sense of safety inside an organization he had trusted. The leader he thought he was, because he hadn’t been able to protect the people he was responsible for. What he was carrying was grief, real and significant grief, for a loss that had no funeral and no casserole and no language in his workplace for what it actually was.

The fix-it response would have been to help him build a plan. To reframe the layoffs as an opportunity, focus on what remained, make meaning out of what had happened. All of that might eventually be useful. But none of it was what he needed in that session.

What he needed was for someone to slow down, name everything that had actually been lost, hold the complexity of being both the survivor and the griever, and stay present with the reality that there was no quick path through this. That is what a grief-informed response looks like. Not passive. Not without hope. Just honest enough to start with what is actually true.

What We Can Do Differently

Grief literacy is not a clinical specialty. It is a human one. And building it doesn’t require a degree or a training program. It starts with a single shift in orientation.

Stop asking how to make grief better. Start asking how to be present with it.

That means learning to tolerate silence instead of filling it. It means asking “what has this been like for you” instead of immediately offering solutions. It means recognizing that grief shows up in places we don’t expect, in a layoff, a diagnosis, an identity shift, the end of something that never got a name, and responding to all of it with the same care we would offer a loss that comes with a funeral.

It means understanding that when someone is grieving, your presence is more valuable than your advice. That sitting with someone in their pain, without trying to fix it or shorten it or make it more comfortable for everyone in the room, is one of the most profound things one human being can offer another.

Grief is not a problem. It is not a detour or a malfunction or a phase to be managed toward its conclusion. It is a doorway. And what is on the other side of it, for the griever who has been genuinely witnessed and supported, is not who they were before the loss. It is who they are becoming because of it.

We just have to be willing to stay.

Dr. Heather Taylor

Dr. Heather Taylor is a licensed psychologist, grief expert, and creator of the STAY Framework for Grief Integration. She is the host of the Grief is the New Normal podcast and writes about modern grief, identity, chronic illness, and grief informed leadership. Subscribe to follow the full STAY series.

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References

Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The other side of sadness: What the new science of bereavement tells us about life after loss. Basic Books.

Doka, K. J. (2002). Disenfranchised grief: New directions, challenges, and strategies for practice. Research Press.

Geller, S. M., & Greenberg, L. S. (2012). Therapeutic presence: A mindful approach to effective therapy. American Psychological Association.

Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.

Schuurman, D. L., & Mitchell, M. B. (2020). Becoming grief-informed: A call to action. Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children & Families.

Can I tell you what grief panic looks like in real life?

It looks like cleaning out a closet three days after a loss because you cannot stand to look at it anymore. It looks like researching “how long does grief last” at two in the morning, doom scrolling on your phone. It looks like making decisions about relationships, jobs, and living situations in the first weeks of a loss because doing something, anything, feels better than sitting inside the weight of what just happened.

It looks like trying to calculate exactly how many seconds of silence is supportive versus uncomfortable, at what point you should change the subject, and whether changing the subject means you’re being dismissive. By the time you’ve figured it out, you’ve already started talking about something else, and now you feel terrible about it.

It looks like a therapist jumping straight into coping skills because the silence feels too heavy, and they’re not sure what to do either.

And honestly, that internal spiral is one of the most human things I’ve ever witnessed.

Why We Panic Around Other People’s Grief

Most of us were never taught how to be with someone in grief. We were taught to fix things. To make people feel better. To find the silver lining, or the right words, or the perfect thing to say that will somehow make it okay.

Grief doesn’t have a right thing to say. There isn’t one.

So when someone shares a loss with us, something happens internally. We freeze. We panic a little. We start running through the mental checklist:

* Do I ask them to talk about it more?

* Do I change the subject?

* Do I hug them?

* Do I cry?

* What if I say the wrong thing?

* What if I make it worse?

* What if my discomfort makes this about me?

In that moment of internal scrambling, we’re actually doing the same thing the grieving person is doing.

What Grieving People Actually Need

Here’s the thing. Grief isn’t something we can rescue people from. There is no fix. And the moment we release ourselves from the pressure of finding one, something shifts.

We can take a breath. We can regulate. We can stop performing helpfulness and just show up.

What a grieving person actually needs, more than the right words, more than the perfect response, is to feel like their grief is not too much. Like it doesn’t need to be managed, or minimized, or moved past.

Pain needs to be witnessed. It needs to be acknowledged. When we rush through it, or avoid it, or pivot too quickly, the griever feels it. They feel dismissed. They feel like their loss is inconvenient. Like they’re inconvenient.

Grief gets a bad reputation because it’s painful and disruptive, and it shows up uninvited, and it doesn’t leave on anyone’s schedule. But when we learn how to slow down first, to regulate ourselves, to take the pressure off, we become capable of something really powerful.

We can help the people we love feel seen in their pain. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

Why Rushing Grief Backfires

Speed is one of grief’s most reliable companions, and it makes complete sense why. When we’re in pain, our whole system orients toward relief, toward resolution, toward making it stop. Moving fast feels like doing something about it.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both clinically and personally. Speed in grief almost never takes us where we think it’s going to.

When we rush grief, we’re not actually processing it. We’re outrunning it. And grief is patient. She will wait.

What tends to happen is that people move really fast in the early acute stages. They make a lot of decisions. They stay busy. They hold it together impressively. Then six months or a year later, something small happens, and the grief that was waiting in the background finally arrives.

There is a difference between someone who has genuinely integrated a loss and someone who has just gotten really good at not stopping long enough to feel it. Part of what I do clinically is help people figure out which one they’re actually doing.

Speed also cuts off information. Grief carries data. It is trying to tell you something about what mattered, what changed, what you’re navigating now. When we rush past it, we miss that. We miss the meaning. We miss the integration.

The Science: Why Your Nervous System Needs You to Slow Down

Here is the part where I get a little nerdy. Bear with me.

When we’re in a state of urgency, our nervous system is activated. We’re in some version of fight or flight, even if it doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. In that state, the parts of our brain responsible for emotional processing, meaning making, and integration are essentially offline. We’re in survival mode.

Which means when we’re moving fast through grief, we’re literally not in a neurological state where processing can happen.

So slowing down is not a luxury. It is a biological requirement for grief to do what it needs to do. You cannot integrate something your nervous system has not had the capacity to actually feel.

This is why rest matters in grief. It is why people often feel worse when they finally stop being busy. The slowing down did not cause the pain. The pain was always there. The slowing down finally created enough space for it to surface.

That is not a breakdown. That is the process working.

Co-Regulation: Why Your Calm Is a Gift to Someone in Grief

Deb Dana, who has done incredible work translating polyvagal theory into accessible clinical language, talks about this as co-regulation. The idea that our nervous systems do not just operate in isolation. They respond to each other. They influence each other.

When you walk into a room with someone in acute grief, your own system gets activated. That activation is real and it matters. It is also exactly why slowing down first is so powerful.

When we regulate ourselves, when we slow our breathing, soften our urgency, and settle into presence rather than problem solving, we are offering our nervous system as a resource to the person in front of us. We become a regulating presence rather than an activating one. We match their need rather than amplifying the chaos of grief.

This is why the therapist who sits in silence, the friend who just breathes and stays, the colleague who does not immediately pivot to solutions, lands so differently than the person who rushes in with advice.

It is not just emotional. It is neurological. Calm is contagious too.

What Slowing Down Actually Looks Like (It Is Not Falling Apart)

I want to be really clear about something because I think this pillar has the potential to get misunderstood.

Slowing down is not the same as falling apart. It is not passivity. It is not giving up, or giving in, or wallowing. It is a deliberate act of presence.

In practice, it can look really small:

* Pausing before you respond to the question “how are you doing?” instead of automatically saying fine

* Sitting with a feeling for two minutes before you pick up your phone

* Saying to yourself, “I don’t have to figure this out today”

* A therapist sitting in silence with a client instead of filling the space, because sometimes the most therapeutic thing in the room is not the intervention. It is the willingness to not rush toward one.

This applies well beyond the therapy room. Slowing down in those moments looks like:

* Taking a breath before you respond

* Resisting the urge to immediately problem solve or silver line the situation

* Saying “I’m really glad you told me” instead of “everything happens for a reason”

* Simply noticing, “I am moving really fast right now. I am trying to solve something. I am trying to outrun something.”

That noticing, that pause, is already the beginning of slowing down.

A Story From the Therapy Room

I’ll share something from my clinical experience. Details are changed for privacy, but the moment is real and actually common. It has happened more than once.

I had a client early in my career who came in after a significant loss and immediately started listing everything they needed to figure out. Practical things. Logistics. What to tell people. Whether to take time off work. They were moving so fast, even inside the session.

My instinct, my trained instinct, was to help them problem solve. To be useful. To meet the urgency with productivity.

Instead, I slowed down. I got quieter. I let the silence sit.

Eventually, they stopped listing things, looked at me, and said, “I don’t actually know how to do this.”

That was the moment. Not the list. Not the logistics. That moment of not knowing was where the real work started.

When the therapist slows down first, it gives the client permission to stop performing okayness. It changes the whole texture of the room.

Slowing Down Is the First Act of Staying

Slowing down does not fix anything. It is not supposed to. It creates the conditions where something real can actually happen.

This is the first pillar of the STAY framework: a model I created for grief integration that helps individuals, clinicians, and organizations stay with grief instead of rushing to fix it. STAY stands for:

* S Slow Down

* T Track the Loss

* A Allow Complexity

* Y Yield to the Moment

Next week, we move into the second pillar, Track the Loss. We’re going to talk about why grief is almost always about more than the thing we think it is about.

If today resonated, hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. And if you know someone who is tired of being told to “stay strong,” send this their way.

I hope you STAY,

Dr. Heather Taylor

P.S. I will be sending a few of these posts/episodes out each week and look forward to helping you and the people in your life STAY with grief.

P.P.S. You are receiving this Substack post because you subscribed to my mailing list. If you wish to no longer receive communication from me via Substack, feel free to unsubscribe (and I will miss you).

Dr. Heather Taylor is a licensed psychologist, grief expert, and creator of the STAY Framework for Grief Integration. She is the host of the Grief is the New Normal podcast and writes about modern grief, identity, chronic illness, and grief informed leadership. Subscribe to follow the full STAY series.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Early in my clinical work, I used to tell clients that grief gets better.

I stopped saying it. Not because it is never true, but because it was setting people up to measure their grief against a finish line that does not actually exist.

Most grief frameworks we have inherited, the stages, the tasks of mourning, the neatly mapped timelines, are built around the idea that grief has a destination. That if you do the work, you arrive somewhere healed, resolved, accepting. For some people in some losses, that language can be helpful. For many others, it is not. It creates pressure, shame, and the quiet fear that something is wrong with you when grief refuses to behave on schedule.

Grief does not actually work that way for most of us. It is not linear. It does not resolve cleanly. And the losses we carry do not disappear. They change shape. They integrate into who we are.

So I started thinking about what it would look like to build something around staying with grief instead of trying to get through it. Not as resignation. Not the okay, fine, I am stuck with this forever kind of staying. But as an act of presence, of intentionality, of being with what is real instead of rushing toward what we wish were true.

That is the orienting idea behind STAY.

What STAY is, and what it is not

STAY is not a technique. It is not a checklist. It is not another protocol promising five steps to a tidier version of your grief.

It is a stance. An invitation. A way of being with grief that is relational, nonlinear, and cumulative.

Here is what the acronym holds:

S is for Slow Down. Reduce the urgency. Create space instead of rushing toward solutions.

T is for Track the Loss. Identify what has actually been lost. Roles, identities, relationships, futures you were counting on.

A is for Allow Complexity. Hold contradictions. Two opposite emotions can be true at the same time.

Y is for Yield to the Moment. Respond to what is needed now, not what the plan said should be happening by now.

You do not move through these in order. You come back to them, again and again, in different seasons, different contexts, different relationships. Grief asks different things of you at different times. STAY is designed to travel with you through all of those states.

Where this framework actually came from

STAY came out of two things working together.

The first is my clinical experience. Sitting with people across hundreds of sessions and watching what actually helped them versus what sounded good in a textbook. The textbook answers and the lived answers are often not the same thing.

The second is my own grief. I am fluent in the language of loss, for myself and for my story. I am not going to fully unpack that here. But that grief taught me something I could not have learned any other way. Knowing the theory and living inside the loss are two very different experiences. STAY is what I wish I had earlier. As a clinician. As a daughter. As a mother. As a person trying to figure out how to keep showing up while carrying things that were not going to go away.

Who this is for

I am writing this Substack for a few different people.

If you are grieving and you are tired of being handed a roadmap that does not match your actual experience, this is for you.

If you are a clinician looking for a framework that meets clients where they actually are instead of where a model says they should be, this is for you.

If you work in an organization, a school, or a leadership role, and you are starting to notice that grief is everywhere and nobody is talking about it, this is very much for you.

Grief is showing up in coffee shop conversations, at work, in our communities, in hospital rooms and boardrooms and classrooms. Most of us were never taught how to stay with it when it does. We were taught to fix it, soften it, or wait it out. STAY is an alternative.

What is coming next

Next week I am opening up the first pillar, Slow Down, and what it actually looks like when grief shows up and you are afraid you will say the wrong thing, so you say nothing at all.

If you want to go deeper today, the companion essay on why I stopped telling clients grief gets better, and what I say instead, is on Substack. The link is in the show notes.

I am so glad you are here.

I hope you STAY,

Dr. Heather Taylor

P.S. I will be sending a few of these posts/episodes out each week and look forward to helping you and the people in your life STAY with grief.

P.P.S. You are receiving this Substack post because you subscribed to my mailing list. If you wish to no longer receive communication from me via Substack, feel free to unsubscribe (and I will miss you).

Dr. Heather Taylor is a licensed psychologist, grief expert, and creator of the STAY Framework for Grief Integration. She is the host of the Grief is the New Normal podcast and writes about modern grief, identity, chronic illness, and grief informed leadership. Subscribe to follow the full STAY series.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.