Grief in the body.

The five-stage model — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — has shaped how most people understand grief. It has also caused immeasurable harm by turning a natural human experience into a test people feel they are failing.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her model in the 1960s from interviews with people facing their own terminal illness, not from research on bereavement. When those five states were mapped onto grief after loss, they became a framework that was never designed for that purpose. The model has since been critiqued extensively within the research community, but it has proven almost impossible to dislodge from popular understanding.

What this means for you: if you have not felt denial, or if acceptance feels impossibly far away, or if you cycle between rage and numbness with no clear arc — you are not grieving wrong. You are just grieving.

Loss is not processed only in the mind. The nervous system holds the entire relational history of the person you have lost: the sound of their voice, the rhythm of their presence, the way your body learned to orient toward them. When that person is gone, the body spends a long time looking for something that is no longer there.

This is why grief can feel like physical weight. Heaviness in the chest, difficulty breathing deeply, chronic exhaustion, appetite changes, a kind of cognitive fog — these are not signs that something is medically wrong. They are signs that someone mattered, and that the body is working through an enormous reorganization.

Somatic approaches to grief work with this directly. Rather than trying to think your way through loss, you work with the body: breath, movement, sensation, stillness. Breathwork, in particular, gives the nervous system a way to complete cycles of activation that grief often leaves suspended.

Anniversary grief is the way loss resurfaces around dates that carry meaning. The birthday. The anniversary of the death. The holiday that used to be theirs. The first warm day that smells like a season you shared. For many people, grief becomes most acute not in the immediate aftermath of loss, but in the months and years that follow, when the world has moved on but the body has not.

Grief researchers sometimes call this phenomenon “anniversary reactions” — a predictable intensification around specific dates and sensory triggers. Knowing this does not make the surge of feeling easier, but it can make it less frightening. The grief is not starting over. It is responding to a signal.

Many people find that acknowledging these dates intentionally — creating a small ritual, making space, allowing themselves to feel whatever arrives — moves them through the intensity more gently than trying to hold it at a distance.

For much of the twentieth century, the goal of grief work was understood as “letting go” — detaching from the person who died in order to reinvest emotional energy in the living. This model has been challenged significantly by the continuing bonds framework, which proposes something very different: that healthy grieving does not require relinquishing the relationship, but transforming it.

In this understanding, the bond with the person who has died continues in a new form. You still carry them. You still include them in significant moments. You still feel their influence in the values you hold, the choices you make, the person you are becoming. This is not being stuck. This is love that has found a new shape.

Talking to the person you have lost, visiting places that held meaning for them, maintaining practices or traditions connected to them, sensing their presence — these are not signs of pathological grief. For most people, they are signs of an ongoing relationship that death could not entirely sever.

Much of the work Nubbia does — in breathwork circles, in private coaching, and in the Remembering Through Connection event — holds space for this kind of continuing relationship. The premise is not that you need to move on. It is that you can learn to carry the love without being crushed by the weight of the loss.