On the Non-linearity of Grief

Forget the stages of grief; learn the Engine

We’re used to hearing about the “stages of grief.” Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. but anyone who has actually grieved and at this point that’s most of us, knows it’s not so simple.

We know you don’t move through stages; you circle around the same truths, each pass a little deeper, until eventually the truth doesn’t destroy you anymore.

Though the “stages of grief” perspective can be helpful, I find them to be a less than stellar lens with which to talk about the process of grieving. The stages are just a list of the experiences that are common to universal at some point for people actively grieving.

But the stages explore nothing of the process itself, nothing of the structure of what’s happening behind the denial or the anger. In this way I see the “stages” of grief as a combination of stages and symptoms of grief.

I’m interested in root causes. I’m interested in the psycho-biological processes that drive human behavior and suffering including grief.

So, let’s instead set aside the “stages of grief” completely.

Let’s talk about grieving in a way that’s far more interesting and I find actually useful. Let’s talk about why grief is inherently nonlinear and discover why that nonlinearity isn’t a flaw in the process, but the mechanism itself.

The Architecture of Understanding

It all boils down to this simple truth: you (your biology) can only tolerate what lies within a small deviation of your current understanding.

Think of it this way. Your sense of who you are, your identity, your narrative, your view of the world, what its like, and how it works, has a certain capacity or limitations, which often scales with experience. If a table is red that means by default its not blue (limitations)

When new information arrives that fits comfortably within that capacity, you assimilate it easily. You were a little impatient? Sure, you can hold that. You made a minor mistake? Fine, you already know yourself as someone who occasionally slips up. I say that the table is red, you say no it’s maroon? Ok, fine. We can work with that.

But when the pain of a truth is larger, it becomes a little harder to swallow. When the story implicates you in a way your current self‑concept can’t contain, or shifts your view of the world in a big way, assimilation fails.

You can’t just “accept” it. The gap is too wide. What you need isn’t more information; it’s an expansion of the container itself. You must expand the scaffolding of your understanding.

Unfortunately for us, that expansion doesn’t just happen through thinking. It happens through emotion. There are degrees of course, the bigger the expansion the bigger the emotion.

The required emotions we usually do not like much, because frankly, they feel awful.

But again, there are degrees. Finding out your new friend might be color blind? That’s a small deviation. A little shocking maybe but kind of neat and certainly not life changing. You’ll be over it in a few days at most. Living in a world alone after a lifelong lover dies of cancer? Now that’s a deviation and that’s going to need a much larger adjustment.

The Emotional Mechanism

When you encounter a truth that exceeds your capacity to hold it, in its eternal struggle for homeostasis and efficiency your biology resists.

That biological resistance shows up as blame shifting, intellectualizing, minimization. Sometimes it’s a vague sense that the situation is “complicated” or just “not that simple.” This is biological resistance in narrative form.

You’re not being dishonest; you’re being human. The psyche protects itself from truths it isn’t yet capable of holding. It’s actually supposed to work that way, believe it or not.

Eventually, if you stay with it, the resistance exhausts itself. What follows is usually something like despair.

Despair is essentially the collapse of hope.

Hope that reality was going to be, could have or ought to have been different. It feels like suffocation because something is dying. Hope is dying.

This is the scary part. This is the part where we all freeze and resist the most.

We have to kill the hope for a version of the world that’s any different than the one that is.  We have to. Just for a moment, kill all hope.

Its hard work to kill of any hope for a reality where we were innocent, where love lasts forever, where the world is fair or we could get out without changing in some way.

That death of hope is very real and it’s why despair feels like dying.

This is where the non-linearity becomes visible. You don’t feel despair once and then move on. You feel it, then you get a moment of clarity, then you encounter the next layer of truth, and the despair returns.

Choosing to engage with despair is the emotional work of expanding the container. The cognitive clarity that follows despair is the new capacity: you now understand yourself in a way you didn’t before.

Piaget called this the cycle of assimilation and accommodation. You encounter something that doesn’t fit (disequilibrium). You feel the discomfort. You accommodate—you expand the structure. Then you assimilate the new information into the larger framework. Then you encounter the next thing that doesn’t fit.

In grief, that cycle is the engine. It’s why you can have the same realization five times, each time with a different weight. You aren’t just going in circles; you’re spiraling inward, each pass integrating a piece of reality that was previously too large to hold.

What the Loop Looks Like

The process has four phases, but they don’t occur in a straight line. They recur:

· Resistance. You fight reality. Blame, distraction, intellectualization—anything to avoid the full weight of what’s true.

· Despair. The fight exhausts itself. Hope for a different reality collapses. You feel the loss of the story you’d been holding as truth.

· Acceptance. The argument with reality stops. Not resignation—just an end to the internal negotiation. “This is what happened.”

· Accountability. From acceptance, response‑ability emerges. Not performative guilt, but a clean: “Given what happened, what’s next?”

You will loop through (non-linearity) these phases. You will reach a moment of acceptance, then encounter a deeper layer of truth that’s bigger than the current version of you can handle and find yourself back in resistance. That’s actually progress. That’s life experience. That’s maturity. That’s the literal engine of growth.

Each time you re‑exit despair, you’ll be holding a slightly larger truth. Your container has grown because you have. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, we do have to enter despair first, before we can re-exit each time. But, If I find a work around to avoid the nose dive into despair, I promise I’ll let you know. It’s not fun for any of us no matter how many times we do it.

Why it Helps

Even if you already know grief well and you know that grief isn’t linear, if you’re anything like me you’ll still have a tendency to interpret the oscillation back n forth as failure to learn the lesson fast enough. You’ll think you’re stuck slow or stupid. You’ll reach for distractions or shortcuts or beat yourself up for somehow taking too long.

But if you understand the architecture, you can more easily trust the spiral. The despair that returns isn’t a sign you’ve failed; it’s an invitation that your heart is actually ready to heal a little deeper; by expanding you and your world a little further.

There is no way through grief that avoids despair.

It just somehow makes it a little easier for me knowing the non-linearity isn’t a bug, it’s actually the engine driving the whole thing.

 It’s the emergent reality born of the fact that we can only comprehend a small deviation from our current understanding of the world.

It’s the mechanism by which a version of you too small to hold the truth, grows large enough to contain galaxies.

This is what it means to grieve honestly: you stay with the discomfort long enough for it to exhaust collapse and eventually expand you. You let the old story die, over and over, until the only story left is one that can hold everything you’ve lived.