Grief is often imagined as something obvious: tears, sadness, longing, a period of mourning that eventually resolves. Yet many people carry grief without ever identifying it as such. Instead of sadness, they feel tense, irritated, or numb, disguising the pain that lies underneath.
This misidentification stems from the fact that grief isn’t just limited to the experience of losing a loved one. It can also arise from the loss of a relationship through rupture or separation, the loss of a hoped-for future, even the loss of identity following illness, trauma, or major life transition. When these losses are ambiguous, minimized, or unsupported, grief can remain unnamed. And when grief can’t be felt directly—because it’s too painful, too destabilizing, or too isolating—it frequently finds expression through the body instead.
This often leads to subtle somatic signals that something meaningful has not yet been metabolized. The body is holding what the nervous system hasn’t felt safe enough to release. When we address these physical patterns, we can begin to find relief.
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Somatic Grief: How Loss Lives in the Body
Grief as a Nervous System Experience
From a somatic perspective, grief is both an emotional experience and a nervous system event. Loss disrupts our sense of safety, continuity, and connection, all of which are regulated through the autonomic nervous system. When something or someone essential disappears, the body responds as it would to threat: by mobilizing, bracing, or conserving energy.
When grief follows losses that are sudden, cumulative, or relationally complex, these survival states may persist long after the loss itself. The nervous system becomes organized around protection rather than restoration.
Because direct contact with grief can feel overwhelming, the nervous system often routes around it. Instead of sadness or longing, people may notice secondary emotions such as anxiety, irritability, anger, or shame. These emotions are not the grief itself—they are protective strategies that help regulate distance from pain that feels too destabilizing to feel all at once. In this way, secondary emotions and protective responses serve a function: they organize the system around survival when grief feels intolerable.
Grief in the Body
While this organization can look different for each person, here are some common themes when working with grief held in the body:
- Chronic activation: hypervigilance, muscle tension, shallow breathing, persistent bracing, difficulty relaxing
- Shutdown or collapse: low energy, emotional flatness, heaviness in the body, difficulty initiating movement or action
- Freeze responses: feeling stuck or immobilized, indecision, numbness, a sense of being unable to move forward
- Agitation without relief: restlessness, pacing, irritability, an urge to stay busy without feeling settled
- Disrupted internal rhythms: sleep disturbance, appetite changes, digestive discomfort, headaches or body aches
- Chronic activation: hypervigilance, muscle tension, shallow breathing, persistent bracing, difficulty relaxing
These patterns aren’t just signs of dysfunction. They often reflect the nervous system’s ongoing attempt to manage loss that has not yet had enough safety, support, or time to complete.
Listening & Processing
The complex ways in which grief is held mean it can’t be shifted through cognitive insight alone. Often, grief softens in waves, as the nervous system senses enough safety to release what was previously held in place.
Rather than asking the system to “go there,” somatic work emphasizes tracking what is already present—sensations, impulses, shifts in energy—and staying within a tolerable range. When the nervous system is met with curiosity instead of pressure, it begins to trust that it doesn’t have to brace against what’s coming next.
Without guidance, attempts to process grief can unintentionally overwhelm the system, leading to emotional flooding, shutdown, or renewed bracing. What supports healing instead is pacing: allowing grief to emerge in fragments that can be integrated, rather than insisting on full emotional access before the body is ready.
Why Support Matters
Grief is not meant to be carried alone. Ancestral practices and wisdom from cultures around the world promote a shared approach to mourning and grief resolution. By offering a steady, co-regulating presence, we help the body stay oriented to safety while approaching painful material. Without that support, the system may either avoid grief altogether or become overwhelmed by it.
With attuned guidance, it becomes possible to track activation as it arises, notice when the system needs more containment, and prevent re-entering states of overwhelm or shutdown. Rather than forcing expression, the focus shifts to integration—allowing grief to move in manageable increments, at a speed the nervous system can sustain.
Learning to work with grief in this way restores choice. It creates space for what has been held back to emerge gradually, without destabilizing the system that learned to protect itself for good reason.
When Protection Softens
As conditions shift, the body begins to release what it no longer has to hold alone. This release may be quiet or subtle. It may come in waves. What matters is not how quickly grief resolves, but that it is met with curiosity, respect, and care.
When we learn to listen to the body’s signals—and honor their timing—we can begin to appreciate the nervous system for its protection. From there, healing becomes less about pushing through pain, and more about restoring choice, presence, and authentic joy.
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