The Different Faces of Grief

By Kristina Vande Vrede, PsyD | Clinical Psychologist & Director, Waypoint Psychological Services
 

I want to start with something that might surprise you: not all grief looks the same, and not all of it announces itself clearly.
 

I remember the day I didn't match for residency. If you've never been through the Match — the high-stakes process by which psychology doctoral students find out where they'll complete their training — it's difficult to convey what it feels like when your name isn't on the list. Years of work, a carefully constructed identity, a very specific vision of what your future looks like. Gone, in a moment. I remember thinking: this is it. This is where it ends. It felt, in every way that mattered, like a loss.
 

It wasn't, of course… or rather, it was… but it was also something else. I matched in the second round at a site I hadn't seriously considered the first time around. It turned out to be nearly perfect: the location, the specialty fit, the professional relationships I built there that I'm still drawing on today. The loss cracked something open, and what grew in that space was better than what I had planned.
 

I tell that story not to minimize grief, but to say something true about it: grief is the price of attachment. We grieve what we love, what we wanted, what we planned for -and sometimes, what we never even got the chance to have.
 

The Grief That Has No Roadmap

The hardest grief I encounter in my clinical work is perinatal loss — the death of a baby through stillbirth or infant loss. I am a PMH-C, a certified perinatal mental health specialist, and this work is some of the most sacred and demanding I do.
 

When a grandparent dies after a long life, there is a kind of narrative available to the people left behind. It is devastating, but it is, in some sense, comprehensible. A life was lived. There is a shape to it.
 

The death of a baby before it has lived a single day outside the womb offers no such narrative. There is no shape. There is only the impossible task of making meaning out of something that resists meaning entirely. Parents are left holding a grief that the people around them often don't know how to acknowledge — because our culture has very little language for babies who die. Friends say the wrong things, or say nothing. Well-meaning relatives suggest it's time to "try again," as if a new pregnancy could simply replace what was lost. And the parents sit alone with a grief that has no funeral traditions built around it, no bereavement leave that matches its weight, no clean social script.
 

What I've learned from sitting with these families is that grief does not need to be resolved to be survived. The goal is not to move on. It is to learn how to carry the loss, and slowly, over time, to build a life that holds both the grief and the living.
 

What Grief Actually Looks Like

Part of what makes grief so disorienting is that it rarely looks the way we expect. We anticipate sadness, and sadness comes -but so does anger, numbness, guilt, anxiety, and a strange flatness where nothing feels quite real. Grief can show up weeks or months after a loss, long after the people around you have assumed you're fine. It can be triggered by a song, a smell, a due date on a calendar, or an Internship Match email.
 

It does not follow a timeline. It does not move in stages, despite what you may have heard. And it cannot be rushed.
 

What grief therapy offers is not a shortcut through the pain. It is a steady, structured space to do the work that grief requires — processing the emotions that feel too big to hold alone, sitting with the questions that don't have easy answers, and slowly, carefully, rebuilding a sense of self and meaning on the other side of loss.
 

In my work with grieving clients, that often means helping them name what they've actually lost — which is sometimes more layered than it first appears. It means working through guilt and regret, navigating the social terrain of other people's discomfort, and learning to distinguish between moving on (which implies leaving something behind) and moving forward (which means carrying it with you differently).
 

You Don't Have to Wait Until It's Unbearable

One of the most common things I hear from people who finally come to therapy is some version of: I didn't think it was bad enough to get help. They waited until they couldn't sleep, couldn't work, couldn't get through a conversation without unraveling. They spent months telling themselves they should be handling it better.
 

You don't have to wait that long. Grief therapy is not a last resort — it is a resource, and reaching out early is not a sign of weakness. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that keeps grief from compounding into something more entrenched.
 

If your loss is affecting your sleep, your relationships, your ability to function at work, or simply your sense that life still has meaning, that is enough. You are allowed to ask for support before things feel unbearable.

At Waypoint Psychological Services, we provide grief and loss therapy for individuals navigating loss of all kinds — including perinatal loss, relationship endings, career transitions, and the death of loved ones. If something in this post resonates with what you're carrying, we'd welcome the conversation. Reach out to schedule a consultation, or call our Waldwick, NJ office at (201) 427-0720.