This content was created by Theresa Byrne. This content was uploaded by Theresa Byrne. This is a YouTube video titled "Grief Comes in Waves (Not Stages). Why the Process Isn’t Linear" (uploaded 2025-11-11). The excerpt is a single-speaker monologue/talk about grief, explaining that grieving is non-linear and comes in waves rather than sequential stages. The speaker broadens grief beyond bereavement to include loss of identity, jobs, relationships, dreams, and everyday losses (even keys), and emphasizes learning to ride the waves as part of coping.
Chapters
Let's talk about grief for a second. It's not a subject that most people like to feel, let alone talk about. And oftentimes we think that if we're grieving, it has to be like you grieve, you reach a point, and you're done. That is not how grief works. Grief is actually something that comes in waves. Maybe you realize suddenly that that person is gone, or maybe you suddenly realize something that reminds you of them, and it all starts over again. There's a great series or a great concept about grief, which is the different stages of grief. But that makes us think that we go through stage 1, stage 2. It's not linear. Grief is absolutely something that you might find just suddenly. It hits you. You see something on television or you hear a song or you have a smell and it reminds you of a situation that you don't have anymore, that you've lost, or a person that you've lost. Being able to understand that the grief The grief process happens in spiral, in waves, in— sometimes it's worse, sometimes it's better. And it's not just people that we lose that we grieve. It's parts of ourselves. It's the dreams that we had. It's the wish that we'd had that something had gone differently, and now it's gone. A friendship is gone. A relationship is gone. Or you've lost something. Oftentimes grief is a formation of something that we feel like we've lost or that's been taken from us. It's real. You can lose a job, you can lose an identity, you can lose your standing in your, in your head, you can lose a person, you can lose a relationship or a friendship, and those all— you can lose your keys! These all stimulate grief in some way, shape, or form, and being able to understand it and ride the waves is really what makes grief easier for any of us to deal with.
