Grief does not move in a straight line.
It moves in waves.
You can feel steady for hours, even days.
You manage conversations. You complete tasks. There is a sense, however fragile, that you are finding your footing again.
And then something shifts.
A scent passes you in the street.
A song plays unexpectedly.
The light falls in a familiar way across a room.
And suddenly, it hits with full force.
Not gently. Not gradually.
But all at once.
This unpredictability can feel deeply destabilising.
As if something inside you is unreliable.
As if you are moving backwards rather than forward.
But what feels chaotic is, in fact, the brain working through one of the most complex forms of learning it will ever encounter.
The brain does not lose the person immediately, it holds on to learned “mapping” for a long time.
When we love someone, the brain builds what neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor describes as a three-dimensional attachment map.
This map is not metaphorical. It is functional.
It encodes where the person is in space.
When and how you will see them again.
And the depth of your connection to them.
It allows you to move through life with an implicit sense of their presence.
You do not consciously think about it.
But your brain does.
When someone dies, this map does not disappear.
It updates slowly. Very slowly.
So the brain continues to operate as if the person is still part of your world.
It scans the environment for them.
It anticipates their presence.
It expects them to return.
Why small things can trigger intense waves
What we often call “triggers” are not random.
They are moments when something in the external world overlaps with this internal attachment map.
A voice that sounds similar.
A place you once shared.
A smell linked to a memory.
When this happens, the brain briefly activates the expectation that the person is still here.
Not as a distant thought, but as something felt.
This involves dopaminergic pathways associated with anticipation and seeking.
The brain reaches, in a very real sense, toward the person.
And then reality kicks in. They are not here anymore
This sudden mismatch between expectation and reality creates what is experienced as a wave of grief. And they are often unexpected and frankly quite brutal.
Grief is processed in fragments
At the same time, the brain is trying to process the emotional reality of the loss.
This is not a single event.
Lisa Shulman’s work in neurology shows that grief engages multiple systems at once: memory, emotion, and the body’s stress response.
These systems do not update simultaneously.
Which means the process unfolds in pieces.
For a brief moment, the brain operates from the old map.
Then it is confronted with the new reality.
This back-and-forth is what gives grief its wave-like nature.
Each wave is a small step in integrating a reality that the brain was never designed to accept quickly.
There is no instability here
What feels unpredictable is not dysfunction.
It is adaptation.
The brain is not breaking down.
It is attempting to reconcile two conflicting truths:
The deep, embodied expectation that your person exists,
and the reality that they do not.
This takes time.
Not linear time, but lived time.
Repeated moments of recognition, each one updating the internal map slightly.
A different way to meet the waves
The instinct is often to control the experience.
To push it away.
To make it stop.
But there is something quietly powerful in a different approach.
To recognise it.
“This is a wave.”
A simple sentence that introduces structure into what feels unstructured.
Naming the experience engages the prefrontal cortex, helping to regulate the emotional intensity just enough to stay present.
Not to remove the pain.
But to make it more navigable.
Over time, the waves do not necessarily disappear.
But they begin to feel more familiar.
Less like something that overtakes you,
and more like something you can move through.
Grief does not become linear.
But your relationship to it can change.
And that shift often begins with understanding what your brain is trying to do.
For those navigating intense and unpredictable grief responses, I’ve created a self-paced digital resource: Grief Triggers – The Ultimate Toolkit, designed to help you understand and regulate these moments as they arise.
“Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants. In that regard, grief has a lot in common with love.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert From a Facebook post after the death of her partner, Rayya Elias