There’s no “right way” to handle this.

By Patia Braithwaite

In 2008 Anne Pinkerton, 46, learned her big brother died during a rock-climbing accident. She was overwhelmed by the suddenness of it all. David, who was 12 years his sister’s senior, was a radiologist with a passion for the outdoors, Pinkerton tells SELF. He died “in the prime of his life while doing some of his most rigorous athletic work,” she says. Pinkerton had never thought of David as anything other than healthy and now she had to make sense of his death.

“It seemed unreal for a long time,” says Pinkerton, who regularly writes about grief. She remembers her persistent thoughts that David would eventually get in touch with her, that his absence couldn’t be permanent. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he was just away on a trip, she says.

“A lot of that first year was just really trying to process the fact that he was gone,” Pinkerton explains. “It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that I was going to live the rest of my life without my big brother.”

Having had the expectation that she’d grow old with David, Pinkerton’s grief included feelings of sadness, abandonment, and a bit of anger. But there was also the sense that her grief was inappropriate, she says: “Being a sibling and losing a sibling was so unbelievably painful, [but] people were not treating me as though I had experienced something huge.” This isolation “was a big part of what took me back to counseling,” Pinkerton says. “I had thoughts like, ‘Is there something wrong with me? Am I dealing with this inappropriately?’ Because [people were] acting like this shouldn’t be a big deal. And it was the biggest thing that ever happened to me.”

As awful as it feels, grief is a natural human response to losing someone close to you. The intense emotions that come with grief can all be an appropriate part of eventually helping you heal as much as possible. But there are times when grief is even more overwhelming than usual—times when it hinders your life and happiness long-term. But when losing someone has thrown your world off its axis, how can you tell what’s normal and what’s not? Here’s what you need to know about the typical grieving process, the phenomenon of “complicated” grief, and when to see someone like a therapist about your grieving process.

Grief isn’t linear, but it should soften with time.

“Grief doesn’t really go away,” M. Katherine Shear, M.D., director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, tells SELF. But most people will eventually get to a point where “the feelings won’t have center stage the way they do in the beginning,” Dr. Shear says.

With that in mind, grief researchers have started to move beyond the Kübler-Ross grief stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to acknowledge what you’re probably feeling after a loss: Grief is chaotic and the stages are often more scrambled than straightforward.

So instead of neatly labeled stages, the Center for Complicated Grief categorizes the typical grief trajectory as having an acute phase and an integrated phase. The acute phase occurs shortly after a loved one’s death and includes the intense feelings we often associate with grieving, like sadness, yearning, guilt, anger, anxiety, numbness, wishful thinking, and more.

During the acute phase of grief, activities like eating, walking your dog, smiling, and getting out of bed probably seem like major victories. They are. “Even if you’re just going through the motions at first, doing your routines and daily responsibilities is a good sign” that you might be working through your grief, Rachel L. Goldman, Ph.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, tells SELF.

The integrated grief phase is a more long-lasting form of grief where you acknowledge the loss, but it now has a place in your life without taking over it. You’ll still have bad days, but in most cases you’ll start to have more OK days and even happy ones too.

“What softens grief is making progress in adapting to the loss,” Dr. Shear says. “And adapting to all the changes that come along with the loss of someone close.”

The general expectation is that during the first year of grief, you will start to move away from the acute phase toward the integrated one.

“You’re going to feel sad, but ideally you’re also starting to regain your own sense of well-being,” Dr. Shear says. “And hopefully you’re starting to see pathways forward in your life that have some potential for joy, satisfaction, and continued purpose.”

But if the pain you’re feeling doesn’t seem to be softening as time passes or if it’s even getting deeper, you may be dealing with complicated grief, which is a diagnosable medical condition that can often be treated.

Complicated grief happens when these emotions don’t subside as expected with time.

This essentially means that your acute grief is sticking around longer than it should, preventing you from learning how to live while managing your loss.

A lot is still unknown about this condition. For starters, medical professionals don’t have a clear consensus on exactly when grief becomes complicated, the Mayo Clinic says.

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a resource that U.S. health care professionals use to diagnose mental health issues, this condition is known as persistent complex bereavement disorder (PCBD). The DSM-5 defines it as a “severe and persistent grief and mourning reaction” that must still be around at least 12 months post-loss in order to be diagnosed.

However, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the diagnostic resource released by the World Health Organization, calls this phenomenon prolonged grief disorder, defining it as a “persistent and pervasive grief response characterized by a longing for the deceased or persistent preoccupation with the deceased accompanied by intense emotional pain.” Experiencing this kind of grief at least six months after the loss is a core ICD diagnostic criterion for prolonged grief disorder.

Though there’s some debate about how long someone needs to grieve in order for it to be considered complicated, one thing’s clear: If the grief is so severe it’s negatively impacting a person’s life in a major way, it may be more serious than typical grief. The DSM-5 lists symptoms like feeling as though life is meaningless after the loss, a preoccupation with the person who’s gone and the circumstances of their death, and loneliness. The ICD lists symptoms such as feeling you’ve lost a part of yourself and an inability to feel happy. (There’s a lot of symptom overlap between the two lists of diagnostic criteria.)

A lot of these symptoms are actually normal early in the grieving process. For instance an inability to stop counterfactual thinking—concocting alternatives to events that have already happened—is to be expected at first, Dr. Shear says. It’s natural to think, If only I had done this one thing differently, maybe the person I love would still be here. But if those thoughts become the focus of your thinking for a prolonged period after the loss, it could prevent you from integrating grief into life. Excessive avoidance is another example. It’s reasonable to avoid specific places or things that remind you of your loss early on in the grief process, but if it persists it might be a sign that you could benefit from support to help you move forward, Dr. Shear explains.

There aren’t firm numbers for how many people are impacted by complicated grief. The Center for Complicated Grief estimates that around 10 to 15 percent of people who have suffered a loss may be dealing with this condition. No one knows why a minority of people develop complicated grief while others don’t, Dr. Shear says. But there are risk factors that might make you more prone to it, like a history of depression, separation anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, or a personal history of abuse or neglect, according to the Mayo Clinic. If the person you lost died unexpectedly or violently, that’s another risk factor, as are circumstances such as the death of a child, social isolation, and life stressors like money troubles.

To make things more confusing, complicated grief is often misdiagnosed as depression, according to the Center for Complicated Grief. One way to tell the difference is that complicated grief is characterized by yearning and overwhelming thoughts about the person you lost, while depression can feel like more of a sadness or loss of pleasure that blankets your life but isn’t centered so much on a death. Of course it’s possible to have both complicated grief and depression too.

Consider seeking mental health support if your grief feels all-consuming.

Pinkerton says that she was comfortable getting a therapist after her brother’s death because she’d been in therapy before. But if you haven’t been in therapy, it can be hard to pinpoint whether or not you could benefit from some extra support.

No matter where you think you might be on the grief continuum, Goldman suggests seeking support from someone like a doctor or mental health professional when you feel you have “reached the end of your personal coping mechanisms.”

Instead of focusing solely on the timeline, try to examine the intensity of your grief. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. If your grief feels utterly overwhelming, that’s reason enough to reach out. You don’t need to think you might have complicated grief in order to deserve help.

“I don’t think it’s ever too soon to see a provider,” Goldman says. “Worst-case scenario, a therapist says, ‘This is a completely normal reaction. I would also feel sad. I would also cry.’ And that is therapeutic and powerful for someone to hear.”

If you do see a therapist within the first few months of your loss, they might tell you that you have an adjustment disorder, which can occur when you’re having trouble coping with a big life transition, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“An adjustment disorder is a way we classify anybody that has had a major stressor in their life and has [mental health-related] symptoms following that stressor,” Goldman says.

The death of someone close to you is a huge stressor that naturally can come with intense emotions and pretty significant life changes (like relocation, financial issues, and other logistical stuff). These changes and the loss itself might trigger some disorienting feelings, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with how you’re handling it all.

The important thing to note here is that adjustment disorders are typically short-term reactions to stressful life events. In most cases, talking through your experience with a therapist should help the adjustment disorder symptoms subside within six months, Goldman says. If your symptoms don’t subside and it turns out you may have complicated grief, you’ve already laid some groundwork with someone who may be able to help.

Experts typically treat complicated grief with something that’s (unsurprisingly) called complicated grief therapy, according to the Mayo Clinic. It involves techniques like retelling the circumstances of your loved one’s death in a guided format that might help you become less triggered by those thoughts or images. Ideally this treatment will help you explore your feelings in a way that allows you to better integrate your grief into your life. And if you have other health conditions such as depression you could benefit from talk therapy for that, along with medications like antidepressants, the Mayo Clinic says.

If you don’t feel compelled to see someone like a doctor or mental health professional right now, that’s OK. But support might be available through other avenues too, like the friends and family who might be desperate to help you or support groups for people who can relate.

“One of the most important things is to feel like someone else has actually been through this before and has lived to tell about it,” Pinkerton says. “If you can find other people who have experienced something similar, it’s incredibly empowering to realize that not only are you not an alien, you will survive.”

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