The Grief That Won’t Move

What the Research Actually Shows

Start with the number, because it does two useful things at once: it tells you that grief lasting past a year is real, and it tells you that it is not where most people land. When researchers gathered every sound study they could find and pooled fourteen of them, the rate of prolonged grief — grief that stays intense, disabling and largely unchanged well beyond the first year — came out at 9.8%, roughly one bereaved person in ten (Lundorff et al., 2017). Hold both halves of that. If your grief is still loud a year on, you are not broken and you are not alone; there is a recognised pattern here, now formally described as prolonged grief disorder. And nine in ten people do move through it, which means the more useful question is not what is wrong with me but what helps grief move when it has stalled.

On that question the evidence is unusually consistent, and it points somewhere counterintuitive. The thing that most reliably keeps grief stuck is the very strategy our culture recommends most: staying busy, keeping strong, not dwelling. In a study of bereaved adults, researchers found that rumination — going over the loss in an anxious, circular way — deepened and prolonged grief precisely because it was paired with avoidance: suppressing the feeling, steering around the reminders, filling the day so there was no room to actually feel it (Eisma et al., 2013). The grief did not stay because the person felt it too much. It stayed because it was never allowed all the way in. Avoidance is not the absence of grief; it is grief held at arm’s length, indefinitely, where it cannot complete.

If avoidance is what stalls grief, then what moves it is the opposite — giving the feeling somewhere to go that isn’t only the mind. Here the research turns toward the body, and specifically toward the voice. In a controlled study, adults bereaved by cancer joined a weekly choir for twelve weeks while a comparison group did not. Over the following months the singers’ symptoms of depression stayed stable and their sense of wellbeing and self-esteem gradually rose; the group that did not sing drifted the other way, with depression climbing and wellbeing falling (Fancourt et al., 2019). The researchers were careful not to overclaim — this was singing together, not a cure — but the direction is telling. Grief given a voice, in company, did not overwhelm people. It steadied them.

What Perukua Says About Grief That Stays

Perukua — the Australian vocalist and women’s facilitator whose sound work has reached women in more than 63 countries — came to this understanding the hard way, through her own body, long before she could explain it. After a period of severe pain she went to live alone at the edge of a forest, and something began to surface that she had no words for. “I started going into the forest every day,” she recounts, “and sounds began to rise up out of me — terrible sounds, very unpleasant. And at the same time the vibration of those sounds seemed to clean the horror out of me” (interview). She is describing exactly what the avoidance research describes from the outside: something that had been held in the body, unmoving, finally being given a way out — not by thinking about it, but by sounding it.

She has a plain image for how this works. The body, in her account, has places that hold what we could not release — the throat, the heart, the belly — and the voice is what shakes them loose. “When these vibrations are activated,” Perukua reports, “they help — like beating a rug — to bring out all the dust, everything that got stuck in there. Otherwise a woman lives numbed, as if she cannot quite feel her life.” That last line is the one to keep. Numbness, in her telling, is not the absence of grief. It is grief that has been packed down so hard the person can no longer feel much of anything — the flat, colourless state that so often arrives when sorrow has been carried too long with no way out.

And she has watched what happens when the outlet finally opens. She tells of a woman who had lost the ability to cry at all. “She could not weep,” Perukua recounts. “And when I did this heart-opening for her, she wept for a full hour in my arms. It changed her deeply” (interview). Note what the woman needed. Not advice, not a reframe, not more time — a permission and a doorway. This is the heart of Perukua’s work with grief: “We need our voice to release the emotional body,” she says. “When a woman has suppressed it, or gone so far up into her mind — running, running, running all day — she loses the connection. So we work with the voice, to release everything she carries within her but cannot say.” If you want to learn to open that doorway gently and safely, that is the subject of her course, Grief.

Why Grief Lodges in the Body — and How to Tell It From Depression

Put the science and Perukua’s account side by side and they describe the same mechanism in two languages. Grief is not only an idea about someone who is gone; it is an energy that arrives in the body — the tight throat, the heaviness in the chest, the ache with no location. When circumstances don’t allow the feeling to move — because you had to be strong for everyone else, because there was no safe place to fall apart, because the culture prizes composure — the feeling doesn’t disappear. It gets held. The research calls this experiential avoidance and links it to grief that persists. Perukua calls it dust caught in a rug, or a woman who has forgotten how to cry. Both are pointing at the same thing: an emotion that needed a way out and was never given one, still waiting, a year or ten years later, in the body that kept it.

This is also why grief so often lives in the throat and comes out as sound — why the sob, the wail, the cracked voice are grief’s native language across almost every culture on earth. Long before there were grief counsellors there were keening women, wailing traditions, laments sung at gravesides — whole cultures that understood, without needing a study, that grief has to be voiced to move. The modern instruction to grieve quietly and get back to work is the historical exception, not the rule. When we swallow the sound, we don’t skip the grief. We store it.

One honest distinction has to sit here, because giving grief a voice is not a treatment for everything that can look like grief. Grief, even prolonged grief, moves — it comes in waves, it is about the person and the loss, and between the waves you can still be reached by a kind hour, a friend, a piece of music. Depression is flatter and more total: it drains colour from things unrelated to your loss, turns the inner voice against you, disrupts sleep and appetite, and does not lift when something good happens. Perukua is an artist and a facilitator, not a doctor, and an article is not a diagnosis. If your grief has stayed intense and disabling for more than a year, or if low mood and hopelessness have sat for weeks and will not move, or if you have thoughts that life is not worth living, that is the point to bring it to a doctor or a grief professional — prolonged grief disorder and depression both respond to real support. Telling grief apart from depression is not weakness. It is the most useful thing you can do for yourself in the sorrow.

A Practice for Grief That Won’t Move

The instinct with grief that has outstayed its welcome is to try harder to be over it — more distraction, more productivity, more determined cheerfulness. If the research is right, that is the move that keeps it in place. This practice does the opposite. It gives the grief a small, contained, regular way out through the one instrument grief has always used: the voice.

Choose a private place and, if it helps, a private time — the car, the shower, a room where no one will hear. For the next week or two, keep one short appointment with your grief every day: ten minutes, no phone. First, let the body have the feeling — put one hand on your chest and one low on your belly, breathe down into the belly until it moves, and simply notice what is there without arguing with it. Then give it a sound. Not words — a sound. Start with a low hum on a long out-breath, four or five times, until you feel it in your chest and throat. If something wants to get louder — a sigh that turns into a groan, a sound that turns into tears — let it. This is the oldest grief practice there is, and you are allowed to do it. Tears are not the grief going wrong; they are the grief moving. Afterward, sit for a moment in the quiet that follows, which is often the first real quiet in a long time. Do this daily and watch whether the grief, given somewhere to go, begins to change — not vanish, but move. If you would like this held in a structured, gentle container rather than done alone, Perukua built her course Grief for exactly this — learning to let sorrow pass through the body and the voice instead of lodging in them.

In Closing

We tell the bereaved to be strong, to keep busy, to be over it by now — and then wonder why the grief won’t move. The research quietly overturns the advice: grief stalls not when we feel it, but when we hold it at arm’s length; and it eases, for most people, when it is finally given somewhere to go. Perukua learned this at the edge of a forest, when the sounds that rose out of her carried away a horror she could not think her way out of. Your grief a year later is not proof that something is wrong with you. It may simply be an emotion that has been waiting, patiently, in the body that kept it — waiting for the oldest permission there is: to be given a voice, and let move.

This piece touches on grief, depression and loss. If you are struggling badly, please reach out to a doctor or a grief professional — and if you ever have thoughts that life is not worth living, contact a local crisis line or emergency services. Support helps, and you do not have to carry this alone.

References & Quote Sources

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