Grief vs. Grieving: Why the Difference Matters

We often use the words grief and grieving interchangeably—but did you know they’re not quite the same?

In this thoughtful solo episode of Grief and Light, host Nina Rodriguez invites listeners into a powerful reframe: grief is the natural response to loss, but grieving is how we live with and in relation to our grief. With tenderness and clarity, Nina explores how understanding the distinction between these two terms can transform our experience with loss—softening unrealistic expectations, reducing pressure to "move on," and opening up a path toward self-compassion and emotional expansion.

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Drawing from her personal experiences and professional grief support work, Nina illustrates how grief is a universal, often involuntary response—raw, physical, and immediate—while grieving is a dynamic and deeply personal relationship with what’s missing. She emphasizes that grieving is not something to get over but something we tend to, like a garden or a living relationship, over time.

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This episode is a balm for anyone who’s ever asked themselves, “Why am I still like this?” and offers a more empowering, spacious question instead: “What kind of care do I need today?”

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Key Takeaways:

• Grief is the event—the natural response to loss and life-altering change.
• Grieving is the process—our evolving relationship with that loss over time.
• There is no timeline for grieving and no single "right" way to do it.
• Cultural, familial, and societal influences shape how we perceive grief.
• Grieving is a practice in patience and self-compassion, not perfection.
• Honoring your own process means also allowing others to move at their pace.
• The metaphor of the grief jar illustrates how our capacity expands—not that the grief shrinks.
• Tending to grief honestly is what brings meaning, integration, and even unexpected joy.

Mentioned in this episode: Grief vs. Grieving post

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Chapters

• 0:00 Preview & Intro song
• 0:44 Grief vs. Grieving: What's the difference?
• 7:45 The Nature of Grieving and Its Impact
• 9:42 Growing around grief
• 10:25 Understanding the difference

Transcript

Understanding that grief is the event and grieving is the process, we shift our perspective. We shift the point of view from which we're seeing our lives. And instead of saying, why is this happening? When is it going to go away? Instead of focusing our energy on those questions, we focus our energy on what kind of care do I need today? How can I show up for myself today? How can I support myself today? And we move forward with more ease and more compassion for ourselves and each other.

You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief in Life podcast where we explore this new reality through grief colored lenses. Openly, authentically, I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Grief in Life podcast. My name is Nina Rodriguez. I am your host. And today is a solo episode. So it's me and you in conversation. And I wanted to share something interesting that has come up, which is

We often confuse the word grief and grieving and we use them interchangeably. But did you know that they're not quite the same? This is something I explored in a recent post on social media and I found it so thought provoking and it reshaped a lot of how people think about their loss and how they're moving forward after loss that I wanted to also make a brief episode about it because I think it's valuable for discussion and for perspective.

perspective is everything when we're navigating, well, life really, but also grief. And I think it's really helpful to have these frameworks that help us see things in a different light that empowers us versus makes us feel like everything looking ahead is a loss, right? So what is grief? Grief is the natural response to loss and life altering change. It is a human normal natural response to loss. Grieving is the evolving

process, conscious or not, of integrating that loss into our lives. It's the evolving relationship with what or who we've lost. It's dynamic. It changes with time, with support, and with space to tend. So in other words, grief is a universal experience where grieving is a very personal experience and it varies for everybody. Everybody grieves, but not everybody grieves the same. I'm sure you've heard that before.

Understanding the difference can sometimes soften the pressure to get over it and instead offer us room to get through it with gentleness, self-compassion, and by showing ourselves grace. Whether we realize it or not, a lot of the ways that we initially navigate grief has a lot to do with what we've been taught consciously or not about what grief is and how we're supposed to move through it. In the past, there was this whole

what is it, keep calm and carry on type of mindset or shove it down your throat or nobody has time for tears, that don't express, get over it and move on, the less you talk about it, the better. That was more of the standard and that has shifted with time and as we get to know more about how grief actually works, what it actually is and how to navigate it. So understanding that our culture, our grief biases, our...

biases, me, our belief systems, religious or spiritual beliefs, family dynamics, media and more. Our culture at large essentially is constantly shaping how we grieve or how we're supposed to grieve and especially when you see it like in movies or documentaries as if this is supposed to happen. Well, yes, people pass away all the time and two things can be true at once, the loss reshapes us and it's worthy of being tended to. So.

The key to understand is that there is no timeline and there's no quote unquote right way to grieve. The only sort of wrong way to grieve would be to not do it at all. I recently shared this post on Instagram, which I will link in the show notes if you wanna go straight to it, where I break down the difference between grief and grieving and why this discussion matters and how it can help you navigate your own experience or if you're looking to support somebody else in theirs, it's also very useful. Knowing the difference,

can shift how we care for ourselves and each other. Grief arrives suddenly and grieving unfolds days, months, even decades later. Understanding this helps you reduce the pressure to move on and instead encourages us to create a space to move with. One reframe that I offer is that perhaps you're not stuck in grief.

You're in an ongoing relationship with your loss and like all relationships, things change and they evolve and you have the power to shape what that experience is like. It may not feel like it in the beginning, but over time you have the power to shape it. So grieving in time can bring meaning, memory, even unexpected beauty and joy, but only when we're allowed to feel and explore it honestly. And that's a key piece of the puzzle. It's being able to explore it honestly and authentically.

Think of grief like a river that just comes rushing down. doesn't care if you're ready. It doesn't wait for you to feel strong. It rises up and it sweeps you into a current that feels like it might never let go. Grief is the body blow, the heartbreak, the gut.

It's the empty seat at the table, the song that stops you mid-sentence, the smell that sends you spiraling, the aisle in the grocery store that makes you just break down, or those moments in the car when the tears start flowing out of nowhere. Grief is physical, it's spiritual, it's primal, it shows up in your skin, in your sleep, in your voice, in your memories. It's a very physical experience. When my brother passed, I remember my grandmother's skin broke out in hives and

Initially, we couldn't put it together as obvious as it may seem now looking at it in hindsight. In the moment, we couldn't put it together. We didn't understand why she was breaking out in hives until we understood the effect of grief on the body. Grief brain, grief is physical, and that was one of her symptoms. Grief is sometimes loud. Other times it's quiet or dull or a low hum that you carry everywhere, so it shifts.

Grief is the natural human unavoidable response to loss. It is not wrong or broken. It just is. You have very little, if any, control over how it shows up. It just is. That's why we say grief is not something to get over. It just shows up. It's how you naturally respond to loss and life altering change. Grieving, on the other hand, think of it as the raft. It's the part that comes after.

the river arrives. It's the learning, the building, the adjusting, the daily renegotiation. Grieving is how we live our life with grief. It's not something that we do once. It's not a checklist or a time process. It's our ongoing relationship with what's missing. And it looks different for everybody. For some, it's lighting a candle in the morning. For others, it looks like rage cleaning your kitchen or writing a notebook.

into a clock in the morning or canceling plans without explanation or just feeling like the world is not a place you recognize anymore. Some days grieving looks like a deep conversation or ugly crying and others it looks like you are laughing until your stomach hurts because your person would have found that so funny in that exact same moment. So think about grief as the fixed element, the unchangeable element and grieving is the dynamic element. So that's why we say

We tend to the pain of grief and we adjust the suffering of loss. The grieving part is the part that is sort of under our control. It's nonlinear, it requires patience. Even when you just want a shortcut and you want to get it over with, it still requires patience. Think about the way that nature works. Nature takes its time to do anything and yet it gets everything done in its own timing. So grief is very much like that, it goes on its own timing.

Nature has events where it rushes, like a sudden eruption or an earthquake. When nature rushes, it causes destruction. It causes even more unwanted ripple effects. In a similar way, when we try to rush through a lot of these processes, they're not done changing what needs to be changed within us or in our lives, and it doesn't give us the time to adapt to what we need to adapt to. So,

understanding fundamentally that grieving is going to take time and that it's going to change over time and it's gonna look different over time, not assigning it a sense of permanency in the moment. So first year grief looks very different than third year grief, than fifth year grief, let's say, or longer. And just understanding that it's going to change, you're not going to feel like this forever. But deeply understanding that it is a normal

I shouldn't say but I should say and deeply understanding that it's a normal part of the process can help us soften into that understanding and help us gain perspective on how patient we need to be for ourselves, with ourselves and for ourselves and each other. The more we try to avoid this, the more it shows up in other forms in our lives. It could be sadness, it could be rage, it could be low tolerance, it could be resentment.

It could be so many other things, but underneath those feelings is grief. And grieving is the way to move through it, with it, and forward. You may have seen one of those memes where there's a ball and jar and the ball has very little room to move. And then the second image is a bigger jar. Then the third image is the bigger jar. The ball stays the same size, but the jar grows. And in a similar way, our lives grow around our grief.

The grieving process helps us expand that capacity and make our emotional jar, if you will, bigger. It's not that the grief shrinks, it's that our capacity expands. We learn to carry it differently. It becomes a part of our inner landscape. It's less like a wound and more like a scar that tingles a little bit when the weather shifts. There's a reminder of what happened and that's grief over time. Understanding that grief is the event and grieving is the process.

helps us to stop asking questions like, why am I still like this? And instead ask, what kind of care do I need today? We shift our perspective. We shift the point of view from which we're seeing our lives. And instead of saying, why is this happening? When is it gonna go away? Why is this so unfair? Instead of focusing our energy on those questions, we focus our energy on what kind of care do I need today?

How can I show up for myself today? How can I support myself today? And we move forward with more ease and more compassion for ourselves and each other. For whatever it's worth, this is a friendly reminder that you're not too sensitive, you're not taking too long, and you're not doing it wrong. You are grieving. That's allowed to take time, and it's going to be on your time. Even in family systems, everybody grieves differently. So mom, dad, brother, sister, spouse, children,

are all going to have their own timing. And sometimes we feel like we're making headway and we get concerned about our loved ones because from our perspective, it might seem like they're falling behind. Trust their timing as well and surrender that need to control everybody else's timing. Focus on your own. Like anything in life, we think we have control of other people and other situations, but the control is really when we focus it on ourselves. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our feelings. We're responsible for how we move forward.

We can support others when they're open to it. We can show them the way, but we can never force somebody to walk down that path. Even if we do somehow, they will not get what you think they will get out of it. So if you feel like a family member, your mother, your sister, your son, daughter, aunt, uncle, whoever is not grieving correctly, quote unquote, right? I'm using your quotes here. Just understand that they have their own process. Focus more on yours, understand.

your dynamics, your timing, and honor everybody else's as it is for them. I'll leave you with some food for thought. Are there parts of your grief that you've tried to outrun or silence?

Think about it. Are there parts of your grief that you have tried to outrun or silence or ignore? What if you saw grieving as a relationship to tend to, not a problem to solve? What if you saw grieving as a relationship to tend to, not a problem to solve? How would that shift things for you, even energetically within yourself? So I'll leave you with those questions for you to ponder. And if you want extra support, if you want a place

of witnessing. If you want more resources, more tools, you're always welcome to join the community by Grief and Light. I will link it in the show notes as well. It is a space where I share resources and it is a dedicated space for grievers to show up honestly. You can access it anytime, anywhere. And if you want more personalized support, you are welcome to sign on to my one-on-one coaching sessions at griefandlight.com/heart-to-heart I will

also link that in the show notes, or you could just go to griefandlight.com and everything's there. Thank you for being here. This was a short and sweet episode. To give you some perspective, I've shared more posts like this on social media, and I think it's worthy of amplifying the message because it shifts the conversation around loss for ourselves and each other. And so if you got something out of this, I would love to hear from you. You can message me at griefandlight on Instagram, actually any social media platform. I also have resting grief face on the sub stack.

and I will also link that in the show notes. My goal is to continue educating and shifting the narrative around grief and how we move forward because it is truly braided and intertwined into the fabric of our lives and we rarely recognize it. We're just now starting to collectively recognize it, how it impacts everything and how to navigate through it. So the more we shed a light on these conversations, the more that they soften something within, the better we help each other and ourselves move forward in life.

I hope this was helpful. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you. And I'll see you in the next episode.

You are not alone.