The Research Behind All of It
Ten sources, named so you can check them yourself. Afterglow is not a clinic, and nothing here is medical advice, but nothing here is invented either.
Grief has been studied seriously for decades, and most of what actually helps was worked out by researchers who spent years following real bereaved people, not by anyone selling a five-step programme. These are ten of the sources behind the way Afterglow talks about grief. Each one is named in full, so you do not have to take our word for any of it.
1. Mary-Frances O'Connor, on grief as a kind of learning
O'Connor, M.-F. (2022). The Grieving Brain. HarperOne. See also O'Connor & Seeley (2022), Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 317–322, and O'Connor (2019), Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(8), 731–738.
O'Connor studies what grief actually does inside the brain. Her research suggests the brain builds an internal map that expects a loved one to still be reachable, so part of grief is the slow work of updating that map to a truth the rest of you already knows. That mismatch, between what the brain still expects and what is actually true, can explain why grief comes in waves rather than a straight line, and why it looks more like learning over time than moving through a checklist.
2. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, on the swing between facing it and living life
Stroebe, M. S., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. Updated in Stroebe & Schut (2010), Omega, 61(4), 273–289.
Stroebe and Schut found that healthy grieving is not one steady descent and recovery. People naturally swing between facing the loss directly, thinking about the person, feeling the pain, and turning towards ordinary life: handling tasks, taking a break from grief, even laughing. Their research suggests that this back and forth is what coping actually looks like, not a sign that someone is avoiding their grief.
3. George Bonanno, on how many people are more resilient than expected
Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience. American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. See also Bonanno (2009), The Other Side of Sadness, Basic Books.
Bonanno followed large groups of bereaved people over time and found that most are more resilient than they are given credit for. A lot of people function reasonably well fairly soon after a loss, and that is not denial, and it is not a sign that they loved less. His research pushed back on the idea that there is one right way, or one right pace, for grief to unfold.
4. Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, on staying connected
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis.
This collection challenged the older idea that healthy grieving means letting go of the person who died. It brought together research showing that maintaining a bond with someone who has died, talking to them, feeling their presence, carrying their values forward, is a normal and often comforting part of grief, not a sign that someone is stuck.
5. Holly Prigerson and colleagues, on naming when grief needs professional support
Prigerson, H. G., et al. (2009). Prolonged grief disorder: Psychometric validation of criteria proposed for DSM-V and ICD-11. PLoS Medicine, 6(8), e1000121.
This study helped researchers describe when grief crosses into something that benefits from clinical support: intense, disabling grief that has not eased even many months after a loss. Work like this helped build the case for Prolonged Grief Disorder as a recognised diagnosis, which the World Health Organization added to ICD-11 and the American Psychiatric Association added to DSM-5-TR, so people struggling this way can be recognised and treated rather than told to wait it out.
6. M. Katherine Shear and colleagues, on a therapy built specifically for grief
Shear, K., Frank, E., Houck, P. R., & Reynolds, C. F. (2005). Treatment of complicated grief: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 293(21), 2601–2608.
This trial tested a therapy designed specifically for grief that was not easing on its own, against a well-established standard treatment. The grief-specific therapy helped more people, and helped them faster, which gave clinicians real evidence that targeted grief treatment works, and that struggling this way is treatable rather than something to push through alone.
7. J. William Worden, on grieving as active work rather than a feeling that happens to you
Worden, J. W. (2018). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner (5th ed.). Springer.
Worden's model describes grieving as work made up of four tasks: accepting that the loss is real, working through the pain of it, adjusting to a life that has to include the loss, and finding a lasting way to stay connected to the person while still moving forward. Unlike a stage model, these do not have to happen in order, and the framework has shaped how grief counsellors are trained for decades.
8. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and why the "five stages" get misread
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan. See also Stroebe, Schut & Boerner (2017), Omega, 74(4), 455–473.
Kübler-Ross’s original work described five reactions, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, that she observed in people who were dying, not in people grieving a loss. She never meant them as a fixed order everyone must pass through. Later researchers, including Stroebe and Schut, have shown there is no good evidence that grief moves through set stages in sequence, and that treating the five stages as a checklist can make a grieving person feel like they are doing it wrong when they are not.
9. James Pennebaker, on writing it down
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
Pennebaker found that writing honestly about a difficult or painful experience, even across just a few short sessions, can measurably help people process it: easing emotional distress, and showing benefits for physical health too. The effects are modest, and smaller in studies of bereaved people specifically, so it is worth trying rather than counting on. It is part of why putting grief into words, even privately and for nobody else to read, can feel like it lightens something.
10. Joseph Currier, Robert Neimeyer and Jeffrey Berman, on whether grief therapy actually helps
Currier, J. M., Neimeyer, R. A., & Berman, J. S. (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons. Psychological Bulletin, 134(5), 648–661.
This review pooled results from dozens of studies on grief counselling and therapy to ask a simple question: does it help? The honest answer is nuanced. Support tends to help most clearly for people whose grief is especially intense or complicated, rather than being something everybody automatically needs, which is useful to know when deciding whether to reach for extra help or lean on the support already around you.
A note on all ten
Research on grief describes patterns across large groups of people, not a verdict on any one person’s grief. None of these findings mean your own grief is wrong if it does not fit the pattern. If what you are carrying has stayed unbearable for a long stretch, that is worth treating as information rather than a personal failure. See Where to Get Real Help for what that can look like.