Why Grief Is So Hard in Our Modern Culture

It’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again — after experiencing more than four decades of acute sorrow without any effective support, and in sitting with others who bring their aching hearts to my workshops and circles. The pain of grief itself is inevitable, but the pain of feeling shut down, unseen, and unsupported in it should not be.

Grief is not new. Our ancestors knew its rhythms. They wept together at gravesides, sang their sorrow by firelight, carried loss openly in ritual, and let grief have its rightful place in the village. They understood grief not as a private failure, but as a communal medicine — a necessary river that carried love through the generations and into every aspect of life.

But today, in our modern Western culture, grief often feels unbearable. It’s not because our losses are greater than those of the past. It’s because the container to hold grief has been broken.

Patriarchy severed us from land-based practices that once wove grief into the cycles of nature. Mourning moved out of our homes and villages into institutions — funeral parlors, hospitals, clinical settings — away from the natural rhythms of life. We lost the rituals that connected us to earth, body, and community. And with that loss, grief became something private, shameful, and often pathologized.

Here are some of the reasons grief feels so heavy in our times:

1. We’ve Lost the Maps

Most of us only learned about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief.” While her model was groundbreaking for people facing their own death, it became the cultural shorthand for all grief. Other models have followed — Bowlby-Parkes’ Four Stages in the 1970s, Worden’s Tasks of Mourning in the 1980s, the Dual Process Model (Stroebe and Schut, 1999), and the Grief Styles Model (Martin and Doka, 2000).

These can offer glimpses of truth, but all fall short of the vast mystery and power of grief. Grief is tidal. Mysterious. Nonlinear. Unpredictable. When our lived experience doesn’t match the “map,” we believe we are grieving wrong — which only deepens the pain.

2. We Fear Big Emotions

Crying in public is seen as weakness (thank you, patriarchy). Anger is judged as dangerous. Numbness is treated as a pathology. We are praised for “staying strong” and criticized for “falling apart.”

But grief by its very nature is undoing. It asks for tears, trembling, silence, rage, and shock. In a culture that fears emotion, grief has no place to stretch out, be understood, and be honoured.

3. We’ve Become Disembodied 

So much of modern life unfolds on screens, in our heads, and in constant stimulation. We feel like overstimulated ghosts — longing to feel, and longing not to feel, all at once.

But grief is profoundly physical. It presses on the chest, weighs on the shoulders, disrupts sleep, steals appetite, stiffens joints, aches in muscles, and shakes the body from within.

Without somatic practices — movement, touch, breath, ritual — grief gets stuck in the body, frozen and unbearable.

4. We Grieve Alone 

In traditional cultures, grief was shared. The whole community cried with the bereaved, sang for them, cooked for them, and stayed close for as long as needed.

While parts of grief must be met in solitude, we were never meant to carry its immensity alone. It is too much for one body.

Today, after a funeral or memorial, people return to work within days. At first, casseroles and cards arrive. But within weeks, most friends move on, leaving the mourner isolated — carrying a weight no one else sees.

Our culture’s obsession with youth, beauty, and new beginnings means we ignore aging, decay, death, and mourning. This avoidance breeds fear and shame, leaving us to believe our grief is a personal flaw rather than part of life’s natural cycle.

5. We Rush Through Grief 

We live in a world that worships speed, productivity, and efficiency. But grief cannot be rushed. It spirals back again and again, often for a lifetime.

When we pressure ourselves (or others) toward “closure,” we heap shame and frustration on top of heartbreak. In truth, grief is a lifelong companion. The work is not to “get over it” but to learn how to walk with it as part of the fabric of our lives.

6. We’ve Lost Ritual 

Ritual once held grief as sacred: wailing songs, vigils, altars, days set aside for mourning. Ritual told the soul: you are not alone, this is holy work.

Ritual is an ancient technology — somatic, cathartic, connective. Without it, grief spills out sideways as anxiety, depression, illness, or rage. It has no container to hold its immensity.

🌱 The Good News

We are collectively waking up to the truth of grief as medicine.

If grief feels unbearable in our modern context, it is not because you are weak or broken. It is because you are living in a culture that has forgotten how to hold grief.

And yet, this can change. We can remember what our bones already know. We can reclaim ritual. We can gather in community. We can turn toward our grief instead of away, and discover that grief itself is sacred medicine.

Your grief deserves space, dignity, and companionship. It is not a problem to solve, but a doorway into love.

This is why I do the work I do: to create spaces where grief is welcome, held, and honoured — so no one has to carry sorrow alone.