The Four Spaces of TMGL: Grief Doesn't Happen in Stages

For decades, many of us have encountered grief through the language of stages: one experience followed by another, eventually leading somewhere that sounds a lot like being finished.

But grief rarely behaves that neatly.

We can feel steady one day and disoriented the next. A loss we thought we had learned to carry can feel entirely different when our circumstances change. An anniversary, a new relationship, becoming a parent, reaching an age someone we love never reached, or simply seeing our lives differently can bring us back into parts of a loss we thought we already understood.

That doesn't mean we've gone backward.

It means grief is dynamic.

The Transcending Model of Grief and Loss (TMGL) offers another way of understanding that experience. Rather than stages people are expected to complete, TMGL describes four spaces people may experience in relationship to loss: Uncharted Territory, Initial Reaction, Lost/Adrift, and Transcending.

These spaces are not a checklist. They don't come with deadlines, and there is no correct amount of time to spend in any of them. People may revisit them, experience aspects of more than one at once, or understand them differently as their lives and identities change.

Uncharted Territory

Interestingly, TMGL begins before the loss. Uncharted Territory represents life before a loss occurs or before its significance is fully recognized. It is the familiar terrain of our assumptions, routines, relationships, identities, and expectations about how life is supposed to unfold.

This is not a grief response. There may be no grief yet.

But that doesn't mean this space is irrelevant to what comes later. We enter loss carrying everything that existed before it: previous experiences, relationships, cultural messages, identities, beliefs, expectations, vulnerabilities, and assumptions about ourselves and the world.

No one arrives at loss as a blank slate.

Initial Reaction

Then something changes. A death. A diagnosis. A divorce. A pregnancy loss. A friendship ending. A job disappearing. A move we didn't want. A future that suddenly isn't going to happen.

Initial Reaction is the space in which the loss becomes known, recognized, or felt. For one person, that may mean shock. For another, overwhelming emotion. Someone else may feel numb, relieved, frightened, angry, confused, or surprisingly functional. There is no required emotional response.

What has changed is the terrain itself. Life is no longer quite as it was before, even if we don't yet understand what that change will mean.

Lost/Adrift

Loss can also raise questions that go beyond the event itself. Who am I now? What does my life look like from here? Why did this happen? What do I believe now that something I believed was impossible has actually happened?

Lost/Adrift describes this disorienting space.

We often picture it as a dense forest without a marked trail. People may revisit the same memories, questions, emotions, or pieces of their identity again and again. From the outside, that repetition can look like being "stuck." But revisiting something isn't necessarily the same as standing still. Sometimes we return to the same loss from a different place in our lives and see something we couldn't see before. The terrain may be familiar, but we are not exactly the same person walking through it.

Transcending

TMGL does not end with "getting over" the loss. It doesn't end with closure, either. Transcending is an active, ongoing process of incorporating loss into a life that continues to be lived. The loss remains part of the person's story. It may continue to influence identity, relationships, beliefs, choices, and meaning. Pain can still exist. So can joy. Connection can exist alongside longing. A person can build a meaningful life while still wishing something had been different.

That both/and matters.

Transcending doesn't require us to erase what happened in order to continue living. It recognizes that loss can become integrated into who we are without becoming all that we are.

The Spaces Are Not Stages

This may be the most important part of TMGL's four spaces: You don't graduate from them.

Someone who is Transcending can experience another Initial Reaction when new information changes the meaning of a loss. A person can experience Lost/Adrift years later when a life transition raises new identity questions. Even looking back at Uncharted Territory can bring new understanding of who we were before everything changed. Grief does not have to move neatly forward to be meaningful. The four spaces give us language for recognizing where we may be in relation to a loss without turning that recognition into another expectation about where we should be.

And because no two people enter these spaces carrying exactly the same histories, relationships, identities, expectations, resources, or circumstances, even the same type of loss can be experienced very differently. That is where another part of TMGL becomes important: the Loss Template.

The Loss Template explores four factors: Context, Grief Expectations, Identity, and Process that help us understand why grief takes the particular shape it does for each person. In the posts ahead, we'll explore both: the spaces we may encounter as we live with loss and the factors that help shape how we experience them. Because grief is a human experience, but the way we experience grief is uniquely our own.

Griefly Speaking is available for purchase on Amazon.

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