Mourning and Growth — How We Move Through Loss

Throughout our lives, we experience losses both great and small. We lose people, relationships, and sometimes even former versions of ourselves—a healthy body, a confident mind, or a future we once took for granted. Strangely, some losses make us stronger over time, while others keep us trapped where they occurred. Where does this difference come from?

Two Paths Distinguished by Freud: Mourning and Melancholia

Freud attempted to answer this question in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” He distinguished between two different paths a person may take after a loss.

The first is mourning. Mourning is the gradual and painful process of withdrawing the emotional energy that had been invested in the lost person or object. We grieve, long for what has been lost, and sometimes feel anger, while gradually moving ourselves toward a place where we can live without it. Mourning is painful, but it has an end. In time, a person comes to accept the loss for what it is and returns to life.

The second is melancholia. Freud regarded it as a form of mourning that had “failed.” A person caught in melancholia cannot direct outward the resentment and anger once felt toward the lost object. Instead, those feelings are turned against the self. Rather than thinking, “That person left me,” the person concludes, “This happened because I was not good enough,” drawing all responsibility for the loss inward. As a result, grief does not come to an end but hardens into a harsh judgment of the self.

The fact that the same loss can open onto two such different paths may explain why this century-old essay continues to be read today.

What Determines Which Path We Take?

Why, then, do some people move toward mourning while others fall into melancholia? Later studies have identified several possible conditions.

First, was there a place in which the person was allowed to grieve? For mourning to unfold properly, there must be time and space in which sorrow can be expressed. A person who has heard, “It is all right; you are allowed to grieve more deeply,” may walk a very different path from someone who has only been told, “That is enough—pull yourself together now,” even when facing the same kind of loss.

Second, where did the person locate the cause of the loss? The moment an event caused by circumstances is understood entirely as the result of one’s own defects, mourning begins to turn toward melancholia. By contrast, when a person can accept that “this was something beyond my control,” sorrow finds a path toward mourning rather than self-blame.

Third, was someone there beside the person? Mourning can take place in solitude, but it unfolds much more safely when someone is present to witness the process and remain alongside the grieving person. Melancholia, by contrast, deepens in isolation.

Growth After Loss

What is especially interesting is that people who move fully through mourning may experience something beyond simply “feeling better.” Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun called this post-traumatic growth. Some people who undergo profound loss or suffering come to understand life more deeply, value their relationships more fully, and discover strengths within themselves that they had not previously known.

It is important not to romanticize this by claiming that “suffering is good.” Suffering itself is simply suffering. Growth does not arise from pain alone. It may follow only when pain has been properly worked through by way of mourning. For a person trapped in melancholia, what remains is not growth but recurring self-blame.

What Education and Organizations Can Do

This distinction applies equally to schools, educational institutions, and every community to which we belong. When a student, colleague, or any other person experiences a loss—failure, frustration, the end of a relationship, or the disappointment of not obtaining something they had hoped for—the community’s response can influence whether that person moves toward mourning or toward melancholia.

The words “Why was that all you could do?” push responsibility for the loss into the person. By contrast, saying, “I can understand how that might have happened in those circumstances. How are you feeling now?” creates a place in which sorrow is allowed to remain sorrow. Good education and a healthy organizational culture may ultimately be understood as offering people a space in which they are permitted to mourn their losses.

Conclusion

The difference between mourning and melancholia lies not in whether a person has experienced loss, but in how that person moves through it. The quality of that passage is not solely the grieving person’s responsibility. To a considerable extent, it is shaped together by the people who remain beside them and by the environment that surrounds them.

Perhaps the best thing we can offer one another in the face of loss is this: we cannot grieve in another person’s place, but we can protect the space in which they are allowed to grieve.