Where Grief First Finds Language
Written by Daniel Stern
A Conceptual Model Emerging from Lived Experience
The Creative Grief Cycle is a conceptual framework that emerged from my own experience of grief and the process of writing through it. In the time following loss, I found that writing did not begin as expression or communication, but as something more immediate—an attempt to give form to experience before it could be fully understood. What I describe here reflects that process. It is not a formal clinical model, but an effort to articulate a pattern that became visible through lived experience, considered alongside existing research in expressive writing, narrative psychology, and grief theory.
In a previous article, I introduced what I call The Creative Grief Cycle—a way of understanding how grief moves through creative expression. In that earlier piece, I described how grief often begins in silence; this stage begins at the point where that silence first breaks into language. This article focuses on that transition: the moment when experience first enters language.
The cycle has three stages:
- Creation — where grief first takes form in language
- Communication — where that expression connects with others
- Rediscovery — where the work can be revisited over time, allowing meaning to evolve
Here, I want to focus on the first stage: Creation.
Research in expressive writing and grief has shown that writing about emotional experience can improve psychological and physical well-being (Pennebaker & Chung, 2011). This aligns with work in expressive and therapeutic writing (Mazza, 2017; Stepakoff, 2009), and with research emphasizing the role of narrative in helping individuals organize and make sense of loss (Neimeyer, 2001; McAdams, 2001). What receives less explicit attention, though, is an earlier phase—the point before writing becomes expressive or communicative, when pre-verbal emotional experience first begins to take form in words. While elements of this transition appear across existing research, they are not typically isolated as a distinct phase in grief writing itself.
Writing Begins as Pressure
In my experience, grief did not begin in words. It began as something closer to pressure—diffuse, persistent, and not yet nameable.
This pressure did not feel like a thought or even a clearly defined emotion. It was more constant than that—something ambient, but insistent. It did not organize itself into sentences or ideas. It accumulated.
At times, it felt physical: a weight in the chest, a tightening, a sense of something pressing inward or outward without direction. At other times, it was harder to locate—an internal density, a sense of saturation, as though experience had nowhere to go.
Research in trauma and affective processing suggests that overwhelming emotional experience is often encoded in sensory, bodily, and affective forms before it becomes available to language (van der Kolk, 2014). Putting feelings into words can also change how those experiences are processed (Lieberman et al., 2007). In this sense, what I describe as pressure may reflect a stage where experience is present but not yet organized in language.
What defines this state is not just intensity, but a lack of structure. Something is there—persistently—but it cannot yet be articulated or fully understood.
It is this pressure, rather than intention, that seems to initiate writing.
Writing does not begin here as expression. It begins as a response. Something pushes toward language—not clearly or steadily, but in fragments that appear, recede, and return.
Words surface incompletely: a phrase, an image, a line that will not leave. There is often hesitation, even resistance. The act begins not because there is something clear to say, but because something can no longer remain entirely internal.
In practice, this early movement often appears in small, recurring fragments before anything fully forms. For example:
From “A Picture on the Wall”
A small square of pigment
leaned out of its silence
and took me by the collar.
Or:
From “Between Two Gravities”
Between what demands I shine
and the gravity that pulls me inward…
These lines do not yet explain, resolve, or interpret the experience—they simply hold it in place. What they do is more immediate: they allow something to remain present long enough to be encountered.
At this stage, what appears on the page is not meaning in the usual sense. It is better understood as what I call proto-meaning— the earliest linguistic shape of an experience before it has become explanation, insight, or story.
Experience begins to take shape in language, but it is not yet narrative, explanation, or reflection. What emerges instead are fragments—images, lines, repetitions—that allow experience to exist outside the self for the first time.
This shift is subtle but significant. What was previously diffuse and internal begins, however slightly, to cohere.
Seen this way, fragmented or image-based writing is not a failure of clarity, but the beginning of it.
At this point, writing is not oriented toward communication or interpretation. Its function is more basic. It brings experience into form—giving it just enough structure to be encountered rather than only endured.
This is the first movement of Creation: not clarity, but necessity.
When Language Creates Distance
Once experience begins to take form in words, something shifts.
Language introduces structure. Even a single line creates a boundary—this word instead of another, this image held long enough to be seen. What was previously diffuse begins, however slightly, to take shape.
This does not immediately produce understanding. The experience may still feel unclear. But something important changes: distance becomes possible.
Not detachment—but perspective.
The experience is no longer entirely internal. Some part of it now exists outside the self, where it can be returned to. The writer is no longer completely inside the feeling. Something has been set down, even if only partially.
Research on expressive writing shows that, over time, people begin to organize emotional experience into more structured language—connections, causality, and meaning (Pennebaker & Chung, 2011; McAdams, 2001). Before that happens, a more basic shift occurs: experience becomes something that can be held and revisited (Neimeyer, 2001).
Writing begins to do more than respond—it begins to shape.
That shaping is not linear. It circles. It revisits. It approaches the same experience from different angles. But even in fragments, something changes: what was uncontained is now being held, line by line.
Why Grief Turns to Metaphor
Even as writing begins to create structure, it rarely does so through direct explanation.
Grief often resists that kind of language. Statements like “I feel empty” or “I am overwhelmed” may be accurate, but they flatten the experience. They fail to capture its movement, its contradictions, and the way it shifts over time.
So the writing moves toward image.
This is not simply stylistic. In early grief writing, metaphor may become necessary because direct language can feel too limited.
In early drafts, grief often appears not as a statement, but as a force. The fragment returns, unchanged:
From “Between Two Gravities”
Between what demands I shine
and the gravity that pulls me inward…
Here, the experience is not named directly. It is approached through something else—gravity, pressure, distance. Not because these are more precise, but because they make the experience possible to hold.
This aligns with work in poetry therapy, which suggests that metaphor provides an accessible structure for experiences that resist direct articulation (Mazza, 2017; Stepakoff, 2009). Cognitive linguistics similarly proposes that metaphor acts as a bridge between emotional and conceptual experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
In early grief writing, metaphor functions less as ornament and more as a tool.
By mapping internal experience onto something more concrete, metaphor creates a structure capable of holding what would otherwise remain diffuse. It gives shape without requiring full understanding. It allows movement—an image can shift, return, and evolve in ways a direct statement cannot.
Through metaphor, writing does not simply express experience—it begins to uncover it.
Writing as Discovery: Aphelion
In my own experience, the first poem I wrote after loss—Aphelion—began without intention. It did not start as an effort to express or explain anything. Instead, it emerged in fragments: isolated lines, images that appeared without context, and a persistent sense of movement that I could not yet name.
The central metaphor developed gradually rather than by design. Aphelion—the point in an orbit where a body is farthest from the center it moves around—became a way of approaching an internal state that resisted direct articulation: a simultaneous sense of distance and attachment, of being pulled away while still held in relation.
An early passage reflects this movement:
Some slip the constellations we hope to trace,
following a hidden geometry,
their own unseen law.
And when they reach aphelion—
that farthest point
where distance feels eternal—
we feel their silence
more sharply than their light.
Early lines did not explain this. They circled it. Images of distance, gravity, and motion appeared before any clear conceptual link was made. The metaphor did not begin as meaning; it functioned first as a container—something stable enough to hold a shifting internal state.
As the poem developed over several weeks, that structure allowed movement. The metaphor could shift, return, and reconfigure in ways that direct language could not. What had been entirely internal began to exist externally—not as a coherent narrative, but as something visible and revisitable.
By the time the poem was complete, the experience itself had not resolved. But it had changed form. What had been diffuse became structured enough to be encountered.
This pattern is not unique to a single piece. Across early grief writing, metaphor often emerges not as stylistic choice, but as necessity—providing the first framework capable of holding experience before it can be interpreted.
At this stage, there is often:
- no audience
- no intention to explain
- no clear endpoint
The process itself is the point. Writing is not expressing experience—it is creating the conditions under which experience can be known.
The Function of Creation
It is important to be clear about what writing in this stage does—and does not—do.
Writing does not resolve grief.
It does not produce immediate understanding.
It does not yet create stable meaning.
What it does is more foundational.
It transforms experience from something uncontained into something structured enough to be encountered. It brings experience into language—not as explanation, but as form.
What emerges at this stage is not fully developed meaning, but something closer to proto-meaning—the first structures capable of holding experience in language.
This can be understood as a process of linguistic emergence, in which pre-verbal emotional experience begins to take early linguistic form. Through this process, experience becomes something that can be returned to, engaged with, and gradually understood over time.
From this point, the later stages of the Creative Grief Cycle become possible:
- Communication, where expression becomes relational
- Rediscovery, where meaning evolves across time
But neither occurs without this first shift.
Before grief can be shared or understood, it must first take form in language.
Author’s Bio:
Daniel Stern is a retired engineer turned astronomer and astrophotographer whose poetry explores grief, silence, memory, and renewal. His work lives at the intersection of science and emotion, where observation becomes reflection and language reaches for what cannot be measured. He is the author of Aphelion, his debut book of poetry, and the chapbook The Roar of Silence, a collection born from personal loss and the search for meaning in its wake. In his work as an astronomer, his astrophotography has been recognized numerous times by NASA (APOD). He has discovered deep-sky objects and, in collaboration with others, has been published in peer-reviewed astrophysics journals. Stern lives in Delray Beach, Florida, with his wife, Randie.
Website: Http://www.theroarofsilence.com
Email: dstern@mea-obs.com
References
Baikie, K. A., & Wilhelm, K. (2005). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 11(5), 338–346.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
Mazza, N. (2017). Poetry therapy: Theory and practice (2nd ed.). Routledge.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2011). Expressive writing: Connections to physical and mental health. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of health psychology (pp. 417–437). Oxford University Press.
Stepakoff, S. (2009). From destruction to creation, from silence to speech: Poetry therapy principles and practices for working with suicide grief. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 36(2), 105–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2009.01.007
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Please also review AIHCP’s Grief Counseling Certification, as well as its Child and Adolescent Grief Counseling Program, Pet Loss Grief Counseling Program, Christian Grief Counseling Program, Grief Diversity Counseling Program, Grief Perinatal Program, Grief Practitioner Program and finally its Grief Support Group Leader Program.