How Anxiety Can Mask Unprocessed Grief

It often begins with a feeling you can’t quite put your finger on. Familiar, but not wanted. It's the ever-present restlessness under your skin, a flutter in the chest, a mind that won’t stop ruminating on the "what-ifs".

You tell yourself it’s anxiety. After all, isn't that what anxiety feels like? The racing thoughts, the shallow breathing, the sense that something is wrong even when everything seems fine.

And often, it really is anxiety. But sometimes, anxiety is only part of the story. That's because anxiety can often mask symptoms of unprocessed grief. If you've been actively working on your anxiety but continue to feel like it's always right there with you no matter what, it might be time to look at what's hiding deep under the surface.

Anxiety as protection

Anxiety is the body’s alarm system. When your nervous system senses a threat, whether it's real or imagined, it goes into overdrive to keep you safe. But for many people, that alarm stays activated and never switches off. It's a constant background hum, making it hard to relax, to sleep, to trust that things are okay. The noise of non-stop anxiety robs you of your peace and makes it hard to simply enjoy life.

What’s often hidden beneath that "hum" is unprocessed grief. Grief? You might be thinking to yourself, "There's nothing I'm grieving. I've dealt with everything and moved on." Except, maybe you didn't. Maybe you pushed it down and carried on, but never truly processed your feelings.

Perhaps it was the loss of someone you loved long ago. Maybe you had a childhood where you never felt seen. Or possibly you experienced an intimate relationship that ended without closure. All of these things bring pain that can be pushed down, buried, and ignored. But the feelings of unprocessed grief are still there...lurking deep down and causing you anxiety.

For many people, grief can feel too big to deal with and too painful to process. We push it down to protect ourselves, and our bodies assume the defense role by translating the grief into something more manageable, like a racing heart, a knot in the stomach, or an urge to stay busy and distract ourselves. Anxiety becomes a standard way of coping with feelings that, at some point, felt unbearable.

Anxiety might even feel more acceptable than grief. After all, you can explain anxiety. You can treat it. Most people can understand the sensation as they've experienced it themselves.

But grief? Well, that’s something we’ve been taught to either hide entirely or to be strong and move on quickly.

When grief isn’t acknowledged

Usually, when we think of grief, it's about someone we loved or cared about who is no longer with us. But grief isn’t limited to death or bereavement. It can present from any kind of loss: safety, love, belonging, identity, or dreams. Grief often stems from childhood experiences of neglect or abandonment, from relationships that were more painful than nurturing, or from simply never feeling "good enough".

But when grief isn’t acknowledged, it doesn’t just disappear. It waits, buried deep within the psyche and the body, surfacing in disguised forms — chronic anxiety, perfectionism, overthinking, even panic.

Swiss psychiatrist, author, and grief expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says it's impossible to "tuck messy emotions into neat packages" and that "there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss."

You might always feel restless without knowing why, or maybe you have a constant fear of losing control, when what’s really being triggered is a much older fear of loss itself.

Some people even carry intergenerational trauma and grief — the inherited cycle of pain and suffering passed down through families or cultures that never had space to mourn. Others carry grief for themselves: for the years lost to survival, for the childhood joy that never had room to thrive.

Over time, this buried sorrow can harden into a kind of emotional armor where you stay strong and just keep going. Moving right along, everything's perfectly fine!

On the outside, you probably do appear just fine. But beneath the surface, your body is still holding its breath, and you feel like you want to scream.

The body remembers what the mind wants to forget

Your body is a miraculous thing, and while you might think pushing your memories down means you don't have to deal with them, your body carries the memories of your past even when your mind has worked hard to suppress them. And guess what? Those racing thoughts, that constant "hum"? That's your body talking, and it's not going to let you forget.

Therapy creates a safe space for healing unprocessed grief by acknowledging what was lost and allowing yourself to feel it, but your body needs to move the grief. That's why talk therapy alone won't process your grief. Expressing how you're feeling is necessary, but talk therapy needs to be combined with whole-body somatic therapies. These practices teach you how to listen to your breath and pay attention to your nervous system as you process what's happening in your body.

At The Place Retreats, we often see clients who arrive describing anxiety, burnout, or restlessness, only to discover that their bodies have been carrying the weight of grief for years. Tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, and shallow breathing are common signs that the body is protecting itself from feeling too much. Sound familiar?

Through somatic movement and mindfulness-based approaches, therapy helps reconnect these inner parts. As the body begins to feel safe again, the deeper layers of grief can start to surface gently.

It’s not always comfortable. But it is necessary.

Of course, you may still have moments of worry or fear; that's normal for everyone, but those feelings no longer dominate your days. With the rightholistic therapy, you'll be able to breathe deeply with an open heart, knowing you're safe, right here, right now.

The healing process at The Place Retreats

At The Place Retreats, we offer our clients a safe space to process their anxiety and grief. We genuinely understand that only through gentle reconnection with the body and mind can true transformation begin.

You see, when someone truly witnesses your pain without judgment, something in the nervous system relaxes, and the body begins to trust that it can survive feeling again. And in that moment, the grip of anxiety starts to loosen.

We compassionately guide our clients through the layers of anxious emotions: from tension to sadness, from resistance to surrender, from fear to relief. With each layer comes a little more breath, a little more space, a little more peace. You deserve that peace.

When you're ready to uncover and process the hidden grief beneath your anxiety, we're here for you.

If you'd like more information on how grief retreats at The Place Retreats Bali can help you, contact us to schedule a free 15-minute consultation with a member of our team.