Understanding Grief Orientations: A New Way of Making Sense of Suicide Loss

When someone we love dies by suicide, the grief that follows can feel unlike anything we have ever experienced. It is not just the loss of a person. It can feel like the loss of who we are, and the loss of the world as we knew it. Many people describe it as being dropped into a place with no map. Nigel Linacre knows that feeling well. After losing his son to suicide, Nigel found that the existing models of grief did not quite fit what he was going through. So he began to think differently about it, drawing on his own experience and conversations with many others who had lived through profound loss. What emerged is the Grief Orientations Model: a thoughtful, humane, and deeply resonant framework that offers something many of us have been looking for: a map.

We’ve written a summary of Nigel’s model and if you would like to explore Nigel's work further, you can watch him speak about the model here.

What is “Great Grief”?

Nigel uses the term "great grief" to describe a particular kind of loss, one that does not just hurt, but fundamentally disrupts who we are and how we understand the world. Not all grief is great grief in this sense. But the loss of someone to suicide often is. In conversations with many people who had experienced severe loss, Nigel found that they shared something in common: not just the pain of losing a person, but a loss of self and a loss of the world as they had known it. It was this combination that made this kind of grief disorienting and so hard to navigate with existing frameworks.

The Grief Orientations model was developed specifically for great grief. It does not try to minimise what has happened or offer a tidy path through it. Instead, it tries to make sense of an experience that can feel entirely beyond sense.

Grief is more than one loss

One of the most important aspects the Grief Orientations model recognises is that when someone dies, we are not just losing them. We are often experiencing three losses at once:

• The loss of the person who has died. This is the loss we most readily name, the absence of someone we loved, the relationship we had with them.

• The loss of our world. Not just the physical world, but our assumptive world, the beliefs we held about how life works, the sense that things would, on balance, be OK. When someone we love dies suddenly or by suicide, those beliefs can shatter.

• The loss of ourselves. When someone we are deeply connected to is gone, a part of us goes with them. The self we were in relation to them, and the version of us that believed in the world as it was, may no longer exist.

Recognising all three losses can be a relief in itself. It helps explain why grief after suicide can feel so disorienting. It is not just that someone is gone. Everything has shifted.

Three phases: finding our way through

The Grief Orientations model describes three phases, orientations or contexts, that many grievers move through. These are not stages in a fixed sequence, grief is rarely that tidy, but they offer a meaningful way of understanding where we might be, and what might help.

Disorientation

This is often where grief begins: in shock. The person we love is gone, but everything in us struggles to believe it. We might keep expecting them to walk through the door. The world feels fractured and strange. We feel unlike ourselves. In disorientation, we are pulled toward the past, to the version of reality where they still existed. This is not denial; it is the mind's difficulty reconciling what was with what is. It takes time. In this phase, what most helps is simply being with someone. Not fixing, not explaining, just presence.

“I was on a film set with the wrong script.”- Nigel Linacre

Nonorientation

As the shock begins to quiet, something else can emerge: a deep emptiness. The reality of the loss has landed, but there is no sense yet of what comes next. Nothing feels meaningful. There may be no wish to move forward, but no wish to stay still either. Just a kind of void. Nonorientation can feel bleak, and it is important to name that. But it also has something unexpected in it. When we stop clinging to the world as it was, something loosens. The things we used to worry about may seem less important. There can be, strange as it sounds, a kind of freedom in letting go, even if it does not feel that way while we are in it. In this phase, what helps is recognition. Being seen. Not being rushed.

“Nonorientation may feel like sitting in a deep pit with no wish to go anywhere.” - Nigel Linacre

Reorientation

Reorientation does not mean returning to who we were before. That version of ourselves, and that version of the world, is gone. What reorientation offers is something different: the possibility of building anew, on more honest ground. Those who reach reorientation often describe a different relationship with the person they have lost, not an absence, but a continuing presence. They can think of them, feel them, even speak to them. The relationship is not what it was, but it has not entirely ended. There is also, in reorientation, a new relationship with life itself. A sharper sense of what matters. Less tolerance for the trivial. More capacity for depth.

“We lost our loved one and yet may feel them.” - Nigel Linacre

How we move through grief

Nigel describes three broad ways people relate to their grief:

Turning away: avoiding the pain, at least for a time. Sometimes this is necessary. But when it becomes the default, grief can become stuck, surfacing later in ways we do not expect.

Living with it: keeping going, hoping that time will help. For many people, this is all they can manage. It is a valid path, but often a long one.

Leaning in: actively working with the grief, sitting with it, letting it teach us. This is the hardest path, but it can also be the shorter one. Nigel describes three steps within it: attending to the loss, connecting with it, and allowing it to transform us. In reality, most of us move between all three, and that is not a failure. It is grief being what grief is.

Three acceptances

The Grief Orientations model does not ask us to accept our loved one's death as something that was acceptable. For many of us, especially those bereaved by suicide,  there is nothing acceptable about it. What Nigel offers instead are three quieter, more human acceptances:

Even though I am not who I was, I accept myself as I now am.

Even though my world is not as it was, I accept it as it now is.

Even though my relationship with them is not as it was, I accept it as it now is.

These are not destinations to arrive at quickly. They are possibilities, ones that may feel completely out of reach in the early days of grief, and which may only become accessible slowly, and in glimpses. But they point toward something important: that we are still here, that the world is still here, and that our relationship with the person we have lost has not simply ended. It has changed form.

A map, not a destination

The Grief Orientations model will not take the pain away. But it offers a gentle map that many people who are bereaved by suicide tell us they need most: a sense that what they are feeling makes sense, that they are not alone in it, and that there may be a way through, even if they cannot see it yet.

If you would like to explore Nigel's work further, you can watch him speak about the model here.