Grief bursts and STUG reactions (Rando)
A sudden, short wave of grief, sometimes years after a death, set off by a cue: a song in a shop, a smell on a coat, a date, a first day of school the person would have seen. It passes, and the days between bursts can be ordinary.
What drives it
The burst brings the loss back at full strength for a few minutes, which can frighten a person into thinking they are going backwards. Useful for identification because a short wave tied to a cue, followed by a return to ordinary life, more likely fits ordinary grief, and naming it can stop one bad afternoon being read as a sign that something is wrong.
How it shows
Work
Crying in the car park after a colleague mentions their dad’s birthday, four years after the funeral. Losing the thread of a meeting when someone uses a phrase the dead person used, then working normally an hour later.
Relationships
A partner sees the person go quiet at a wedding during the father and daughter dance and doesn’t know why. Friends assume the grief is over because it has been two years, and the person stops mentioning the bad moments.
Self
Notice what was in front of you in the minute before the wave: a sound, a smell, a date, a place. Notice also how long it lasted and what the hour after it was like.
What tells it apart
Triggers: A trauma trigger more likely brings fear: the body braces, the heart races, the mind jumps to danger. A grief burst more likely brings longing and tears for the person, with no sense of threat.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): In a PTSD flashback the event may feel as if it is happening again. A grief burst is more likely an ache of missing someone, felt in the present, with the person still aware of where they are.
Prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11, DSM-5-TR): Bursts that come and go with ordinary days between may be ordinary grief. Yearning or preoccupation on most days, a year or more after the death in adults (DSM-5-TR), and getting in the way of daily life, is more likely prolonged grief disorder.
A test
Keep a note for two weeks of each wave: what came just before it, how long it lasted and how the next hour went. If most waves follow a cue and pass, leaving the rest of the day workable, they may be grief bursts within ordinary grief.
Questions to carry
- What was in front of me in the minute before the wave came?
- What do I tell myself about my grief once a wave has passed?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
clinical. A clinical idea from Therese Rando’s 1993 book on complicated mourning, built from practice and case material. We found no study that measured STUG reactions as she defined them or counted how often they happen, so the term describes something many bereaved people report more than something that has been tested. It sits alongside the dual process model’s picture of grief moving between the loss and the rest of life.
Where it comes from
Therese A. Rando, Treatment of Complicated Mourning, Research Press, 1993 (subsequent temporary upsurges of grief, with cues sorted into cyclic, linear and stimulus-cued)