A woman stands frozen in a grocery store aisle, unable to decide between two loaves of bread. It sounds like a small, almost funny moment — until you learn it happened the day before the anniversary of her husband's death, and that bread was the one thing she bought every year to honor him.
This is a real pattern Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, describes in her book Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery — grief and anxiety aren't always separate experiences. Sometimes anxiety is the form grief takes when there's nowhere else for it to go.
Why grief can show up disguised as anxiety
Barbara's core teaching on this point is direct: if we're afraid of our grief or other difficult feelings, we send a fear message to our anxiety, and anxiety rises up to protect us from being overwhelmed by those emotions. In other words, anxiety can act as a stand-in for a feeling that hasn't been allowed to fully surface. If grief has been minimized, rushed, or never fully processed — sometimes because a doctor labeled it "just grief" that would pass on its own — it doesn't disappear. It often resurfaces later as anxiety instead.
A woman avoiding being alone — but not for the reason it looked like
In her book's case study, a woman in her late seventies had quietly built her life around never being alone — driving friends to errands, checking who else would be attending an event before signing up herself, always keeping company nearby. On the surface, it looked like ordinary anxiety about solo activities. Underneath, it traced back to her husband's death a decade earlier — grief that a doctor had told her would simply pass with time. It hadn't. It had just gone underground and re-emerged as low-level, constant anxiety about being on her own.
Grief doesn't have an expiration date, and that's not a problem to solve
One of the more freeing ideas in Barbara's work is her rejection of the belief that grief should end by a certain point. In the case study, once the client stopped trying to move past her grief and instead let herself feel and express it, something shifted — not because the grief disappeared, but because she stopped needing anxiety to hold it at bay. She described being able to laugh and find joy again while still carrying grief, and recognized that the grief itself was, in its own way, a connection to the person she'd lost — not something she needed to eliminate.
How the two can be worked apart
If anxiety and grief have become tangled together, Barbara's approach is to separate them rather than treat them as one thing. That means:
Naming the actual feeling underneath the anxiety — is this really about the situation in front of you, or is it grief wearing an anxious disguise?
Finding a safe place to talk about it — a support group, therapist, or trusted friend — rather than continuing to suppress it, which only feeds the anxiety further.
Using calm skills (breathing, grounding, practice schedules) to handle the anxiety piece, while giving the grief itself room to be expressed rather than managed away.
Gradually re-engaging with activities that had quietly narrowed, using small, deliberate steps rather than forcing a big leap all at once.
The outcome doesn't have to be "getting over it"
In the case study, the resolution wasn't a life free of grief — it was a life where grief and calm could coexist. The client went on to make a major life decision (moving to be near family) that she'd been unable to make while anxiety was doing the deciding for her, and she eventually became involved in a grief support group of her own, helping others going through the same thing.
If this sounds like you or someone you love
Anxiety in older adults, in particular, sometimes gets written off as "just stress" or "just part of aging" — but persistent anxiety, especially anxiety centered on being alone or specific dates and rituals, is worth taking seriously as its own thing, separate from grief itself, even when the two are connected.
This case study and the full framework for working through anxiety and repressed emotion are covered in Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery by Barbara Spaulding, LCSW. She also runs a free biweekly Anxiety Relief Zoom group open to adults at any stage of life — details at anxietyandpanic.net.
This article discusses grief and loss and may be difficult for some readers. If you're struggling, reaching out to a grief counselor or therapist can help.