Angela Schellenberg
Fall feels heavy in September because your nervous system has already lived this loss enough times to begin bracing for it months before a single holiday arrives. You have not spiraled. You have not invented something to dread. Your body simply knows what comes next, the way it knows to flinch before the sound of breaking glass, and it has started counting.
What is anticipatory grief and why does it start in September?
Anticipatory grief, sometimes called anticipatory loss or the grief before the grief, is the body's learned response to a season that has repeatedly brought pain. It is not pessimism or catastrophizing. It is the nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems are built to do: scanning for patterns that predicted loss before, and beginning to prepare.
September is not emotionally neutral. The quality of light changes. The air has a particular weight. School supply displays appear in the pharmacy aisle. All of it is sensory data, and the body reads sensory data the way it reads a weather report. If the last five Novembers have been hard, the body starts checking the forecast in late August. By the time September settles in, it is already running low-grade dread through your chest before you have consciously registered what month it is.
This is the body calendar. It does not need a prompt. It does not need you to think about the holidays. It simply knows what comes next, because it has lived what comes next, and it begins counting toward it the way a child counts days before something they fear. The heaviness you feel before anything has happened is real. It is just not happening in the future. It is happening now, in your nervous system, which has already arrived at the conclusion that what is coming will hurt.
Why does this feel different from regular sadness or seasonal mood?
Anticipatory grief has a shape and a directionality that ordinary seasonal mood does not. It is not the flat grey of depression. It is more like bracing, like the feeling just before impact, except the impact is still two or three months away and no one around you can see what you are already protecting yourself against.
That distinction matters because it changes what helps. Seasonal mood responds to light, to movement, to schedule. Anticipatory grief does not respond to those things in the same way, because it is not primarily about light or schedule. It is about loss. Specifically, it is the nervous system running a prediction about upcoming absence based on previous experience of that absence. Your body is not sad about shorter days. It is grieving something that was not there last November, or the November before that, and beginning to feel the weight of its not being there again.
For daughters who have lost a mother, whether to death, to emotional unavailability, or to estrangement, the holidays carry an enormous relational charge. They are occasions scripted, culturally and personally, around maternal presence. When that presence is gone, every approaching holiday becomes a countdown toward a confirmed absence. The body knows. It starts the count early.
Why doesn't thinking your way through September heaviness help?
Thinking does not resolve anticipatory grief because the grief was never stored where thinking lives. It developed in the parts of the nervous system responsible for survival patterning, not the parts responsible for reasoning and language. When loss has been repeated, the body encodes the seasonal pattern the same way it encodes any repeated threat: below conscious awareness, automatically, without consulting your prefrontal cortex about whether this is rational.
This is why someone can know, clearly and intellectually, that the holidays will be survivable and still feel like something is pressing on their sternum from the inside all of September. The knowing and the feeling are operating on different floors of the same building, and they cannot hear each other. Cognitive reassurance applied to somatic grief is like mailing a letter to an address that does not receive mail. The effort is not wrong. It is going to the wrong place.
This is the part that frustrates so many of the women I work with. They have named it, journaled it, discussed it in therapy. They make plans. They build support structures. And still, in the third week of September, they wake up heavy and cannot explain why to anyone, including themselves. That is not a personal failure. It is a structural mismatch between the tool and the location of the wound.
What is the body actually doing when it runs a grief calendar? (Anniversary grief and the anniversary effect)
The nervous system is a prediction machine, and one of its core jobs is to anticipate what is coming based on what has already happened, preparing the body before the event arrives. When attachment loss has been significant and repeated across multiple holiday seasons, the body begins to associate the sensory markers of early fall with the emotional state that followed them before.
The smell of September air, the particular slant of afternoon light, the feeling of a cotton sweater after months of bare arms. These are not neutral stimuli. They are data points the nervous system has filed under a specific category, and it retrieves that category automatically when the conditions recur.
What you experience as inexplicable heaviness is the body already in a modified state, one that is preparing for loss by lowering its capacity for ease, tightening its systems, and reducing tolerance for ordinary stressors. The nervous system is not malfunctioning. It is being exactly as efficient as it was designed to be. The grief is simply arriving, via the body, before the occasion that prompted it has occurred.
Does attachment history, mother loss, or a mother wound make anticipatory grief worse in the fall?
Yes, in a specific and important way. Research from Boelen and colleagues on complicated grief and attachment demonstrates that insecure attachment histories are associated with more prolonged and more intense grief responses. For daughters who grew up uncertain of maternal availability, the holiday season does not simply trigger sadness about loss. It reactivates the older, deeper wound underneath the loss: the original insecurity about whether they would be received.
The holidays are attachment-saturated events. They involve family configurations, expectations of warmth, rituals built on connection. For a daughter who never had a secure maternal attachment, even before any death or estrangement, the holidays have always carried an undercurrent of hoping for something that was not reliably available. When the loss becomes permanent, that undercurrent does not disappear. It intensifies.
This is why September can feel completely disproportionate to what is objectively happening. The body is not only grieving what happened last November. It is grieving the accumulated weight of every fall that came before it, every holiday that confirmed the absence, every year the table felt like it was missing the thing that was supposed to make it feel like home.
What actually helps when your body is running ahead of the calendar?
The honest answer is that the goal is not to stop the body from feeling this. The body is doing what it was built to do, and fighting it tends to make it louder. What helps is learning to work with it rather than against it, and to give it what thinking alone cannot provide.
Name what is happening without trying to fix it
There is something genuinely settling about having accurate language for an experience. Not because language resolves somatic grief, but because the absence of language leaves you convinced something is wrong with you. Your nervous system built a grief calendar, and September is on it. Naming that is not the same as fixing it, but it is the difference between confusion and orientation, and orientation lowers the nervous system's alarm level slightly.
Work with sensation, not narrative
When the heaviness arrives, the instinct is to figure out why, to trace the thought, to reason with it. A more useful question is: where is this in my body right now, and what does it feel like? Not because introspection resolves grief, but because acknowledging the body's experience rather than arguing with it shifts the relationship between you and what you are carrying. You are not trying to think your way out. You are trying to be present with what is actually happening.
Reduce the demand on the nervous system before the hard season, not during it
September is not too early to reduce load. Sleep, temperature, food, contact with people who ask nothing of you: these are not luxuries. They are inputs the nervous system uses to calculate how much capacity it has available. A system that arrives at November already depleted has very little to work with. A system that arrives with some resource available can carry the grief differently. The preparation that matters is not planning your emotional responses. It is conserving physical ground so there is somewhere to stand when the harder months come.
Consider body-level support before the season peaks
Talk-based approaches have limits when grief is stored somatically. EMDR, somatic therapy, and equine-assisted processing work at the level where anticipatory grief actually lives: in the body's nervous system, below the reach of language. Doing this work in September, before the peak of the holiday season, is not premature. It is precisely timed. The body is already primed. The material is already at the surface. September is often when grief work goes deepest, even when it feels like nothing has happened yet.
When should I take September heaviness seriously as a clinical concern?
Most anticipatory grief is painful without being dangerous, and the body running a calibration it learned from real loss is a normal grief response rather than a disorder. It becomes worth seeking clinical support when the September heaviness is significantly impairing daily functioning: when you cannot work, cannot eat or sleep, cannot be present with the people around you in any sustained way.
It also warrants attention when it is accompanied by hopelessness that feels different from sadness, by thoughts of not wanting to be here, or by a sense that the grief has been running unaddressed for long enough that it has become structural rather than seasonal.
Angela Schellenberg is a licensed trauma and grief therapist practicing in California, Washington, and Arizona. She specializes in attachment-focused EMDR and leads equine-assisted retreats at Shakti Ranch in Malibu. Her work focuses specifically on the kind of grief that talk therapy has not reached, including the somatic, anticipatory grief that arrives in September long before anyone else thinks the holidays are close. If this post described something you recognize in your own body, that recognition is information worth taking seriously.
References: Boelen, P. A., et al. (2022). Prolonged grief disorder, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder: Relationship patterns and differentiating features. Clinical Psychology Review.
Frequently asked questions
Is anticipatory grief before the holidays a normal grief response?
Yes. When loss has been repeated across multiple holiday seasons, the nervous system encodes the sensory markers of early fall as a signal to begin preparing for pain. The body starting to grieve in September before anything has happened is a normal, if exhausting, feature of grief stored somatically. It is not anxiety, disorder, or irrationality.
Why do I feel so much worse in September even though nothing bad has happened yet?
Your nervous system has already lived enough difficult Novembers to begin bracing for the next one in advance. The heaviness you feel is the body running a prediction based on previous experience of loss, not a response to something happening now. The grief is real even though the occasion has not arrived.
Will the September heaviness get easier over time?
For some people it softens as they develop language and body-level resources for what is happening. It rarely disappears entirely when the underlying attachment loss has not been adequately addressed. Working somatically with the grief, rather than cognitively reasoning through it, tends to produce more lasting change than reframing or planning alone.
Why doesn't journaling or talking about it help with fall anticipatory grief?
Anticipatory grief running on a somatic calendar is stored below the level where language lives. Journaling and talking operate through the prefrontal cortex and narrative memory, but the body calendar was built in subcortical, somatic memory, which does not respond to the same inputs. That is not a failure of effort. It is a structural mismatch between the tool and the location of the wound.
What kind of therapy actually helps with anticipatory grief and the holiday season?
Approaches that work at the body level rather than the narrative level tend to reach this kind of grief more effectively. EMDR, somatic therapy, and equine-assisted processing all engage the subcortical nervous system where somatic grief calendars are stored. Beginning this work in September, when the material is already at the surface, is often better timing than waiting until the holidays have already arrived.
How is anticipatory grief different from seasonal depression?
Seasonal depression tends to present as low mood, low energy, and withdrawal linked to reduced light. Anticipatory grief has a specific directionality: it is oriented toward an approaching loss event, and it carries a quality of bracing rather than flatness. It does not respond to light or schedule changes in the way seasonal mood typically does, because its source is relational loss rather than circadian disruption.
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Angela Schellenberg
Angela is a licensed trauma and grief therapist, attachment-focused EMDR specialist, and trained Mother Hunger® Facilitator (a framework created by Kelly McDaniel). She hosts the Grief, Trauma & Your Mama podcast and leads EMDR intensives and equine-assisted retreats at Shakti Ranch in Malibu. Licensed in California, Washington, and Arizona. Work with Angela →