The Loss That Doesn’t Get a Funeral

There are losses that come with flowers and casseroles. People gather. There is a word for what you are, bereaved, and the world accommodates you, at least for a while.

And then there are the other ones.

The relationship that ended before anyone else knew it was serious. The pregnancy that didn’t continue. The role you always imagined you’d grow into (mother, partner, the version of yourself you’d been quietly rehearsing) that simply never arrived. The friendship that dissolved without an argument. The life in another country you chose to leave and still, sometimes, mourn.

These are losses too. But they rarely get named as such. There is no bereavement leave, no ritual, no social permission to grieve. And so the grief goes somewhere else, into the body, into a low-level ache, into the strange feeling of being sad about something you can’t quite explain to anyone else without it sounding smaller than it feels.

The psychologist Kenneth Doka called this disenfranchised grief, grief that falls outside the socially recognised frameworks for loss. It isn’t less real. It is, in many ways, harder to carry, precisely because there is no container for it.

When I was developing my October workshop on grief, I kept coming back to this category. Because in my clinical work, I see it constantly, not always named, not always conscious, but present. The woman who comes in for anxiety and somewhere in the second session mentions, almost in passing, that she never had children. The man whose grief for his father is tangled up with grief for the relationship they never quite managed to have while his father was alive. The person mourning a version of their life that the pandemic took, or a friendship that simply, quietly ended.

I also know it personally.

I have a photograph of myself with Freddy, my dog, when he was a puppy. He was this tiny, serious creature who from his very first days had a quality of stillness and acceptance that I’ve rarely encountered in any being, human or otherwise. I didn’t know, when he arrived, how much I needed exactly that. What I do know is that Freddy arrived at a point in my life when I was quietly grieving an unlived role, the one I’d always assumed would materialise, and hadn’t. There was no event to name. No clear before and after. Just the slow recognition that something I had always thought would be part of my life was not going to be.

He didn’t fix that. But he was present with it, in that uncomplicated way animals have. The pureness of him. The acceptance. Something in that helped me bring what had been wordless a little closer to language.
The reason disenfranchised grief is so important to understand, as clients, as practitioners, is that unacknowledged grief doesn’t disappear. It shape-shifts.

It can look like numbness, or a low-grade restlessness, or a tendency to avoid certain conversations. It can present somatically, as physical symptoms that don’t have a clear medical explanation: fatigue, digestive disturbance, dizziness, that particular heaviness that sits just below the sternum. The body keeps the record, even when the mind hasn’t found the words.

And it responds to being named. Not fixed, named. There is something that shifts when a client hears: what you’re carrying is a real loss. Permission to grieve, it turns out, is sometimes the beginning of the grief actually moving.
If any of this resonates, the losses that didn’t come with a ritual, the grief that lives somewhere you haven’t quite located yet, there are two ways to work with this.

If you are a client and would like to explore this in a one-to-one session, you can book directly at discover-balance.com/contact-booking.
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If you are a practitioner, my two-day online CPD workshop Grief, Loss and Gratitude runs on 17 and 18 October. We work with grief in all its forms, including the ones that don’t have a name yet. And it ends, genuinely, in gratitude. Not as a bypass, but as a destination we earn our way to across the two days. 6 CPD points. $300. Details and registration at discover-balance.com/workshops.