Some kinds of sadness are hard to name. They have always been there and we treat them, by and large, as entirely normal. They make themselves known when we come across something that doesn’t quite fit – a glimpse of someone else’s childhood, the sight of a family who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. The contrast brings something briefly into view, and a moment later we rationalise it and push it away again – because “no one actually died”, “it was such a long time ago”, “it’s not that bad, I’ve managed so far, I’ll manage a bit longer”. This is the dynamic we live inside.
For a moment, I wanted to call this kind of sadness grief. More precisely, grief for what we never had. For the childhood we never knew. For the parent who was physically present and yet out of reach. For the version of ourselves we are losing hope of ever becoming. I want to show why this kind of grief is rarely acknowledged culturally (or by ourselves). And what happens when it is left without a voice, and what the work of giving it back a voice can look like.
Grief without death
Grief is not only about death. Culturally, we’ve grown used to the shorthand: black clothes, a funeral, an obituary in the paper. In reality, it is a much broader category of experience. Grief is the response to any significant loss, whether or not an actual death is involved. We can grieve a place we will never return to; a language no one speaks any more; an ability the body will not regain; a version of ourselves that will never come to be. Even a lost phone that held our entire digital life. You can tell a loss by its effect – by the gap it leaves behind.
A particular form of this experience is grief for what never was. It is a loss without a clear moment of losing, because no such moment ever existed. What did exist was an emptiness that was never filled. But because it had always been there, it was the norm – impossible to notice, let alone name. In this category of loss, we can grieve the absence of a happy, safe childhood; relationships that might have happened if conditions in the past had been different. We can also grieve a vision of ourselves, or a potential, that never had the chance to manifest. Broadly speaking, a life that could have happened, but turned out to be out of reach.
There are names for this in the psychological literature. Kenneth Doka speaks of disenfranchised grief; grief that the community does not acknowledge – with the unacknowledged element being either the relationship in which the loss occurred, the loss itself, or the person experiencing it. Pauline Boss uses the term ambiguous loss; a loss without any moment at which we could say “something has ended”. Francis Weller, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, describes five gates of grief. Two of them relate directly to what I am trying to describe. The second gate, which he calls ‘the places that have not known love’, and the fourth, ‘what we expected and did not receive’. We usually experience these places alone, because the community rarely sees them at all. As a result, in a sense, we live cut off from life, trapped in the past – with no way to reframe it.
Painful and invisible grief
The paradox of grief for what never happened is that it has a deep effect on us and, at the same time, often goes unrecognised. It concerns something we needed and did not receive. This unmet need keeps gnawing at us, subtly or less subtly. At the same time, being invisible, it cannot be properly addressed. To make matters worse, the culture – and we ourselves – often deny that what we feel has any right to exist.
Grief in the classical sense has its rituals. The funeral, condolences, a socially recognised period of mourning. Loved ones and colleagues know it is a time for gentler treatment. For grief over what we never experienced, there are no socially established rituals. Culturally, there is no funeral for a childhood that was out of reach. There are no condolences for a version of ourselves that will never come to be. The kind of social support that says “you have the right to feel what you feel” is rare. We alone are the witnesses to this kind of grief. There is a quote attributed to C. G. Jung: “The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you”. Paraphrased in the context of socially invisible grief, it means the necessity of standing up for ourselves. Even if we do not know precisely what did (or did not) happen, following our sense, our intuition, is a form of looking after ourselves and fighting for our own future.
Yet the absence of a social place for this grief is often something we internalise. Jeffrey Kauffman, in a volume edited by Doka, named this mechanism self-disenfranchised grief – grief whose right to exist is denied by the grieving person themselves. We try to muffle the grief with the same phrases we have picked up from the culture: “others have it worse”, “it was so long ago, I should have grown out of it by now”, “you should be grateful for what you have”, “why rake up the past”, “it’s not that bad”. Each of these sentences holds a grain of truth, and each serves an important function. On the one hand, it is a defence mechanism that protects us from consciously confronting a difficult experience. On the other, it keeps us in a place from which we have no chance of fully acknowledging the loss. In this way the same scenario can be replayed indefinitely – when the pain becomes acute enough, we try to deal with it. Then it subsides, and we return to the starting position. Once again we are left alone with our pain and with the sense of being stuck.
On top of this comes a particular feature of the situation: what is missing was never fully experienced in the first place. How can you long for a parent’s tenderness if you have no experience of such tenderness? And yet – a surprising mechanism – the body knows. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, describes how bodily memory precedes narrative memory – the body registers the absence of tenderness, of safety, of being seen – even if conscious awareness cannot name it. Gabor Maté shows the same thing from a different angle. He points out that chronic tension, exhaustion and psychosomatic symptoms often carry unprocessed grief that was never consciously put into words.
When grief has no voice
Grief that is admitted into neither social nor private language shifts from a level where it could be named to a level where it is only lived – with no awareness of its source.
The most visible layer is usually the somatic one. Bessel van der Kolk shows that the body registers what the mind has not had time to put into words, and stores that information in very specific places: chronic tension in the jaw, the neck, the diaphragm; shallow or held breathing; sleep that brings no rest; a startle response to stimuli that objectively pose no threat. The pattern persists for years, regardless of what is currently going on in a person’s life. Gabor Maté goes further. In When the Body Says No he presents clinical material showing how chronically suppressed emotions (particularly grief and suppressed anger) play a part in the development of autoimmune diseases, gut disorders and cardiac problems. Maté’s thesis is strong and is sometimes criticised for not sufficiently distinguishing correlation from causation. However, the core point that emerges from this theory makes clear that suppressed grief is one of the factors contributing to what happens to the body. On the everyday level, the picture is often quite ordinary – we may notice a drop in energy for no obvious reason, irritability, a subdued mood, difficulty experiencing pleasure, perfectionism. Each of these symptoms has its own independent explanations within psychiatry and somatic medicine, so we cannot definitively attribute them to an unlived loss. With that in mind, the grief hypothesis is worth testing in each individual case.
It is worth noting that van der Kolk is most often associated with research on trauma. However, his work consistently extends beyond the single traumatic event toward what he himself calls developmental trauma (chronic, relational deficits in early life, where what matters is not what happened, but what did not happen). In The Body Keeps the Score he devotes a separate chapter to this – on attachment and attunement – and over the years he campaigned for the inclusion of Developmental Trauma Disorder as a category in the DSM. He argued that the classical PTSD criteria do not capture the cumulative impact of emotional neglect. This thread of his work connects directly with grief for what never happened: the nervous system does not distinguish “harm that occurred” from “regulation that was absent”. Both experiences leave a similar trace in the body, even if conscious awareness has nothing to refer back to – because the absence had always been the norm.
The second layer is the facade. Donald Winnicott described this mechanism as the false self – a personality structure a child builds when the environment cannot hold its real emotions. It puts forward what is acceptable and withdraws what is not (a useful reference here is Carl Rogers’s concept of conditions of worth). What is unacceptable gets buried deep enough that the person loses access to it themselves. An adult with a well-developed false self can be competent, well-liked, capable, and at the same time cut off from their own needs, from the body, and from the people closest to them.
The third layer is relationships. John Bowlby and later Mary Ainsworth, in their work on attachment, described patterns in which a child experiencing emotional unavailability from a caregiver learns to minimise the need for closeness. In adulthood, this manifests as deficits in forming relationships. One example is the avoidant pattern: stable, polite, often successful relationships, in which the person nevertheless remains apart. They contain a longing for closeness alongside a fear of it. This kind of conflict can stay with a person for a lifetime. The pattern described here is the most typical scenario, though not the only one.
When grief begins to have a voice
Therapeutic work begins with naming and legitimising the experience – that what the client carries within is grief, that this grief is real, that it has the right to exist. Most people with this kind of grief are hearing this for the first time in their lives.
The second thread is a shift in what we take the goal to be. Pauline Boss, in The Myth of Closure, shows that in ambiguous losses the concept of “closure” is a myth. Closure assumes a starting point – something that began and can now be closed. In grief for what never happened, no such moment ever existed; the absence had always been there, so there is nothing to close. The goal of the work therefore shifts from removing the grief to learning how to carry it consciously, without shame and without any internal pressure along the lines of “this should have passed long ago”.
Here it is worth noting a clinical boundary. Grieving takes its proper time, and in the case of significant losses it is a necessity. When grief paralyses functioning for years, however, something else is probably also at work alongside it: an unfinished bond, guilt, clinically significant depression. Modern classifications (ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR) identify this as prolonged grief disorder. In that case, a different or supplementary approach is needed. Sometimes psychotherapeutic work is combined with a psychiatric consultation.
In the typical work with grief for what never happened, we keep returning to a few places. The first is allowing oneself to long for something one never had, without the internal reprimand that “one should not long for fiction”. The second is the recognition that the past is unchangeable and that what was missing is not going to happen now. An apt saying here is Irvin Yalom’s: Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past. Reaching the place where this information can be taken in is usually preceded by a therapeutic process. Third, the slow loosening of the facade, looking at what stands behind the capable, well-liked, competent “I” that Winnicott described as the false self. And finally, fourth, the question of the present: what is my life now, when absence is no longer the only axis around which this life is organised.
A frequent goal people bring into this work is the need to forgive. Here it is worth separating two things that culture often merges into one. Accepting reality consists of acknowledging what did or did not happen, and “putting down” the weight associated with it. Forgiveness is an act concerning the one who caused the harm – it is a relationship with a specific person or institution. It is important to notice that one can accept reality without the need to forgive. Popular approaches such as Colin Tipping’s Radical Forgiveness propose forgiveness as an act of inner development, independent of anyone’s behaviour. It helps some people and not others. Critics, including therapists working with trauma, point out that imposed forgiveness can become a form of spiritual bypassing.
The term “spiritual bypassing” was introduced by John Welwood. He used it to describe situations in which personal development, spirituality or “working on oneself” become a form of escape – a way of going around what actually needs attention. Grief is then covered over with positive thinking, affirmations, practices and spiritual formulas, only to return later (sometimes with force), because once again no one has listened to it. In the tantric stream of Buddhism (Vajrayana, best known in its Tibetan form), the practitioner visualises themselves as an enlightened being. Over time, this identification is meant to stop being a visualisation and become their experience. It is not for me to judge spiritual traditions. I would only note that, in the context of working on oneself, balance needs to be maintained – the middle way. Spiritual work can support processes of psychological growth, and it can equally hinder them, or even make them impossible. What matters is becoming aware of, and examining, the personal motivation behind it.
The role of the psychotherapist in working with grief is largely that of a witness. Someone who sees what the person is going through, names it and accompanies them without imposing a pace, stages, or a “correct” trajectory. The pace is rarely linear. Months of stagnation are possible, after which something suddenly shifts, and the reverse happens too.
Why do this work at all
Since the past stays as it was, and what was missing cannot be supplied after the fact – what is actually the point of investing time, energy and money in this kind of work? We can put it more sharply: isn’t this just raking over something that cannot be changed anyway?
The answer begins with adding up the costs. As I wrote earlier, voiceless grief works through the body, the mood, relationships, the way of being in the world. When it is acknowledged and named, its intensity beneath the surface drops. The energy that went into keeping it out of awareness is then freed up for other things. This is the most observable effect.
The second effect is a change in the relationship with the absence. Pauline Boss uses the phrase learning to live with – learning to live with something that cannot be resolved. The absence remains, but it ceases to be the axis around which daily life is organised. The state of “I’m over this” does not arise in this work, because there is nothing to be over. What does emerge instead is a different state: I know what I carry, and I don’t have to hide it from myself. This brings a great deal of inner ease.
The third effect (and here it is worth being careful with promises) is sometimes a certain change in relationships with others. If distance from loved ones was maintained because closeness might hurt the way it once did, its loosening usually comes slowly, sometimes incompletely, and not always. Attachment patterns can be more durable than they appeared. They can be loosened, and they can be worked with. Expecting old patterns to soften is realistic; fully silencing the fear is not the norm.
The limits of this work are firm, and it is worth saying so directly. The past will always remain unchanged. The experience that was missing (for example, of tenderness) cannot be supplied retroactively. Loss remains loss, and yet something important emerges. We have access to the present as something of our own, independent of what was missing. We carry awareness of what we carry, without having to hide it from ourselves. This releases a great deal of energy that for years went into sustaining the silence around the grief. That little or that much.
Threads for further exploration
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.
Boss, P. (2021). The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change. W. W. Norton.
Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
Doka, K. J. (red.) (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books.
Doka, K. J. (red.) (2002). Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. Research Press.
Kauffman, J. (2002). The Psychology of Disenfranchised Grief: Liberation, Shame, and Self-Disenfranchised Grief. W: K. J. Doka (red.), Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice (s. 61–77). Research Press.
Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. W: M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti & E. M. Cummings (red.), Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research, and intervention (s. 121–160). University of Chicago Press.
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Knopf Canada.
Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery.
Miller, A. (1979). Das Drama des begabten Kindes. Suhrkamp.
Tipping, C. (1997). Radical Forgiveness: A Revolutionary Five-Stage Process to Heal Relationships, Let Go of Anger and Blame, Find Peace in Any Situation. Sounds True.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Weller, F. (2015). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books.
Welwood, J. (2000). Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Shambhala.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press.