There’s a grief that doesn’t have a name.

It doesn’t fit the categories that we are given – not death, not divorce, not estrangement. It’s the grief of watching what I experienced as harm unfold in real-time while being systematically prevented from stopping it.

It’s the grief of knowing exactly what’s happening because you lived it yourself. Of recognising every tactic, every lie, every manipulation. The grief of screaming for help and being told you’re the problem and of watching someone you love disappear into the same nightmare that you barely escaped.

This is ambiguous loss. Disenfranchised grief. The kind you can’t fully speak about, can’t fully resolve, can’t process and move on from – because it’s neverending.

Photo credit: Korie Jenkins

Written In Skin

My body has been carrying these wounds for years.

My right shoulder – carrying burdens I cannot put down. Responsibilities I cannot fulfil no matter how hard I try.

My right wrist – inflamed from trying to handle a situation that’s beyond my control. The nerve flares when I’m reminded that all my efforts mean nothing.

My right ankle – permanently swollen. Stuck. Unable to move forward. Held in place by systems and circumstances I cannot change.

The body holds what the mind can’t process. When we’re trapped in situations we cannot resolve, our nervous system stores that helplessness somatically. Chronic inflammation. Persistent pain. Physical manifestation of emotional truth.

The right side of my body – the side associated with action, doing and external responsibility – is breaking down under the weight of what I cannot fix.

Recognition

This grief is watching someone you love become trapped in dynamics that you recognise intimately.

It holds years of psychosomatic symptoms that no one would connect to their source – reports that went nowhere, explosive behaviour that was subsequently explained away, being told I was overreacting, and watching systems designed to protect instead enable harm.

It holds a soul destroying helplessness of having clarity whilst everyone around you sees nothing wrong. The helplessness of being labelled as the problem for naming what’s happening. For refusing to stay quiet – for refusing to go away.

Photo credit: Vincepal

Living In Limbo

Beneath all of this is a grief that once forced an impossible choice.

A car accident. A parent who might not survive. The immediate need to relocate and provide care whilst simultaneously losing what mattered most.

There is no pain comparable to being ripped away from your child whilst a parent is dying. To be shattered between two people you love when both are in crisis. To have every fibre of your being screaming that you need to be in two places at once – and knowing you can’t. Knowing that whatever you choose, you lose.

And then being punished for it. Told that responding to your parent’s crisis meant you abandoned your child. That trying to save your parent was evidence of your failure.

Everything changed in that instant. Daily access to my child. The ability to protect them. The belief that impossible circumstances would be met with any shred of understanding. The hope that doing everything humanly possible would matter to someone.

When everything is torn apart at once – when you’re left holding nothing but grief in both hands – there’s nowhere for it to go. It lives in your body. It’s a tearing that never heals.

It felt like the systems were punishing me for responding to a crisis. They interpreted my actions as abandonment. They couldn’t hold space for the reality that sometimes there are no good choices – only unbearable ones.

In the same moment I nearly lost a parent, contact with the most important person in my life was taken entirely – and had to be fought for.

The grief of those losses can’t be separated – they are woven together in a way that makes healing either one impossible without addressing both.

Utterly Powerless

The deepest grief is the powerlessness itself.

I perceived harm happening. I could see it clearly. I tried everything – every channel I knew, every authority I could access, every avenue that seemed available – and met failure at every turn.

The system has no framework for this. Showing emotion gets read as instability. Speaking up gets you labelled as high conflict. Choosing not to weaponise your child gets interpreted as being passive. Every response becomes evidence against you.

Systems can default to maintaining the status quo regardless of what a child expresses. A child’s voice – their stated preferences and communication – can be noted and then set aside in favour of what already exists.

It’s a grief of realising you cannot save someone from a situation you understand intimately – no matter how clearly you see it, no matter how hard you fight, no matter how desperately you love them. You just have to watch. Carry it in your body. And keep going.

Diametrically Opposed

I see now that parenting within controlling dynamics isn’t co-parenting. It’s parallel parenting at best – and at worst, it’s a continuation of the same patterns that existed in the relationship, just with a child in between.

Decisions appear to prioritise power over collaboration. When interactions become opportunities to assert dominance rather than work together for a child’s benefit – it isn’t parenting. It’s control taking a new shape.

It’s subtle. Information gets presented in ways that create confusion. Requests for support meet resistance without clear reasoning. Basic cooperation becomes impossible. And none of it makes sense as parenting. But all of it makes sense as control.

It’s heartbreaking to watch someone you love be navigated through a reality that isn’t entirely their own – where their thoughts and loyalties are managed rather than nurtured. It’s the grief of seeing a child taught to view one parent through the lens of another’s pain. It creates a landscape of conflicting realities, where the child is forced to manage the adults’ emotions just to maintain a sense of safety.

A child may become a confidant, a protector, or a primary source of emotional support for a parent. This is called parentification, but to the child, it just feels like love and loyalty. It feels like being the strong one.

I see the somatic cost: a child’s nervous system wasn’t designed to carry the emotional regulation of an adult. When a child is placed in the middle of adult grievances, or made to feel responsible for a parent’s happiness, they lose the freedom to simply be a child. They carry a heavy maturity that they should never have had to develop so soon.

When you are inside it, you can’t see it. You love the person. It feels normal because it is all you have ever known. I know this because I lived it too. The patterns that shaped me were invisible for decades. I couldn’t see them from the inside either.

There’s a deeper layer. A child may be fed inaccurate information about the other parent – where they live, what their life looks like, who they are. Their connections outside the home shrink. Friendships become harder to maintain. The world outside gets smaller.

This isn’t incidental. Isolation and distortion are recognisable features of controlling dynamics. They limit a child’s access to alternative perspectives – and to people who might reflect something different back to them.

The child absorbs the dysregulation from both environments. They carry the confusion of conflicting worlds, the weight of being caught between adults navigating irreconcilable realities.

Photo Credit : Oscar Keys

What grief isn’t.

Not all heartbreak is genuine. What looks like grief can sometimes be injury to the ego – the pain of losing control, not losing love.

Genuine grief moves through stages, even non-linearly. It allows for growth and insight. It softens over time. It leads to acceptance and moving forward. It focuses on what was lost and what it meant.

In some patterns, “grief” stays frozen in victimhood for years. It resists healing. It gets wielded to control others, demands constant validation, and focuses relentlessly on what this person did to them.

I’ve watched people stay brokenhearted for a decade because the victim story serves them. It justifies their behaviour and is used to deflect accountability.

When “grief” doesn’t change over years, when it conveniently activates when someone tries to establish a boundary, when it demands others stay small to accommodate it – it’s not grief seeking resolution. That’s pain being used to maintain control.

Real grief wants to heal. This wants to stay wounded – because the wound is useful.

If you’re holding grief that has no resolution – ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, the helplessness of witnessing what you experience as harm that you cannot stop – I see you.

This is the grief we don’t talk about. The grief that doesn’t fit the framework. The grief that lives in our bodies because it has nowhere else to go.

You’re not alone in carrying it. And you’re not failing because you can’t put it down.

Anna Roters

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