A report published this week by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and University of Melbourne brings into focus one of the most overlooked forms of childhood bereavement: growing up after one parent has killed the other. It is a subject that rarely surfaces in public conversation, and when it does, the child’s experience is often an afterthought. This post is an attempt to address that directly. If this is your experience, you may never have seen it named clearly, and you may not even be sure you are allowed to call it trauma. You are.

A loss that is actually two losses

When one parent murders the other, a child loses both parents in the same moment. One parent dies, and the other is removed by the criminal justice system, held at an unbearable distance, or later returned to the child’s life in ways that added confusion rather than resolution. There is no shared social script for this kind of grief, no cultural ritual, no language that most people around you will recognise or be able to
sit with comfortably.

What often happens instead is that the grief goes underground. Adults bereaved in this way frequently describe maintaining a strong internal connection to the parent they lost, keeping objects, embodying their values, speaking of them in the present tense. This is not pathology but attachment doing exactly what attachment does, holding on to the person who mattered most and refusing to let the relationship
disappear simply because the person has.

The perpetrator parent is a different and more complicated psychological reality. As a child you may have had no say in whether you visited them in prison, been placed with their family, or returned to their care on release. You may have been given a version of events that protected them, blamed the parent who died, or asked you to manage loyalties that no child should carry. And through all of it, you were almost
certainly not asked what you needed, what you thought, or what you felt. That absence of agency is itself a wound, one that tends to show up in adulthood in the difficulty of trusting your own perceptions, or of feeling entitled to your own needs at all.

Stigma, silence, and the hidden self

One of the most consistent features of this experience is the pressure to keep it hidden. As a child you may have been told you were too young to remember, or that asking questions would only make things harder. You may have been given a sanitised account of what happened, or no account at all, and you may have learned very quickly that other people could not hold the truth of it, that your job was to
manage their discomfort rather than your own grief.

Over time, that lesson becomes part of how you move through the world. You develop a version of yourself that leaves out something essential, become skilled at reading rooms, protecting others, keeping the story at a safe distance. When a core part of your experience has been treated as unacceptable or unspeakable, you do not just hide the story, you hide the part of yourself that carries it, and the cost of that over a lifetime is significant.

Many adults bereaved in this way describe disclosure as feeling akin to coming out: the anticipation of being seen differently, the exhausting maintenance of a partial self, the grief of knowing that very few people can ever fully know you. The silencing that began in childhood, often by well-meaning adults who genuinely did not know how to help, tends to get reinforced by a world that finds this particular kind of loss very hard to acknowledge.

Identity and the fear of resemblance

Alongside the grief and the silence, many adults carry a more private fear about who they are and who they might become. For those whose fathers killed their mothers, this fear often centres on resemblance, a deep anxiety about repeating what happened, about finding the perpetrator parent somewhere inside themselves. It can make closeness feel risky and intimacy something to approach with extreme caution,
not because there is any real evidence of danger, but because the internal narrative inherited from childhood has never been examined or challenged.

This fear is compounded by narratives that some adults were exposed to as children, the suggestion that they were damaged beyond repair, or destined to become either a victim or a perpetrator themselves. Even when those messages were never spoken directly, they can be absorbed through the way adults around you behaved, through silence, through overprotection, through the particular quality of pity that some people directed at you. Identity formed in that context carries the weight of other people’s fears as much as your own experience.

It is also worth saying that many adults who survived this experience carry real personal strength alongside the pain. They are often acutely attuned to others, take care seriously, and have developed a kind of resilience that comes from having navigated things that most people will never face. That strength is real, and it matters, though it is worth asking whether some of it has also become a way of never
stopping long enough to feel what is underneath.

What therapy can offer

Relational psychotherapy, informed by attachment ideas, works by taking seriously the relationships and experiences that shaped you, including the ones that were never spoken about. For adults bereaved by parental domestic homicide, this means having somewhere to bring the version of events you were given as a child alongside the one you actually lived, and to begin, carefully and at your own pace, to work out
the difference between the two.

The therapeutic relationship itself matters here. Many people in this situation have spent a lifetime managing other people’s reactions to their history, protecting others from the full weight of it, editing themselves in order to remain acceptable. The experience of bringing that history into contact with another person and not being met with horror, pity, or retreat is, over time, genuinely reparative. It does not undo what happened, but it can shift the way you carry it.

Therapy also offers a space to examine the fears about identity and resemblance that so many adults in this situation carry quietly and alone, to look at which fears are grounded in reality and which are inherited narratives that were never yours to begin with. Many people arrive not knowing what they want from therapy, only that something has never settled. That is a perfectly reasonable place to start. If any of this resonates, you do not need clarity or a clear presenting problem before making contact. You only need to decide that your experience deserves the same attention that everyone else’s does.

Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice in Bromley, South East London. She specialises in trauma, dissociation, and complex relational difficulties, and works with adults navigating the long-term effects of childhood adversity. To enquire about working together, contact me.

Resources

• Children and Young People Bereaved by Parental Domestic Homicide: A Focus on the United Kingdom and Ireland — Devaney et al. (2026), University of Edinburgh and University of Melbourne. Free to access via Edinburgh Research Explorer.
• Trauma and Recovery — Judith Herman. The foundational text on understanding complex trauma and the conditions needed for healing.
• It’s Not Always Depression — Hilary Jacobs Hendel. A clear, accessible guide to working with the emotional experience underlying trauma-related presentations.
• Inherited Family Trauma — Galit Atlas. Explores how unspoken family histories shape identity and intimate relationships.
• Therapist Uncensored podcast — clinically grounded conversations on attachment, trauma, and relational neuroscience.
• SAMM (Support After Murder and Manslaughter) — peer support run by people bereaved by homicide themselves, open to adults regardless of how long ago the bereavement occurred.
• AAFDA (Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse) — specialist advocacy and peer support for families bereaved by fatal domestic abuse, including help navigating domestic homicide reviews and other statutory processes.
• Victim Support National Homicide Service — free, government-funded support for anyone bereaved by murder or manslaughter in England and Wales, available regardless of when the homicide occurred. Call 0300 303 1984.