When a parent dies, the world tends to assume you know what you are feeling. People send flowers, offer condolences, ask how you are coping. There are rituals for this, a funeral, a gathering, a period of acknowledged loss. Society has a script for bereavement, and most people around you will expect you to follow it. For some adults, that script does not fit at all.

You may feel sadness, genuine and real. You may also feel relief, or a strange flatness where the expected weight of grief fails to arrive. You may find yourself going through the practical arrangements with unexpected efficiency, wondering privately why you are not more undone. Or the grief may arrive weeks later, sideways, in a form that does not feel like grief for the person who died but for something else entirely, something harder to name.

If your relationship with your parent was complicated, their death does not simplify it. In many cases it makes things considerably more difficult, because the parent’s death closes off any possibility that things might eventually have been different.

The grief beneath the grief

The psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to describe grief that lacks the clarity and social recognition of conventional bereavement. One form of ambiguous loss describes exactly the experience many adults with difficult parental relationships carry: grieving not the person who died, but the relationship that never existed, the parent that person could not or would not be, and the repair that will now never come.

This is a profound and legitimate loss. It is also one that the people around you are unlikely to name or fully understand, particularly if they knew your parent as charming, capable, or warm in public. The gap between who your parent was to the world and who they were to you in private is itself a form of grief that most people have no language for.

The researcher Kenneth Doka developed the concept of disenfranchised grief to describe loss that society does not acknowledge or support. The grief of a complicated parental relationship falls squarely here. You may feel unable to grieve openly, uncertain whether your feelings are justified, aware that expressing ambivalence about a parent who has just died risks being misunderstood or judged. That isolation compounds an already difficult experience significantly.

Why the death can reopen old wounds

For adults who spent years managing a painful or confusing relationship with a parent, the death often triggers feelings that go well beyond conventional bereavement. Things that had been contained or managed can surface with unexpected force. Old longings, long-suppressed anger, grief for the childhood you deserved and did not have, shame that has never quite been examined. A parent’s death removes the unconscious possibility of resolution that many people carry without knowing it, and its removal can feel like a loss on top of a loss.

Some people are surprised to find themselves grieving more after the death than they ever grieved during the relationship. That is not a contradiction. It is the grief finally finding room to exist, now that the relationship no longer requires constant management. Others feel guilt about the relief. Relief that the complexity is over, that the painful visits have ended, that they no longer have to negotiate with someone whose behaviour was hurtful or unpredictable. Relief is a legitimate response to the end of a difficult relationship. It does not mean you you did not love your parent, or that you are a bad person for having felt the way you did.

What therapy can offer

When a parent dies leaving a relationship that was painful, confusing, or chronically disappointing, one of the things that can feel most out of reach is the possibility of being known and responded to in a way that actually feels safe. That experience may never have been fully available in the relationship with your parent. It can become available in therapy.

Relational psychodynamic therapy works through the quality of the therapeutic relationship itself. A space that is consistent, honest, and genuinely attuned to your experience offers something qualitatively different from the relationship that caused the wound. That difference is not incidental. For many people it is where the most significant healing occurs, not through insight alone, but through the lived Experience of a relationship in which their feelings are taken seriously, their needs are not a burden, and they are not required to manage someone else’s emotional state in order to feel safe.

Complicated grief of this kind rarely benefits from closure in the conventional sense. The research on ambiguous loss is clear: the goal is not a tidy ending, but the capacity to hold the loss without it continuing to shape your life in ways you have no choice about. That shift takes time. Many people find it is some of the most meaningful work they have ever done.

If you recognise yourself here and would like to explore whether therapy might help, you are welcome to get in touch

About the author
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor based in Bromley, South East London. She specialises in grief, trauma, and complex family dynamics, working with adults in longer-term psychodynamic therapy. She is currently completing a Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Psychological Trauma at the University of Chester.

Further reading and listening

Books

• Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss. directly relevant to anyone grieving a relationship that was never quite what it should have been.
• Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas. about how unspoken family losses and absences pass between generations, directly relevant to the experience of grieving something that was never named or acknowledged.
• It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine. Written by a therapist following a devastating personal loss, this book challenges the cultural pressure to resolve grief quickly and validates experiences of loss that do not fit the expected shape.

Podcast

• Griefcast with Cariad Lloyd. A BAFTA-winning podcast in which public figures discuss grief with honesty, depth, and no sentimentality. Several episodes deal directly with complicated family loss, disenfranchised grief, and the feelings that do not fit the conventional bereavement script. https://cariadlloyd.com/griefcast

You Tube

• Dr. Ramani Durvasula on grieving a narcissistic or emotionally unavailable parent. Looks at the guilt, relief, and complicated feelings that often accompany the death of a difficult parent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzG9BUd6UZ8