Yes, sweetheart, after all this time, you STILL get to grieve this.

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 16, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Relational trauma is the emotional injury caused by harmful or neglectful experiences in key relationships — especially early ones with caregivers or family — that shape how you feel about yourself and connect with others throughout your life. It is not about blaming your parents or labeling yourself as damaged; it’s about recognizing the lasting impact of being unseen, unheard, or unsafe in the relationships meant to protect you. For you, this means understanding why certain emotional wounds keep reopening and why grief about your childhood feels so persistent and intense. Relational trauma is the invisible thread running through your struggles, and naming it is the first step toward owning your experience without shame. This matters because it frees you to grieve those losses openly and to begin healing on your own, deeply personal timeline.

• You carry grief for the childhood you never had—the safety, attunement, and emotional presence that were absent—and it’s not only valid but vital to name this loss with precision and compassion.
• Relational trauma means that grief can resurface repeatedly, even after years, because your nervous system is still processing what was never resolved, and this recurring grief is a sign your healing is actively unfolding.
• Allowing yourself to fully feel this grief, without judgment or timelines, is a radical act of self-compassion and essential to moving through the complex emotions tied to your early relational wounds.

Just over six years ago, I wrote an essay called “Yes, sweetheart, you DO actually get to grieve this.”

It was my answer and love letter to clients and readers of mine who would so often say something along the lines of:

“It’s ancient history. Shouldn’t I be over this by now? Why am I so sad? Why do I still have grief over this?”

That little essay went on to become one of the most trafficked and commented-upon pieces on my website.

It struck a chord. It resonated. 

That essay did what I hoped it would: it gave people permission to feel all their feelings and grief no matter how much time had passed, and no matter how concrete or abstract the loss was that they had and were experiencing.

So why am I bringing this up?

Because there was a moment a few weeks ago when I was having a really bad day.

A day when something I thought I was “done” grieving got re-activated again in a potent and painful way.

So I went to my laptop and I literally Googled my own article so I could re-read it.

(Believe me: I’m not trying to be narcissistic here but I know that when I sit down to write, something wiser and clearer comes through me, and when I’m *not* in that place (which can be often) I’m served by those wiser self words I wrote once upon a time as much as the next person with a relational trauma history.)

Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma

Take this 5-minute, 25-question quiz to find out — and learn what to do next if you do.

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Yes, sweetheart, after all this time, you STILL get to grieve this.

So I re-read my article. 

And while my writing style has changed over the years (and lord knows my formatting has evolved!), the content remained solid and just what I needed at that moment when I was berating myself for “still not being over” something that happened so long ago.

It helped my self-talk shift from, “Ugh, again?! Why does this grief still have such a grip on me?”

to “Yes, sweetheart, after all this time, you STILL get to grieve this.”

I figured, if revisiting my own article from 2016 could serve me today in 2022, it might be worthwhile to share it again with you.

So whether you’ve been on my newsletter from the earliest days (Spring 2015) or if you’ve only recently signed up in the last few weeks or months, I truly hope that seeing this archived piece of mine feels helpful, soothing, and increases your compassion for yourself and your experience. 

Processing Recurring Grief in Trauma-Informed Therapy

When grief you thought was “finished” suddenly resurfaces with devastating intensity, trauma-informed therapy provides crucial support for navigating these unexpected returns to old pain without drowning in shame about “still” needing to process something from decades ago.

Your therapist understands that actively grieving your past isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing spiral where you encounter deeper layers of loss as your capacity to feel expands. They normalize the experience of being ambushed by grief at unexpected moments—when your child reaches the age you were when trauma occurred, when you achieve something your parents couldn’t celebrate, when current losses reactivate ancient abandonments—helping you recognize these returns as evidence of healing, not failure.

The therapeutic space becomes a container for holding both the grief itself and your grief about still grieving—the meta-layers of shame, frustration, and exhaustion that compound the original loss. Your therapist helps you distinguish between the inner critic saying “you should be over this” (often an internalized parental voice) and your authentic need to honor losses that fundamentally shaped you.

Through approaches like EMDR for reprocessing grief-laden memories, somatic work for releasing grief held in the body, or parts work for embracing the grieving parts without judgment, you develop increasing capacity to welcome grief’s return as a teacher rather than a tormentor.

Most importantly, therapy reframes recurring grief from pathology to wisdom—understanding that some losses are so profound they require a lifetime of integration, that grieving in spirals rather than straight lines allows you to metabolize pain at the pace your nervous system can handle.

Your therapist holds steady witness as you learn to extend the same compassion to yourself that you would offer a friend, developing an internal voice that responds to grief’s return not with “again?!” but with “yes, sweetheart, after all this time, you still get to grieve this”—transforming self-attack into self-compassion, isolation into connection, and ancient pain into integrated wisdom.

Please enjoy my original article about grief from 2016 here. And, if you feel so inclined when you’re done reading it, leave a message in the comments below to let me know if it resonated with you, and if it soothed and supported you. 

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

How Delayed Grief Shows Up in Driven Women

The driven woman’s relationship to grief is often shaped by a lifelong practice of forward momentum. Her particular survival strategy — achieve, move on, produce, repeat — is precisely what allowed her to function through experiences that would have otherwise been overwhelming. The child who experienced neglect, emotional unavailability, or outright loss learned early that feeling the grief fully wasn’t safe, wasn’t useful, wasn’t possible while she still needed to perform at school, keep her siblings calm, or earn her parents’ approval. So the grief went somewhere. Into the body. Into a low-grade sadness that she calls her “baseline.” Into a grief drawer she opens by accident every few years, usually when something in the present echoes something from the past.

In my work with driven women, delayed grief often surfaces at moments of external accomplishment — the promotion that should feel wonderful, the relationship milestone that should bring joy. The grief arrives precisely when the woman might finally have enough safety and enough psychological space to feel what she wasn’t able to feel before. This is disorienting. It doesn’t fit the cultural narrative that achievement brings happiness. And it doesn’t fit the woman’s own narrative about who she is and how she operates.

Ines is a 41-year-old corporate attorney who grew up with a mother who struggled with chronic depression. Her mother was physically present and functionally capable most of the time, but emotionally unavailable in the ways that mattered most — the celebrations that weren’t celebrated, the struggles that weren’t witnessed, the ordinary childhood moments that went unmirrored. Last spring, Ines made senior partner. The night after the announcement, she drove home, walked into her apartment, and cried for two hours. “I kept thinking I should be happy,” she told me. “Everyone keeps telling me this is what I worked for. But I just kept thinking about my mom and how she’ll never really understand what this means to me.” What Ines was encountering wasn’t depression or ingratitude. It was decades of unacknowledged grief for the mother she needed and didn’t have — grief that had been waiting for a moment safe enough to finally arrive.

Why the Inner Critic Says You Should Be Over It by Now

One of the most consistent features of delayed grief is the accompanying inner critic voice — the part that says “you should be over this by now,” “other people have had it worse,” “you’re just being dramatic,” “it was so long ago.” This voice is worth examining carefully, because it is almost always an internalized version of something that was actually communicated — explicitly or implicitly — in the original environment where the grief went unwitnessed.

The message that emotions should have an expiration date, that grief is acceptable for a short window and then becomes self-indulgence, is not a psychological truth. It’s a cultural artifact that serves productivity and social comfort at the expense of genuine healing. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of Trauma and Recovery, wrote about how the social pressure to minimize and move past trauma often works in direct opposition to what trauma recovery actually requires — which is sustained, unhurried attention to what was lost and what it meant.

For driven women specifically, the inner critic’s “get over it” message often has an achievement-oriented flavor: “You’ve accomplished so much. You’ve moved forward. You should be grateful. Grief is for people who haven’t built something.” This framing positions grief as incompatible with success — as if the two experiences couldn’t possibly coexist. They can. In fact, actively grieving the past is often a prerequisite for being fully alive to the present, including the present of genuine accomplishment and connection.

Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Function — and Neither Invalidates the Other

Driven women grieve differently — or rather, the world expects them to. They’re given a week of bereavement leave and then expected to return to performance. They handle the logistics of loss — the paperwork, the calls, the estate — with the same competence they bring to everything, and because they’re still functioning, everyone assumes they’re fine. In my work with bereaved clients, functioning is often the last thing to go, and the least reliable indicator of what’s happening underneath.

Grace is a finance executive who lost her mother eight months ago and returned to work after ten days. She delivered a flawless quarterly presentation the following week. Her team never saw her cry. In my office, she described a grief so heavy she sometimes pulled over on her commute because she couldn’t see through the tears. “I don’t know how to do this publicly,” she said. “So I do it alone.” What Grace hadn’t been told — what driven women are rarely told — is that grief doesn’t follow a timeline, doesn’t respect productivity, and doesn’t care about your calendar.

Both/And means Grace can be performing at the highest level professionally and devastated privately. She can be “moving forward” and still carrying her loss everywhere she goes. She can build a new life that doesn’t include her mother and still reach for the phone to call her every Sunday. Grief and function can coexist. Acknowledging one doesn’t threaten the other.

The Systemic Lens: Why Culture Doesn’t Know What to Do With Women’s Grief

American culture is remarkably bad at grief. We offer three to five days of bereavement leave and then expect full productivity. We praise the bereaved for “being strong” and worry about them when they cry in public. We treat grief as a phase to move through rather than a reality to integrate. For driven women, this cultural inadequacy compounds the personal loss, because the message is clear: grieve efficiently, grieve privately, and get back to work.

The driven women I work with who are grieving often face an additional systemic pressure: the expectation that their competence should extend to mourning. They should grieve well — neatly, on schedule, without burdening anyone. They should be sad enough that people don’t worry but functional enough that no one has to step in. This impossible standard mirrors the impossible standards they face in every other domain, and it makes genuine mourning — the messy, nonlinear, body-based process that grief actually is — feel like yet another performance to optimize.

In my practice, I name the cultural context because it affects how women grieve and how they judge their grieving. When a driven woman understands that her culture has provided almost no infrastructure for real mourning — no extended leave, no communal rituals, no acceptable timeline for being diminished — she can stop judging herself for struggling and start grieving in the way her body actually needs, rather than the way her culture demands.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

The cultural message that grief should be private, brief, and then concluded is a particularly heavy burden for women who have already been trained not to take up too much emotional space. The driven woman who finally allows herself to grieve is often navigating not just the grief itself but the anxiety that she’s burdening others, the worry that she’ll be perceived as fragile, the concern that visible grief is incompatible with her professional identity. This anxiety about the grief is sometimes more exhausting than the grief itself.

There is also a class dimension worth naming: grief as a sustained practice requires time and psychological safety that are not equally distributed. The woman who can afford to slow down, who has a support network, who has access to good therapy — she can grieve. The woman working multiple jobs, caregiving for dependents, operating without a net — her grief goes on hold not because she’s less evolved but because the material conditions of her life don’t yet permit it. Trauma-informed support that ignores these structural realities isn’t actually trauma-informed. It’s just therapy for the privileged.

How to Honor Delayed Grief: A Path Forward for the Grief That’s Been Waiting

In my work with clients navigating delayed grief, one of the first and most important things I offer is this: there is no expiration date on loss. The grief that you’ve been carrying quietly, the grief you told yourself you should be over by now, the grief for something that happened years or even decades ago — it’s still valid. It still deserves space. Time doesn’t heal grief; it just creates distance, and sometimes that distance gets mistaken for healing until something breaks through it and you realize the loss is still right there, exactly where you left it. That realization isn’t a step backward. It’s an invitation.

What makes delayed grief different from acute grief isn’t its legitimacy — it’s the specific obstacles that get built up around it over time. By the time you reach grief that’s been deferred for years, there’s often a whole architecture of coping around it: the busyness, the achievement, the stoic self-sufficiency, the belief that feeling it now is somehow self-indulgent when others have it worse, or when so much time has passed. Healing delayed grief requires first dismantling that architecture, gently, and creating actual space for what’s been waiting underneath.

Somatic Experiencing is one of the modalities I reach for most often with delayed grief, because grief held for long periods tends to be grief held in the body. There’s a tightness in the chest, a heaviness, a chronic low-grade ache that’s become so familiar it registers as background noise rather than a message. SE helps you bring careful, attuned attention to where grief lives in the body and allows you to begin moving through it rather than around it. Many clients describe this as finally being able to cry — not performing emotion, but actually feeling something that’s been waiting to be felt.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can also be valuable for delayed grief, particularly when the loss is tied to a specific traumatic event or relationship — a death that happened suddenly, an ending that was never properly grieved, a wound from a parent that was never allowed to be named as a wound. EMDR allows you to return to the emotional truth of those experiences and metabolize what was too much to metabolize at the time. Many clients find that they access grief in EMDR sessions that they’ve been intellectually aware of for years but couldn’t quite feel.

Parts work through Internal Family Systems (IFS) is useful here as well. Delayed grief is often delayed because a protective part decided, at some point, that feeling the loss wasn’t safe — that it would be too overwhelming, that you needed to keep functioning, that showing grief meant weakness or losing control. IFS allows you to find that protector, thank it for what it did, and negotiate for it to step back enough to let the underlying grief have some space. That negotiation, done carefully and with support, tends to be more effective than trying to override the protection by force.

One thing I want to say clearly: doing grief work isn’t the same as drowning in grief. When grief is processed in a supported, titrated way — not all at once, but in doses that your nervous system can integrate — it doesn’t destroy your functioning. It actually frees up enormous amounts of energy that have been going into holding the grief at bay. Many clients describe feeling lighter, more present, and more genuinely alive after grief work than they have in years.

Your grief has been patient. It deserves to be met. If you’re ready to let it have some space — with support, in a context that can hold it — I’d be honored to do that work with you. You can learn more about therapy with me or take our short quiz to get a sense of what kind of support might be the right fit. It’s not too late to grieve. It’s exactly the right time.

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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