When the Person Who Hurt You Dies: The Grief No One Prepares You For
When the person who hurt you dies, grief doesn’t follow the script anyone handed you. It’s more likely to arrive as relief tangled with rage, numbness braided through longing, or a stillness you don’t have a name for. This guide walks through disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss, two frameworks that finally give language to what you’re carrying, and it makes room for grief and relief to both be true at once.
- The Phone Call You Didn’t Know How to Answer
- Disenfranchised Grief: The Name for What You’re Feeling
- The Full Spectrum of What You’re Allowed to Feel
- The Parent Who Was Never Really There: Ambiguous Loss
- What It’s Like When the World Expects You to Mourn
- Both/And: Grief AND Relief Are Both Honest
- The Systemic Lens: Why This Is the Least Supported Loss
- What Actual Healing Looks Like After This Loss
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Phone Call You Didn’t Know How to Answer
Karen is 52, sitting at her kitchen island at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, still in her work blazer, when her brother’s name lights up her phone. She lets it ring twice before she answers. Their mother died an hour ago at the assisted living facility, the same mother who used to lock Karen out of the house as a punishment when she was nine, the same mother Karen hadn’t spoken to in four years except at her brother’s wedding. Karen says “okay” into the phone. Then she says it again. She hangs up and sits with her hands flat on the granite counter, waiting for something to move through her. Nothing does. Not yet.
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“I kept waiting to cry,” she told me two weeks later, turning her water glass in a slow circle on the arm of the couch in my office. “I thought there’d be this wave. I planned for the wave. I had tissues in my car. And instead I just felt like I’d been handed a form to fill out and I didn’t have a pen.”
I’ve sat with this exact stillness more times than I can count across more than fifteen years in this field. It’s not that Karen didn’t feel anything. It’s that what she felt didn’t match any grief template she’d ever been handed, so her body simply held the space open, waiting for feelings that had nowhere sanctioned to land.
Natalie’s version of this looked different but rhymed in the same key. She’s 43, and when her father died of a heart attack in March, she was in a client meeting when her sister texted. Natalie excused herself, walked to the parking garage, sat in her car, and didn’t turn the key for forty minutes. She wasn’t crying. She was just still, watching a maintenance worker hose down the concrete two levels down, feeling the particular exhaustion of a body that has been braced for something for thirty years and can finally, for one moment, stop bracing.
What Karen and Natalie were both living through has a name. Kenneth Doka, PhD, a professor of gerontology at The Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle and a longtime senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America, spent decades studying grief that doesn’t get social permission. He calls it disenfranchised grief, and I think about his framework nearly every week in session. Losing a parent who caused you harm doesn’t come with a script anyone else recognizes, and that missing script is exactly what makes this particular loss so disorienting.
Kenneth Doka, PhD, professor of gerontology at The Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle and senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America, coined this term for grief that isn’t openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.
In plain terms: If the person who died also hurt you, the people around you may not know how to make room for your grief. That doesn’t make your grief any less real.
Here’s how I’d translate Doka’s framework into a Tuesday night at your own kitchen counter. Grief is usually treated like a permission slip that gets handed out automatically: someone you loved died, so you’re allowed to be sad, and everyone around you knows exactly how to respond to that sadness with casseroles and sympathy cards and time off work. Disenfranchised grief means the permission slip never got signed. You’re standing in the same loss without the same social scaffolding, and often without even the vocabulary to name what you’re standing in. That gap between what you feel and what the world expects you to perform is where so much of the loneliness in this specific kind of loss comes from.
If part of what you’re wrestling with is whether to even show up for the funeral, two companion pieces might help you think it through: Attending the Funeral of an Estranged Parent and Choosing Not to Attend a Funeral.
Disenfranchised Grief: The Name for What You’re Feeling
Of course you don’t have a clean feeling about this. You’re not supposed to have a clean feeling about the death of someone who was both your parent and, at various points, a source of real harm. The culture around you has exactly one script for a parent’s death, and it was written for a different relationship than the one you actually had.
Here’s what disenfranchised grief tends to look like when it shows up in a driven, capable woman’s actual week, not in a textbook:
- Feeling isolated because no one in your life seems to understand what you’re actually grieving
- Carrying guilt about feeling relief or anger instead of the sadness you think you’re supposed to feel
- Facing pressure to perform grief at a funeral or family gathering you don’t feel
- Missing the chance to mourn openly because your relationship with this person was defined by harm
Karen described this pressure precisely in our second session. “My aunt kept saying ‘she’s in a better place now,’ and I kept thinking, a better place than what? Better than the place she put me in when I was nine? I couldn’t say that out loud at the reception. So I just nodded and ate a deviled egg and felt like I was lying with my whole body.”
That’s the disenfranchisement in miniature. Not a dramatic rejection, just a thousand small moments of nodding along to a script that doesn’t fit, while the actual feeling has nowhere to go.
| What Disenfranchised Grief Can Look Like | Why It Happens |
|---|---|
| Feeling relief instead of sadness after a harmful parent dies | Society expects grief for the parent role, not for the actual relationship |
| Being met with silence or subtle judgment when you’re honest | Grief for someone who caused harm isn’t socially validated the way other grief is |
| Carrying guilt or shame about your own emotional response | Cultural scripts insist you should be sad, and should forgive, and should move on |
| Feeling confused about what you’re even supposed to feel | The relationship itself was too complicated to fit a single grief model |
Naming disenfranchised grief doesn’t fix it, but it does something almost as important. It tells you the confusion you’re in isn’t a personal failure to grieve correctly. It’s the predictable result of a loss that never had a template. For more on how that plays out around funerals specifically, see attending the funeral of an estranged parent and choosing not to attend the funeral.
The Full Spectrum of What You’re Allowed to Feel
Pauline Boss, PhD, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota and the psychologist who originated ambiguous loss theory, described a category of loss that resists clean resolution because the boundaries of who or what was lost stay unclear.
In plain terms: You might be grieving the death, the childhood you didn’t get, the apology that never came, and the relationship that was never safe, all at the same time, and none of those griefs cancel out the others.
I read Pauline Boss’s original 1999 book on ambiguous loss years into my clinical practice, and it reorganized how I think about this particular category of grief. Boss was writing initially about families with a missing soldier or a parent with advanced dementia, people who are gone and not gone at once. But the framework maps almost perfectly onto what I hear from clients grieving a parent who hurt them. You’re not only losing the person who died. You’re also finally, permanently losing the chance that they might have become the parent you needed them to be.
Stephen Porges, PhD, a neuroscientist and the originator of polyvagal theory, offers a piece of this that I find myself explaining in session almost weekly. Your autonomic nervous system doesn’t necessarily update the moment your parent dies. Even once you know intellectually that the threat is over, your body may still be running old code, the same bracing pattern it learned decades ago. That’s why news of the death itself can land as a physical jolt, a racing heart, a tight chest, a strange stillness, that has little to do with what you consciously believe you should feel.
Natalie’s forty minutes in the parking garage is the clearest example of this I’ve seen in a long time. “I wasn’t thinking anything,” she said. “I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t relieved, I wasn’t sad. I think my body just needed to sit there and not perform anything for anyone for a while.” That stillness wasn’t absence. It was her nervous system, finally off the clock after thirty years of quiet vigilance, needing a beat before it could catch up to what had actually happened.
| Feeling | What Might Be Underneath It | What It Can Look Like on a Tuesday |
|---|---|---|
| Relief | A nervous system finally registering that a chronic threat has ended | A physical loosening, sleeping better, an unexpected lightness that feels confusing |
| Numbness | A protective shutdown so the full weight doesn’t hit all at once | Going through the motions of the week, feeling strangely far away from your own life |
| Rage | Years of unexpressed anger finally reaching the surface | Snapping at your partner over something small, replaying old arguments in the shower |
| Unexpected sadness | Grief for the parent you needed, not only the parent you had | Crying at a commercial, missing someone you also feared |
| Complicated love | Genuine attachment that coexisted with genuine harm | Keeping a photograph you can’t explain to anyone, missing a voice you were also relieved to stop hearing |
None of these reactions cancel each other out, and none of them need to be resolved into one tidy feeling before you’re allowed to keep living your week. If you’re trying to figure out how to move through funeral logistics or family expectations while you’re still sorting through all of this, attending a funeral for an estranged parent and choosing not to attend a funeral both walk through the practical side of that decision.
The Parent Who Was Never Really There: Ambiguous Loss
Here’s the three-layer version of ambiguous loss I actually use with clients. Clinically, Boss defines it as loss without clear resolution, where the boundaries of the loss stay blurry rather than final. Think of it like grieving someone who was always half in the room and half out of it, so that even after they’re physically gone, you’re still not entirely sure what you lost, because you never had a clear read on what you had in the first place. In practice, this means you might find yourself grieving your mother’s death on Tuesday and grieving the mother you never had on Wednesday, and both of those griefs are legitimate, even though only one of them has a funeral attached to it.
Karen put language to this without knowing she was describing a clinical framework. “I’m not sad she’s gone,” she told me, “I’m sad that she’s gone and I still don’t know if she ever loved me. I wanted one more chance to find out. Now there’s no more chances. That’s the part that got me, not in the moment, but three days later, doing the dishes.”
That’s ambiguous loss in a single sentence. The finality of death doesn’t resolve the ambiguity of the relationship. It just closes the door on it forever, which is its own separate wound, layered on top of the wound of the relationship itself.
Ambiguous loss also complicates something very concrete: what you actually do with your body on the day of the funeral. Do you go. Do you speak. Do you sit in the back. Do you decline the invitation altogether. There isn’t a universally correct answer, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretending there’s a clean formula. What I can say from working with women in exactly this position is that the choice tends to go better when it’s made from what feels physically survivable to you, not from what will look correct to your extended family. For a closer look at both sides of that decision, see Attending the Funeral of an Estranged Parent and Choosing Not to Attend the Funeral.
| Characteristic | How It Shows Up When the Parent Who Died Also Caused Harm |
|---|---|
| Physical presence | The parent was alive and present, but emotionally absent or actively harmful |
| Emotional experience | Grief mixed with relief, confusion, anger, or numbness, often shifting hour to hour |
| Closure | Incomplete. The death forecloses the possibility of repair rather than delivering it |
| Social recognition | Minimal. This grief is rarely acknowledged by extended family or friends |
| Impact on identity | The loss of the imagined parent can be harder to metabolize than the loss of the real one |
Understanding ambiguous loss won’t make the ambiguity disappear. What it does is give you a container sturdy enough to hold grief and relief at the same time, without either one needing to win. For a broader look at how these dynamics connect to the wider betrayal trauma picture, my complete guide to betrayal trauma goes deeper into the nervous system side of this.
What It’s Like When the World Expects You to Mourn
Ritual autonomy is the right to decide how, whether, and with whom you mark a death, especially when the standard public rituals don’t reflect the truth of the relationship you actually had.
In plain terms: You can attend, not attend, hold a private ritual of your own, stay quiet, write a letter you never send, or do nothing visible at all. Your body gets a vote in this.
Karen sat at that kitchen island the night of the call, still in her blazer, waiting for a wave that didn’t come. What came instead was a text from her aunt the next morning: “Let me know what you need, we’re all grieving together.” Karen told me she stared at that text for ten minutes before typing back “thank you,” because the truth, that she wasn’t grieving together with anyone, that her grief was a private and complicated thing with edges her aunt had never seen, felt impossible to say.
Here’s what that pressure tends to look like in an actual week:
- Family and friends assume you’ll grieve publicly, in recognizable ways. When you don’t, they may read you as cold, when you’re actually just being honest.
- You feel pressure to perform a grief you don’t have. Over time this can curdle into shame or isolation.
- Your actual feelings, relief, anger, sadness, resentment, get flattened or dismissed. People want the simpler version because the complicated version is harder to sit with.
- You may find yourself quietly excluded from family conversations or rituals once it becomes clear your grief doesn’t match the group’s.
| What You Can Do | What It Looks Like | A Script You Can Actually Use |
|---|---|---|
| Name your real feelings, even just to yourself | Check in with your body before you check in with the room | “I’m feeling relief and exhaustion right now. That’s allowed.” |
| Set a boundary around the conversation | Decide in advance what you will and won’t discuss | “I’m not ready to talk about this yet. I’ll let you know when I am.” |
| Prepare a short, honest deflection | Have one sentence ready instead of improvising under pressure | “Our relationship was complicated. I’m processing it in my own way.” |
| Choose your level of participation deliberately | Attend, skip, or build your own private ritual | See this guide and this one for the full decision framework |
| Bring in outside support | A therapist, a support group, or one trusted friend who already knows the real story | Consider professional support through therapy with Annie Wright, LMFT |
You don’t need everyone in your family to understand your grief for it to be legitimate. You need enough of a container, even a small one, one therapist, one friend, one private ritual, to hold what’s actually true for you while the rest of the room holds its own simpler version.
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Both/And: Grief AND Relief Are Both Honest
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, poet, The Summer Day
Here’s the both/and I keep coming back to with clients in this exact situation. You can be sad this person is gone, AND relieved that a source of harm has left the world. You can miss a voice on the phone, AND feel your shoulders drop for the first time in years. Grief and relief aren’t opposites competing for the same seat. They’re both honest readings of a relationship that actually contained both love and harm, sometimes in the same afternoon.
Natalie named this better than most people I’ve worked with. Sitting in her car in that parking garage, not crying, just still, she wasn’t choosing relief over grief. She was doing both at once, in a body that finally had permission to stop bracing. When she told me about it weeks later, she said, “I felt like I’d been given back forty minutes of my life that I didn’t know I’d been owed.”
Kenneth Doka’s disenfranchised grief framework explains why the “relief” half of this often stays hidden. Grief that isn’t openly acknowledged is hard enough to carry. Relief that isn’t openly acknowledged, on top of that, can start to feel like a secret you’re keeping from your own family. Your grief doesn’t need public validation to be real, and neither does your relief.
Pauline Boss’s ambiguous loss framework explains the other half. You’re not only mourning the parent who died. You’re also mourning the parent you never had, and relief can genuinely coexist with that mourning, because letting go of a hope you’ve carried for decades is its own kind of freedom, even while it’s also its own kind of loss.
A few concrete ways to hold both at once:
- Say the both/and out loud, even just to yourself: “I’m sad this person is gone, and I’m also relieved that the harm has ended.”
- Give yourself permission to skip a public ritual that would ask you to perform only half of what’s true. See choosing not to attend the funeral if that fits your situation.
- Build a private way of marking the loss, journaling, a letter you never send, a quiet walk on the day of the funeral, that has room for the whole truth.
- Bring the both/and into a session with a trauma-informed therapist who won’t ask you to pick one feeling and discard the other. Explore therapy with Annie if you’re looking for that kind of support.
Karen eventually got there too, three weeks after the phone call. “I lit a candle in my kitchen the night before the funeral,” she told me. “Not for her, exactly. For the nine-year-old who got locked out. I told her it was over now. Then I went to the funeral the next day and sat in the back and felt nothing and everything at the same time.” She hasn’t decided yet what that means. Neither have I, and I don’t think either of us needs to.
The Systemic Lens: Why This Is the Least Supported Loss
Gendered expectations intensify almost everything about this particular grief. Women are still culturally assigned the bulk of the emotional labor around death, expected to perform sorrow, arrange reconciliation, and hold the family together, regardless of what actually happened inside that family. Karen’s stillness at her kitchen counter wasn’t only a private psychological event. It was also the product of a system that had already decided, long before her mother died, what Karen’s grief was supposed to look like from the outside.
Family systems frequently protect a shared story of the past rather than the truth of it. If the family narrative has spent decades minimizing or denying the harm a parent caused, that same system tends to keep minimizing it after death, sometimes more urgently, because the person who caused the harm can no longer defend themselves or contradict the sanitized version. This can leave you as the lone holder of a truth everyone else in the room has agreed to soften.
Death rituals themselves are built around an assumption of shared, uncomplicated grief. Funerals expect a room full of people mourning the same loss in roughly the same way. When your relationship with the deceased doesn’t match that assumption, the ritual itself can feel less like comfort and more like a performance you’re being asked to give. That’s part of why the decision about whether to attend at all deserves real thought rather than automatic compliance, a decision I walk through in more depth in Attending the Funeral of an Estranged Parent and Choosing Not to Attend the Funeral.
| Systemic Pressure | Impact on This Kind of Grief | What Can Help |
|---|---|---|
| The cultural script that says you should be sad | Invalidates relief or anger, enforcing a performance instead of a real feeling | Deliberately reject the imposed emotion and validate your own experience instead |
| Gendered emotional labor expectations | Pressures women specifically to manage the whole family’s feelings around the death | Set clear boundaries about what you will and won’t manage for others |
| Family system denial | Minimizes the harm that occurred, demanding loyalty to the story over the truth | Bring in outside professional support that isn’t invested in the family narrative |
| Funeral and mourning rituals built for uncomplicated grief | Excludes or silences anyone whose grief doesn’t match the room | Consider your own private ritual alongside or instead of the public one |
| Legal and estate logistics | Can reactivate old control dynamics through wills, executors, or family property | Loop in a trusted advisor early, and protect your own boundaries around these decisions |
None of this is a reflection of something wrong with you. It’s the predictable result of a culture that built one grief ritual for every relationship, when in reality some relationships were never simple enough for a single ritual to hold. If the weight of carrying this alongside everything else in your life feels like too much, therapy with Annie and executive coaching are both spaces built for exactly this kind of complexity.
What Actual Healing Looks Like After This Loss
Private ritual tends to matter more than public ritual in this specific kind of grief. Writing a letter you never send. Building a small memorial that reflects the truth of the relationship rather than a sanitized version of it. Setting a boundary around what you will and won’t participate in at the funeral itself. Karen’s candle, lit the night before the service, for the nine-year-old rather than for the woman who died, is a version of exactly this. Healing here rarely announces itself. More often it shows up in a quiet, private gesture that nobody else in the family will ever know happened.
Decompression matters just as much as ritual. Natalie’s forty minutes in the parking garage weren’t a delay tactic or an avoidance of feeling. They were her nervous system finally getting the pause it had been asking for since she was a child. If you notice your own body wanting to sit still in a parking lot, or stay in the shower longer than usual, or take a walk with no destination, that isn’t you failing to grieve correctly. That’s regulation happening in real time, and it deserves room rather than judgment.
Decisions about funerals and memorials will keep surfacing family dynamics that were never resolved while your parent was alive, and that’s worth expecting rather than being blindsided by. You have the right to choose what’s survivable for you, whether that’s attending quietly, showing up only for part of the service, or not attending at all. For the fuller decision framework, attending a funeral for an estranged parent and choosing not to attend a funeral both walk through this in practical detail.
Healing also tends to mean integrating this loss into the larger story of what happened to you growing up, rather than treating it as an isolated event. My complete guide to betrayal trauma goes further into how early relational harm shapes the nervous system long after the person who caused it is gone. Building new foundations of safety, in yourself and in the relationships you choose now, tends to be the longer arc this grief eventually opens onto, even when the first weeks feel like nothing but static.
| Healing Step | What It Can Look Like | Why It Tends to Help |
|---|---|---|
| Therapeutic support | A dedicated space to process grief that doesn’t fit a normal template | Validates the experience and helps integrate feelings that have nowhere else to go |
| Private ritual | A letter, a memorial object, a boundary around the funeral | Reclaims your narrative from the family’s sanitized version |
| Deliberate decompression | Time alone with no agenda, no performance, no audience | Lets the nervous system regulate at its own pace instead of on a schedule |
| Clear decision-making around rituals | Choosing attendance, partial attendance, or absence on your own terms | Protects your boundaries and your safety, both physical and emotional |
| Ongoing integration | Connecting this loss to the wider story of the relationship | Supports healing that lasts well past the funeral itself |
You’re allowed to grieve and to feel relief. Both are honest. Neither one needs to be argued away before you’re allowed to keep living your life. If something in this piece landed for you, you don’t have to sit with it alone. A lot of the women I work with start with one small step, whether that’s a quiet conversation with a friend, a session with a therapist, or simply naming to yourself what you actually feel instead of what you think you should feel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is it normal to feel relief when the person who hurt me dies?
A: Yes. Relief is one of the most common responses I hear from clients after the death of a parent who caused them harm, and it doesn’t cancel out any grief you also feel. Relief usually reflects the fact that an ongoing source of threat or pain has ended. Cultural scripts tend to insist that sadness is the only acceptable response to a parent’s death, which can make relief feel confusing or shameful. Recognizing relief as an honest part of your emotional range is a meaningful step toward actually healing rather than performing healing.
Q: I feel nothing after my abusive parent died. Does that mean something is wrong with me?
A: No. Emotional numbness after this kind of death is often a protective response to feelings that are too complicated or too overwhelming to process all at once. It can also reflect the ambiguous loss of a parent who was emotionally unavailable even while alive, which means the felt loss is smaller than the culturally expected loss. Give yourself permission to sit with whatever does or doesn’t arise, without treating stillness as a verdict on your character.
Q: Why do I still feel grief for a parent who hurt me for most of my life?
A: This is one of the clearest places ambiguous loss shows up. You’re often grieving two things at once: the actual person who died, and the safe, attuned relationship you needed but never had. Both griefs are real, and they don’t require resolving into a single feeling before either one is allowed to exist.
Q: How do I grieve someone I was estranged from when they die?
A: Grieving an estranged parent usually means building your own private ritual rather than relying on a traditional one that assumes a different relationship than the one you actually had. That might mean naming your full range of feelings, anger, relief, sadness, confusion, without pressure to perform grief publicly. Therapy, journaling, or a quiet private ceremony can all give this loss a shape that fits, even though estrangement changes what grief looks like rather than removing it.
Q: My family expects me to grieve publicly at the funeral for a parent who hurt me. What do I actually do?
A: You’re not required to perform a grief that isn’t true for you in order to keep the peace. Disenfranchised grief means your actual feelings may not be recognized by the people around you, especially when harm was involved. Attending quietly, speaking privately with a trusted family member, or stepping back from the event entirely are all valid choices. What matters most is choosing what’s safest and most honest for you, ideally with support from a therapist or trusted friend who already knows your real story.
Related Reading
- Doka, Kenneth J. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989.
- Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1996.
- Shear, M. Katherine. “Complicated Grief.” The New England Journal of Medicine 372, no. 2 (2015): 153, 160.
- Wright, Annie. Betrayal Trauma: The Complete Guide.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
Books & Cultural Sources
- Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
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LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven 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.
