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

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 16, 2022

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

 

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.

Camille 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 Camille 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 Camille 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.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer