Grief Unspoken: When Loss Isn’t Validated by Society

Part of the Healing Through Grief & Loss Blog Series

Some grief come with casseroles, memorial services, and long embraces.
Others… come with silence, shame, and questions you don’t dare ask out loud.

Maybe the person you lost did something terrible, abused others, committed a violent crime, or caused real harm to people you care about.
Maybe society, your family, or your community sees them as a monster.
And maybe… you still loved them.

You still do.

But your grief doesn’t feel safe in the open.
It doesn’t feel welcome in support groups.
Even in therapy, you might find yourself censoring the details, afraid of judgment—even from the one person who’s supposed to understand.

This is unspoken grief and it’s far more common than most people realize.

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When Society Doesn’t Allow Your Grief

Unspoken or disenfranchised grief is a term coined by researcher Dr. Kenneth Doka to describe loss that isn’t socially acknowledged or supported. This includes:

• Grieving someone who caused harm to others
• Grieving a relationship that was secret, stigmatized, or abusive
• Grieving a family member involved in crime, abuse, or violence
• Grieving someone others view as undeserving of love, compassion, or remembrance
• Feeling shame or guilt because your grief conflicts with how others see the person

When people around you say things like “Good riddance” or “How can you still care about them after what they did?” it creates emotional isolation that makes grief even harder to process.

You may feel like you have to choose between your pain and your loyalty, between being seen as a “good person” and being honest about your heartbreak.

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The Complexity of Loving People Who Harm Others

Love is not always logical.

We form bonds through attachment, family systems, shared history, and survival. You may have loved an abusive parent, a partner who was controlling, or a sibling who hurt others. You may have known their humanity in ways the world never did. And now that they’re gone, you’re stuck holding both truths—the love and the pain, the person and their actions.

This is where grief becomes complicated.

You may find yourself:

• Ashamed of your sadness
• Afraid others will judge you
• Confused about your moral compass
• Alone in your grief, even among people who knew the deceased

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What Makes This Kind of Grief So Hard

This grief is not just about the loss. It’s about:

• Grieving someone you were taught you shouldn’t love
• Losing the possibility of repair or reckoning
• Being unable to publicly mourn or share stories
• Feeling misunderstood, dismissed, or worse…blamed

Traditional grief support models and many therapists may not have the training or the tolerance for this kind of work. The risk of further pathologizing or moralizing your experience is real. Which is why a safe, attuned therapeutic space matters so much.

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What to Look for in a Therapist When Grieving Someone Who Caused Harm

When seeking a therapist to help with complex or stigmatized grief, look for someone who:

• Has training in trauma-informed care, grief therapy, and parts work like IFS
• Uses language around nonjudgmental, whole-person healing
• Acknowledges disenfranchised grief or ambiguous loss
• Demonstrates the ability to hold dualities without shaming or minimizing
• Offers modalities like EMDR, which can help resolve trauma blocks and internal conflicts
• Has experience working with moral injury, complicated grief, and identity loss

Questions to Ask a Therapist About This Kind of Grief Work:

1. “How do you approach grief that’s complicated by shame, guilt, or conflicting feelings about the person who passed?”
   Why it helps: This question gently opens the door to see if the therapist acknowledges nuanced grief and can hold multiple emotional truths.
2. “Have you worked with clients grieving people who weren’t safe or who hurt others?”
   Why it helps: This screens for relevant experience or at least openness. A therapist doesn’t need to be an expert, but they should be grounded and non-reactive.
3. “What are your thoughts on grief that isn’t always supported by others, like when society might not view the person as worthy of mourning?”
   Why it helps: This reveals the therapist’s values and whether they create space for disenfranchised grief.
4. “How do you work with parts of a person that feel stuck in anger or guilt while other parts still feel love or sadness?”
   Why it helps: This invites discussion about using IFS, EMDR, or other trauma-informed approaches for fragmented, complex emotional experiences.

You deserve a space where all parts of your grief can be heard, including the parts that feel ugly, confusing, or undeserved.

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Parsing the Person from Their Actions

In grief work, especially when harm is involved, one of the most healing processes can be learning to separate the person you loved from the harm they caused. This doesn’t excuse or erase what they did. Instead, it creates the necessary emotional and psychological room to grieve authentically.

Parts work, like IFS (Internal Family Systems), allows you to identify the parts of yourself that are holding shame, love, anger, and confusion, and give them voice and compassion. Meanwhile, EMDR can help your brain reprocess the painful memories and beliefs that keep you stuck in guilt or loyalty binds.

You don’t have to pretend the harm didn’t happen. But you also don’t have to pretend your grief doesn’t exist.

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Recommended Readings & Resources

• Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow by Kenneth J. Doka
• It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• Moral Injury and Beyond: Understanding Human Anguish and Healing Traumatic Wounds by Renos K. Papadopoulos
• It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel
• The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
• Grieving the Loss of Someone You Love: Daily Meditations to Help You Through the Grieving Process by Raymond R. Mitsch & Lynn Brookside
• Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore
• Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

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This Is Grief, Too. You Don’t Have to Hold It Alone.

Unspoken grief is still grief. It matters, even if no one else understands it.

At Path to Growth, I work with individuals navigating these complex, heavy, often private grief experiences. We use a blend of EMDR, informed IFS, and somatic-based therapy to help you unpack the pain, tend to the parts that are holding guilt, shame, or confusion, and make space to grieve without judgment.

If traditional therapy hasn’t felt like a fit or if you need more depth than a weekly 50-minute session—intensive therapy may be a powerful option. In 3-hour blocks or multi-day intensive treatment options, we can do the kind of deep, integrative work that helps you stop circling the pain and start healing in transformational ways.

👉 Ready to talk, schedule a consult today to get started, or reach out via email for more availability.
👉 Curious about intensives?
👉 Not sure what you need? Let’s jump on a free consultation call.
We’ll respond within 24 hours and help guide you to the right next step, even if that’s not with me.

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📚 This blog is part of the Healing Through Loss series. Check out other titles:

• Grief: Grieving Someone Who Hurt You
• The Shame of “Still Not Over It”: Complicated Grief and Internalized Expectations
• “It Wasn’t a Death, But It Was a Loss”: Expanding Our Understanding of Grief and Trauma
• You Can Miss Someone and Be Angry With Them — That’s Normal Grief, Too
• Parts of You Are Grieving Too: Using IFS to Map Internal Responses to Loss
• How EMDR Helps Untangle the Confusion of “Should I Even Be Grieving?