How Undergrieving Keeps You Stuck
Why you need to acknowledge and process the loss before you plan your future
You have been making plans. You have been setting goals. You have been telling yourself that the future is bright, that the past is behind you, that forward is the only direction worth traveling.
And yet, things don’t work out the way you planned.
The promotions you chase feel hollow when they come. The relationships you enter collapse for reasons you cannot name. The energy you pour into work, into children, into the nonstop busyness of life, does not seem either enough or fitting. As if there is a ceiling you cannot break through, no matter how hard you try. It makes you tired. You feel stuck and do not find an explanation why.
It’s very possible that the pain that holds you back arrived long ago and is still unrecognized and unnamed.
Undergrieving or disenfranchised grief
Kenneth Doka tells the story of Marcus. (2) His parents had divorced, and at twelve years old he began to act out at school. His mother was bewildered: “He sees his dad whenever he wants, it’s not like he is dead. There is no reason for him to behave like that!”
However, divorce, separation, the death of a relationship – all these losses are very real. They are losses of connection, of continuity, of the world as it was. But in today’s world, it seems, we only get the right to grieve about a close family member passed away, and it is the only permissible significant loss.
Doka reminds us that serious mourning can occur even when the object of loss remains physically alive. Marcus was acting out in the attempt to grieve a future that would never arrive. A family that would never reform. A father who would never come home at night. His grief was not recognized because the death had not occurred.
Yes, Marcus was just 12, but us in our 30’s-40’s-50’s also tend to regress to a psychologically much younger age during stressful events due to life shifts. We are lost, we want help, we want to get a break from all that, just like children.
Take another example (3). During the onset of the COVID pandemic, there was a couple whose fertility treatment was delayed on end without success. Formally, nobody died, but the experience of not having the long-desired pregnancy made the couple feel isolated and induced powerlessness.
Infertility-related grief got disenfranchised: it did not attract increased social support or usual comforting rituals which would come following a death of a relative. The couple got stuck in the loop of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness – being unable to complete the work of grief, as the loss remained unformulated and therefore unacknowledged.
Moreover, the “supportive” attempts to minimize the pain with comments like “you can always try again” or “adopt” made the processing of the loss even harder, amplifying the isolation.
We are not taught to formulate things as a loss. We are not conditioned to see something important that we lose, especially lose suddenly and unexpectedly – as worthy of grieving and processing, before we move on.
You might be doing the same now. Maybe you have buried something. Perhaps not a death, perhaps a divorce, a layoff, a betrayal, a dream that crumbled in your hands, a relationship that ended without closure. You told yourself to get over it. You convinced yourself that strong people move on. You told yourself that the past is the past. You supported yourself with the words that you can try again.
And now you are stuck.
Underappreciation of grief and loss processing
Grief is the most underappreciated emotional process, because it’s painful, so people tend to shun it and label it “a waste of time”. You might think: why spend time grieving and be sad when I can spend it building the brighter future? You tell yourself: “I will not look into the loss, I’ll just find other ways. Besides, if I build the future I dream of, the past won’t matter any longer.”
However, the ungrieved things may be the reason why things in your present don’t work out and you can’t build the future you desire.
Teleporting into the future, brushing past that you’ve lost something or someone significant, doesn’t work – not just psychologically, but also biologically. Because your brain forms attachments.
John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who spent a lifetime studying how we bond and what happens when those bonds are broken, called this the attachment system (1). When you form a deep attachment to someone or something, your brain encodes that relationship at a fundamental level. It becomes part of your internal wiring. And when that attachment is severed, something in you remains tethered to what is gone.
The ghost of the past event does not care about your five-year plan. It does not respond to affirmations. And the ghost does not respect your schedule.
It waits for you to notice it.
It pulls you back.
It drains your energy.
Do you know why you are exhausted? Because you run. And you know why you run? Because you are not sure how to process the past.
Jumping into the future becomes a form of escapism. When you have been laid off, and you devote yourself undivided to your children, even though it wasn’t required to such an extent, or when you have been divorced, and you immediately pour all your energy into work, without processing what has been taken from you – these are compensations. They are attempts to fill the void with noise, with motion, and the purpose.
Though they might temporarily serve as pain alleviation, they are not a full-scale, long-term solution. That’s why therapy in transitory times focuses so much on processing loss, instead of helping you be uber-productive or push you forward.
Why grief is the opposite of depression
Sigmund Freud understood this distinction more than a century ago. In his foundational essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, he drew a line between two responses to loss (4). Mourning, what we would call healthy grieving, is a process of slowly withdrawing emotional energy from what is lost and eventually reinvesting it in life. It is painful, but it is natural. As it runs its course, the person emerges – changed but whole.
Melancholia, what we would call depression, is different. In melancholia, the person cannot let go. The attachment is not released. Instead, the lost person or thing becomes internalized, absorbed into the self, and the anger and longing that should have been directed outward are turned inward. The mourner attacks himself. He or she becomes stuck.
Grieving is the opposite of depression. With acknowledging, processing and grieving the loss, you create a connection between the past, the present and the future.
Depression, as many studies suggest, is when you are unable to let go of something and you long for it. Your energy is being taken by staying with it without being able to part from it. You are suspended – not moving forward, not fully present, just stuck, with one hand still reaching for what is already gone. (READ MY ARTICLE ABOUT DEPRESSION)
That is why grief work matters so much. That is why Doka insists that validation and creative interventions are essential. Because when grief is disenfranchised: hidden, dismissed, or minimized, it does not disappear, but curdles and rots, like old milk. It becomes something else: depression, anger, numbness, chronic fatigue or that vague sense of being off that you cannot quite name.
Conclusion
An unrecognized, dismissed loss does not help you sprint forward. Instead, it severs your link with the past and creates a self-illusion in which you, family, and society might behave as if you have not lost anything significant. “You are still young”, “There are so many things ahead of you” – as supportive as these things might sound, if they land on an unprocessed loss, they leave you tired, angry, disengaged from not being able to acknowledge and process what you have lost.
Different societies have different grieving rules and norms that specify who, when, where, and how people should grieve. Therapy is also instrumental in processing grief. It is not the essence of this article to codify grief in customs or cultural policies. It is to codify that if you’ve tried everything and are still tired and your plans for the future don’t work out, perhaps your past and your loss need attention. It needs to be identified, acknowledged, processed – in as much time as you need for it, so that you reclaim a legitimate right to grieve. And then your way forward will begin.
Bibliography:
- Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss: Sadness and Depression (Vol. 3 of Attachment and Loss). New York: Basic Books.
- Doka, K. J. (1999). Disenfranchised grief. Bereavement Care, 18(3), 37-39.
- Coronavirus: Recognising disenfranchised grief amid COVID-19, by Jane Fisher and Maggie Kirkman, Monash Lens, March 26, 2020.
- Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. In “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud” (Vol. 14, pp. 237-258). London: Hogarth Press.
Published by author on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships-and-emotional-intelligence/202607/how-undergrieving-keeps-you
