Grieving a Parent Who Is Still Alive

Family Of Origin TraumaGrief & Loss
Written By Kymberly kremnitzer

Hey Friend!

You made the decision. You thought about it for years, not weeks. You tried the conversation more than once, and you tried the version where you said it gently, and you tried the version where you finally said it plainly. Nothing changed.

So you stopped.\

And then something happened that nobody warned you about. You started grieving someone who is still alive. Still posting. Still sending a text on your birthday. Still being described by your aunt as trying so hard.

If you are certain you made the right decision and you are also falling apart, you are not contradicting yourself. There is a name for what is happening to you, and this week new research gave us a much better explanation for how you got here.

‍ It was never really about the past

A sociologist at Ohio State published a study built on 68 in-depth interviews with adults who had gone no contact with a parent, sibling, or other relative. Many of them had difficult childhoods. Some had experienced real abuse.

And they still rarely pointed to childhood as the reason they left.

They pointed to the adult relationship. To the refusal to acknowledge what had happened. To a parent who was still, at fifty-eight, running a household on the logic of because I said so. The estrangement did not come out of a flashback. It came out of the last four years of being talked to a certain way and finally believing it was not going to change.

She calls the underlying conflict a kinship culture clash, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

One person in the family operates on what she names compulsory kinship. Family is permanent and unconditional. Behavior does not alter the terms. You show up at Thanksgiving regardless of what was said last year, because family is family.

The other person operates on democratized kinship. Family requires mutual respect and reciprocity in order to continue. Anyone can become family. Nobody is automatically family.

Neither model is new and neither belongs to one generation. But when two people in the same family are running different models, and neither will move, the relationship cannot hold. Her comparison is sharp: this is exactly what happened to marriage. Once a marriage had to actually work for both people, divorce became thinkable, then ordinary. The same shift is now reaching parents and adult children.

So when someone tells you that you are punishing your parents for things that happened decades ago, you can be accurate with them. You are not. You are responding to a relationship that never updated its terms, and you finally stopped pretending the terms were fine.

Why it still hurts this much

Here is what a clear decision does not protect you from.

Ambiguous loss. The person is gone and alive at the same time. There is no funeral, no obituary, no casserole, no card. There is no moment where the loss becomes official and people gather. Your body registers a death. The world around you registers nothing at all, and asks how your mom is doing.

Disenfranchised grief. This is the second layer, and it is the one that isolates people. It is grief that the people around you do not believe you are entitled to. Your grandmother thinks you are being dramatic. Your friend from church says life is short. Your sibling says she is not that bad. Every one of those responses tells your nervous system to put the grief away, so the grief goes underground and comes out sideways, at 11pm, in the car, over nothing.

And then there is the third thing, the one almost nobody says out loud: you are grieving the parent you needed, who never actually existed. That person cannot die, because they were never born. That is why the grief does not resolve on a schedule. You are mourning a hypothetical, and hypotheticals do not decompose.

You are not grieving badly. You are grieving something the culture has no ritual for.

What therapy actually does here

I want to be specific, because vague promises help no one.

We separate what happened from what you concluded about yourself. Research published just this week found that people whose life stories carried a theme of permanent personal damage were nearly three times more likely to meet a clinical threshold for significant dysfunction, and that this predicted daily life impairment that standard assessments missed. When you were young, the harm and the explanation for the harm arrived at the same time, in your parent's voice. Untangling those is not positive thinking. It is precise, slow work, and it changes measurable things.

We give the grief a place to happen. Not to talk you into or out of anything. Estrangement is not a therapeutic goal and reconciliation is not either. But grief that has been called unreasonable by everyone in your life needs a room where it is treated as reasonable. That is often the first time a person's chest lets go.

We work with your body, not just your understanding. You can explain your family with total accuracy and still go rigid when a certain name appears on your phone. Insight lives in one system, safety lives in another. Somatic work is how we get to the second one, so that a holiday, a voicemail, or an unfamiliar area code stops taking three days out of your life.

And if you carry faith, it comes into the room with you. You do not have to choose between honoring God and telling the truth about your family. Forgiveness and access are two different decisions, and I will never ask you to collapse them into one.

If this is the room you have been living in

You do not have to keep doing this by yourself, or keep explaining it to people who have already decided you are wrong.

I am a Licensed Master Social Worker in Michigan, and I work by telehealth with high achieving adults who look completely fine from the outside and are carrying something enormous underneath. Family of origin wounds. Estrangement. Grief nobody has acknowledged. The guilt that shows up precisely because you are a good person who made a hard call.

Book a free consult and we will talk about what you are carrying and whether this is the right fit. No pressure, no pitch. Just fifteen minutes to be heard by someone who already understands the shape of it.

You can grieve a parent who is still alive. You are allowed. And you do not have to do it in the car.

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All the Best,
Kymberly Kremnitzer, LMSW
The Rooted Therapist MI, PLLC

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Resources

 

Start Online Therapy in Michigan

If you are looking for online therapy for adults healing from emotionally immature family dynamics, estrangement, grief, or attachment wounds, Kymberly Kremnitzer, LMSW offers attachment-informed, certified grief therapy and somatic support for high-achieving adults across Michigan. Faith-based therapy is available if you want your spiritual life to be part of the work.

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Phone: (616) 414-0866
Email: Kymberly@therootedtherapistmi.com
Website: www.therootedtherapistmi.com

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