Sneaky Grief - The Losses That Linger, the Systems That Ignore Them
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we're exploring something that touches every single one of us, yet remains largely invisible in our culture, grief. But not the kind of grief you see in the movies as dramatic funeral scenes, black dresses, or a socially acceptable mourning period. I'm talking about that sneaky grief, the kind that shows up uninvited decades later or the kind that you're told doesn't count, the kind of grief that our economic systems pretend doesn't exist because acknowledging it might cost them money.
Leslie Poston:We're going to explore what happens when, say, the person you loved at 19 dies and you find yourself sobbing before a Zoom meeting, surprised by the depth of your own reaction. We'll examine why our brains struggle to process losses that don't fit into neat categories and why capitalism has a vested interest in keeping our grief small, private, and time limited. This isn't just about death. It's about all the ways we lose people, lose pieces of ourselves, and lose futures that we thought we'd have. It's about the psychological and physiological toll of carrying unacknowledged pain, and it's about the systems that profit from our silence.
Leslie Poston:Let's start with a fundamental truth: not all grief wears black. When we hear grief, most of us picture funerals, caskets, and crying relatives. We think of the obvious losses: death, divorce, maybe a job loss if we're being generous. But grief is far more pervasive and complex than our cultural narratives suggest. Let's start with Doge's concept of disenfranchised grief.
Leslie Poston:These are the losses that aren't openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. Recent research shows this phenomenon is more widespread than we realized, encompassing everything from the loss of a beloved family pet to the end of a friendship we expected to last a lifetime. From workplace deaths to pandemic related losses. We don't just experience disenfranchised grief from others. New research reveals that we also self disenfranchise, suppressing our emotions and not allowing ourselves to grieve even when we feel the loss acutely.
Leslie Poston:We become our own grief police. Think about it. You can grieve a job that meant everything to you, even if everyone else thought it was just work. You can grieve a friendship that ended badly or ended suddenly. You can grieve a mentor who ghosted you or a version of yourself you had to abandon to survive.
Leslie Poston:You can grieve the person your parent never was even though they're still alive. You can grieve a city you had to leave, a dream that died, or a possible future that evaporated. One systematic review found that grief in professional settings alone, which is just one category of disenfranchised grief, has been the subject of increasing research since 2020. Why? Well, think of the example of health care workers.
Leslie Poston:They've been experiencing repeated exposure to patient deaths without adequate recognition or support since COVID hit us and even before then. The problem isn't that these losses are less real. The problem is that we live in a culture that struggles to hold complexity. We want grief to be simple, time limited, and predictable. We want it to follow rules, but grief doesn't follow rules.
Leslie Poston:It shows up when it wants to, as intense as it needs to be, and it stays for as long as it needs to stay. Let me tell you about a type of grief that I experienced recently and the inspiration for this episode. Last week, I got a call that hit me hard. My first love, someone I dated in high school and for several years after and someone I had remained good friends with, had died unexpectedly in a car accident. I was surprised to find myself completely undone.
Leslie Poston:My sadness seemed to blindside me and lingered throughout the week, disrupting my research, my work, and my personal life with its insistence. My grief demanded to be seen and refused to be dismissed or put on a schedule. It was hard to explain to people who are more familiar with the professional side of me. Even to myself, I wondered, Why does this feel like losing a limb? The answer is in the brain as well as the heart, of course.
Leslie Poston:First loves leave an indelible mark on our brains. They occur during peak neuroplasticity periods when our identity is still forming. Research on the neurobiology of attachment shows that early romantic relationships activate brain systems similar to addiction, encoding these memories deeply in our neural networks associated with reward and meaning. And when that person dies, even decades later, it can feel like a part of your identity has been torn away. Not because you were still in love with the person, but because they were part of the scaffolding on which you built your understanding of love, of relationships, and of yourself.
Leslie Poston:But society doesn't have a script for this kind of grief. There's no sympathy card for sorry your ex boyfriend from decades ago died. There's no bereavement leave for I need time to process the death of someone who helped shape who I am. So people tend to grieve these losses in secret. In talking with someone else who knew us both back then, they mentioned that it felt like they were losing their mind, that their grief seemed so out of place.
Leslie Poston:That's normal. The continuing bonds model of grief helps explain this phenomenon. Rather than getting over losses, we often maintain emotional connections to significant people throughout our lives. These bonds can include memories, internalized conversations, memories sparked vividly by something as simple as a song or a smell, and all the ways the person continues to influence our choices and our identity. That's not pathology.
Leslie Poston:That's just how humans work. We're relational beings. The people who matter to us become part of us. And when they die or leave, we don't just lose them. We lose the part of ourselves that existed in relationship to them.
Leslie Poston:Disenfranchised grief is sneaky. It takes many forms. But they all share one thing: society's message that your pain doesn't count. Maybe because it's the death of an ex partner, people expect you to be over them, or maybe if it's someone you only knew online, people don't understand how a virtual relationship could matter to you. Maybe it's a colleague, a mentor, a friend you'd grown apart from, or a pet who was your constant companion.
Leslie Poston:Recent empirical research examined three common scenarios of disenfranchised grief: pet loss, romantic relationship breakups, and receiving a psychological disorder diagnosis. The findings revealed significant differences in how society validates these losses with attachment styles and social support playing crucial roles in how people navigate unacknowledged grief. The invalidation wasn't just social. It was structural. Insurance companies don't recognize grief counseling for minor losses.
Leslie Poston:Workplaces don't provide bereavement leave for friends or ex partners. Even support groups are organized around specific types of loss, often excluding the messy, complicated types of grief that don't fit into neat categories. But here's what the research tells us. Disenfranchised grief can be just as intense and long lasting as what society considers legitimate grief. When your grief isn't validated, it's harder to process, leading to isolation, anxiety, and unresolved emotional pain that can persist for years.
Leslie Poston:The silence becomes part of the wound. You're not just grieving the loss. You're grieving your right to grieve. Some losses resist closure entirely. Psychologist Pauline Boss calls this ambiguous loss situations where the person is neither fully present nor fully gone.
Leslie Poston:A parent with dementia who no longer recognizes you, or a child estranged because of your sexual orientation, or a parent a child can no longer talk to because of how they continue to harm them. A best friend who disappeared entirely without explanation. A relationship that ended mid fight with no resolution. Someone who died while you were still angry at each other. These were all ambiguous losses.
Leslie Poston:Research shows that ambiguous loss disrupts normal grief processing because the brain lacks clear markers of beginning or end. Without resolution, people experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and identity confusion. Our grief rituals assume finality. Funerals mark endings. Memorial services celebrate completed lives, but ambiguous loss exists in perpetual limbo.
Leslie Poston:You can't properly mourn someone who might call tomorrow. You can't fully let go of someone whose story with you has no period, only endless ellipses. Social media has intensified ambiguous loss in unprecedented ways. Where relationships once naturally faded when people moved apart or grew distant, we now maintain digital connections that create perpetual uncertainty. You still see your estranged sibling's post but you can't comment.
Leslie Poston:Or an ex updates their status while you're blocked from their life but not their feed. Someone who ghosted you continues to watch and like your Instagram stories. These digital half connections create a new form of psychological limbo. They're simultaneously present and absent, accessible yet unreachable. The algorithms ensure we keep encountering traces of people we've lost, preventing the natural resolution that distance once provided.
Leslie Poston:The psychological toll of this can be profound. Studies on continuing bonds reveal that unclear or traumatic circumstances of loss make it much harder to maintain healthy emotional connections to the deceased or the simply separated, often leading to complicated grief reactions. We're taught that closure is the goal, but ambiguous loss teaches us that some wounds don't heal. They just change shape. Learning to live with uncertainty, with unfinished stories, with love that has nowhere to go, becomes its own form of survival.
Leslie Poston:Here's where things get a little political, because grief can be political. In The United States, only sixty percent of private sector workers get any paid bereavement leave at all. And that's usually just a few days. The national average is four days for a spouse or a child, three days for a parent, and one-two days for extended family If the person who died isn't on your company's approved list of relationships, you get nothing. Research estimates that grief related productivity losses cost companies $75,000,000,000 annually, a number that has undoubtedly increased since the pandemic.
Leslie Poston:But instead of addressing the root cause inadequate support for grieving workers companies try to minimize the problem by pretending grief should be brief and private. Recent workplace research reveals how capitalism's emotional rules intersect with grief. Employees are expected to return to work composed, efficient, and emotionally neutral. The pressure to restore productivity overrides basic human needs for processing loss. The hidden costs are staggering.
Leslie Poston:Presenteeism cuts individual productivity by one third or more, resulting in about fifty seven point five lost workdays per year. And grief literally rewires your brain, creating symptoms like brain fog that can last six to eighteen months. Yet companies would rather lose productivity than provide adequate support. Research on bereaved parents found that absenteeism costs averaged nearly $9,000 per employee, while presenteeism, being physically present but unable to function at full capacity, costs even more at over $9,600 per employee in the six months following a child's death. The refusal to acknowledge this reality isn't just cruel.
Leslie Poston:It's economically counterproductive. The message is clear. Your grief is less important than corporate profits. Your pain is an inconvenience to be managed, not a fully human experience to be honored. For decades, Western models of psychology actually got grief wrong.
Leslie Poston:They thought the goal was detachment cutting ties with the dead and moving on. But that model never matched how people actually grieve. A systematic review of 79 studies on continuing bonds found that most people maintain ongoing emotional connections to those they've lost. These connections aren't pathological they're normal and often adaptive. Continuing bonds can include engaging with memories, sensing the presence of the deceased, internal conversations, using the deceased as role models, or feeling guided by the values of the deceased.
Leslie Poston:The research shows these connections can provide comfort, support identity formation, and help with meaning making after a loss. However, the relationship between continuing bonds and healing is complex. Recent research distinguishes between internalized bonds feeling guided by the deceased values and externalized bonds such as hallucinations or illusions, with internalized bonds generally being more adaptive. This model is revolutionary because it validates what most grieving people already know. You don't really get over someone who mattered.
Leslie Poston:You just learn to carry them differently. They become part of your internal world, influencing your decisions, shaping your values, living on in your stories and your choices. For disenfranchised grief, this model is particularly powerful. Even when society refuses to validate your loss, you can maintain your own relationship to what you've lost. Your grief doesn't need permission to be real.
Leslie Poston:Grief isn't just emotional. It's a full body experience with measurable physiological effects. Research consistently shows that bereavement is associated with elevated cortisol levels, flattened diurnal cortisol rhythms, and higher morning cortisol. These stress responses can persist for months or even years after a loss. Your immune system also takes a significant hit.
Leslie Poston:Studies document reduced T lymphocyte functioning and increased inflammatory markers and impaired responses to vaccinations. Natural killer cell activity decreases, making grieving people more susceptible to infection and illness. Your cardiovascular system can suffer as well. Chronic stress from grief can lead to increased risk of heart disease and in severe cases can trigger takotsubo cardiomyopathyliterally broken heart syndromewhere emotional distress causes temporary heart muscle weakness. Neurologically, grief can affect cognitive function, memory, and concentration.
Leslie Poston:Brain imaging studies show that grief activates regions associated with physical pain, reward processing, and attachment. The phrase it hurts isn't metaphorical. Grief literally hurts. These aren't character flaws or signs of weakness if you're experiencing any of them. They're predictable biological responses to psychological trauma.
Leslie Poston:When someone tells you to just get over it, they're not just dismissing your emotions. They're ignoring measurable changes in your brain and body that can persist for years if you don't allow yourself to feel your sadness. Research also reveals that the intensity and duration of these physiological effects correlate with grief severity and the availability of social support. People with complicated grief show more pronounced inflammatory responses and greater health risks. Your body keeps your emotions stored physically even when your mind tries to move on.
Leslie Poston:Not all grief resolves naturally. For some people, becomes a chronic, debilitating condition that interferes with basic functioning. Prolonged grief disorder was officially added to the DSM-five TR in 2022. It affects an estimated ten percent of people who experience natural deaths and up to forty nine percent of those who lose someone to unnatural causes. Symptoms include intense yearning, identity disruption, emotional numbness, and a persistent inability to function.
Leslie Poston:Complicated grief is associated with distinct neurobiological patterns. Brain imaging shows that reminders of the deceased activate reward regions rather than memory regions, suggesting that the brain is still seeking reunion rather than adapting to a loss. This medicalization of grief is controversial. Critics worry about pathologizing normal human responses to loss. But research is clear: some people do indeed get stuck in their grief in ways that significantly impair their lives and their health.
Leslie Poston:Intervention research shows moderate effectiveness for grief specific therapies, particularly when tailored to an individual's needs. However, access to these treatments is limited, especially for marginalized populations. What's particularly concerning is how disenfranchised grief increases the risk of complications. When your grief isn't validated and you have to carry it in secret, when you lack social support, you're more likely to develop persistent, impairing symptoms. Silence kills.
Leslie Poston:Literally. When Queen Elizabeth died, daily routines in England stopped. Flags were lowered. News coverage dominated. Official mourning periods were declared.
Leslie Poston:And compare that to the nameless victims of climate disasters, police violence, mass shootings, or pandemic negligence. Some grief gets global attention. Other grief only gets statistics. As writer Lydia Phillip observes, for those who are black, indigenous, Palestinian, racialized, women, gender nonconforming, queer, disabled, or newcomers, she said, there's a historic cumulative grief we cohabitate with. We are survivors of this grief, but it isn't recognized on the job.
Leslie Poston:It defies the boundaries of any workplace bereavement policy. Research on African American homicide bereavement reveals how societal invalidation compounds trauma. When the circumstances of death violate social norms, empathic failures occur within support systems, creating additional layers of disenfranchisement. Grief is weaponized by society as well. We're told that dwelling on historical traumas like enslavement, genocide, internment camps is divisive, that processing collective loss is playing the victim, and that systemic grief should be private, individual, and manageable.
Leslie Poston:But communities are finally fighting back. From memorial murals to protest chants to online spaces where marginalized grief can be honored, people are creating their own rituals, their own validation, and their own permission to mourn. As Philip wrote, grief accrues faster than sick days. The accumulation of loss, personal and collective, exceeds what any workplace policy can accommodate. This isn't a personal failing it's a structural problem.
Leslie Poston:Grief doesn't need permission to be real. It doesn't need to fit into neat categories or follow prescribed timelines. It doesn't need to be productive or convenient or socially acceptable. Grief is love with nowhere to go. It's the tax we pay for caring.
Leslie Poston:It's the shadow cast by connection, the price of attachment, and the evidence that something mattered. The research is clear. Healthy grieving isn't about getting over a loss. It's about integration. It's about finding a way to carry what we've lost forward into who we're becoming.
Leslie Poston:So let's stop asking people to minimize their grief to make others comfortable. Let's stop pretending that three days is enough to process the death of someone who helped shape your soul. Let's stop treating emotional labor as less important than any other kind of work. Your sneaky grief, the kind that shows up at inconvenient times, the kind that doesn't fit categories, the kind that lingers longer than others think it should, is valid. Your tears in a Target parking lot are valid.
Leslie Poston:Your dreams about people you lost years ago are valid. Your inability to concentrate suddenly six months after a loss is valid. Grief is not weakness, it's not self indulgent, and it's not unproductive. Grief is what happens when love encounters mortality. It's one of the most fundamentally human experience we all share.
Leslie Poston:And any system that tries to silence it, minimize it, or commodify it is a system that has forgotten what it means to be human. Take a moment today to honor a grief you've never fully acknowledged. Whisper it to yourself. Write it down. Tell someone who will listen without trying to fix you.
Leslie Poston:Your grief matters even if, perhaps especially if, no one ever told you that it did. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and thanking you for sitting with me in my grief this episode. Remember to stay curious and stay human. And if you like PsyberSpace, don't forget to subscribe so you can sit with me every week and learn something new about your world and share it with a friend if you think they'd like it too.
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