When Grief is Complicated and How to Mourn a Parent Who Caused You Harm
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Written by Louise Chapman, Author, Creator of the Embodied Identity™ Method, and Trauma-Informed Life Coach
Louise is the author of You Are the Cause and creator of the Embodied Identity™ Method, a framework built on one radical premise: that identity, not effort, is the true engine of transformation. She draws on 7+ years in healing service roles and certifications in NLP, somatic therapy, hypnotherapy, Compassion Key, and Akashic Record Reading.
My father died recently. I have sat with that sentence for a while now, turning it over, feeling its weight and its strange lightness. My father died. A former pastry chef and guitarist who achieved some fame in his day as “El Ron”. A man who shaped the earliest years of my life in ways I am still understanding. A man who, by the end, was barely recognisable, his body hollowed out by throat cancer, unable to eat solid food, reduced to skin stretched over bone in a way that made it difficult to reconcile the person in front of me with the person who had loomed so large in my childhood.
He is gone. What I feel is not what I expected to feel. Or rather, it is more than I expected. More complicated, more layered, more simultaneously contradictory than grief has any right to be. There is sadness. There is anger, old anger, the kind that has been living in my body for decades, suddenly with nowhere left to go. There is something I am almost ashamed to name: relief.
I am naming it anyway. Because I think many of you reading this know exactly what I mean. Because the shame that attaches itself to that relief is itself something worth examining.
“Grief is supposed to be simple. We are supposed to lose someone we loved and mourn that loss. But what happens when the relationship you are mourning never gave you what it was supposed to?”
The childhood I am still grieving
My father had narcissistic personality disorder. I did not understand that when I was a child. I only understood the effects of it: the way his hatred of my mother became, at times, a hatred of the parts of me that reminded him of her. The way his need for control expressed itself as cruelty. The way love, in our household, was always conditional, something to be earned and just as easily revoked.
When my parents divorced, my father fought for custody of my sister and me to spite our mother. When I was eight years old, he moved us to Australia, to the other side of the world. He did it to put an ocean between my mother and her children. To take from her the thing he knew she loved most. We were collateral in a war we did not start and did not understand.
We were told our mother did not want to see us. That she was dangerous. That she had chosen to leave us behind. Of course, it was all a lie.
My mother spent years trying to reach us. My father spent those same years ensuring she could not. My sister and I grew up on the other side of the world, inside a story about ourselves and our mother that was constructed entirely to serve one man’s need for revenge.
What followed those years in Australia was eight years of physical and psychological abuse. Not the dramatic, recognisable kind that is easy to name and easy for others to validate. The quieter, more insidious kind. The daily erosion. The messages embedded so deeply into a child’s developing sense of self that by the time I was old enough to question them, they felt like truth.
The man at the end
By the time my father was dying, the man who had scared me as a child was gone in a different way. Cancer had done what decades of living had not. It had taken his power. Not just his physical power, though that was ravaged. His presence. His capacity to dominate a room, to make you feel small with a look or a silence. That person had retreated somewhere, leaving behind a body I did not recognise.
Skin and bone. That is not a metaphor. He could not eat. The throat cancer had taken that from him, and with it the substance of him, until what remained seemed barely tethered to the man I remembered. I would look at him and feel the dissonance of it, this frail, diminished body and the enormous shadow it had once cast over my entire childhood.
There is something deeply disorienting about watching someone who frightened you become frightened themselves. About watching someone who wielded power become powerless. I did not feel the triumph I might have once imagined I would feel. I felt something closer to sorrow, not for the loss of him, exactly, but for everything that had been lost long before this moment. For the father he could have been. For the childhood I could have had. For the relationship that never existed and now never would.
“There is something deeply disorienting about watching someone who frightened you become frightened themselves.”
The anger that has nowhere to go
Grief after losing a difficult parent is strange because it is not only grief for the person who died. It is grief for the parent you never had. Grief for the childhood that was taken. Grief for the version of yourself that might have existed if things had been different. Underneath all of that, in my case, is anger.
Real, legitimate anger that is decades old. The anger that a child could not feel safely. The anger that got buried under survival, under the fawning and the freezing and the trying to be good enough that abuse teaches children to perform. The anger that I have been doing healing work around for years, but that his death has stirred up with a force I did not entirely anticipate.
Because here is what nobody tells you about the death of an abusive parent: the anger does not get resolved by the death. In some ways, the death makes it harder. When they are alive, there is at least the theoretical possibility of an apology. Of acknowledgement. Of the conversation you always knew you needed but never got. Death closes that door permanently. The anger, which was always, underneath, a grief for what you deserved and did not receive, has nowhere left to go except inward. Unless you give it somewhere to go.
In my work with the Embodied Identity™ Method, I have come to understand anger not as a problem to manage but as information to read. Anger is what arises when a boundary was violated and not defended. When something that mattered was taken without consent. When love was owed and withheld. My anger at my father is not pathological. It is the appropriate response of a child, and then an adult, to what actually happened. It deserves to be felt. It deserves to be honoured. It deserves, eventually, to be released, not for his sake, but for mine.
The relief, and the guilt about the relief
Then there is the relief. I notice it and immediately want to qualify it, to make it more palatable, to explain it in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a bad person. But I am going to resist that impulse, because I think the impulse itself is worth examining.
The relief is real. It is not relief that he suffered. It is not relief that he is gone as a person. It is relief that a particular kind of threat, one that existed in my body as a low, constant hum for my entire life, even after I had done years of healing work, is no longer present in the world. The nervous system is remarkably honest about these things. Mine knew, even when my mind had done a great deal of processing and integrating, that he was still there. Still existing. Still capable, theoretically, of the things he had once done.
He is no longer capable. Something in me has exhaled. The guilt about the relief is, I think, a conditioned response. We are taught that we should love our parents. We are taught that death deserves mourning. We are taught that speaking ill of the dead, or feeling relief at their passing, is a moral failure. But these teachings were written for uncomplicated losses. They were not written for those of us who are grieving a relationship that was never what it should have been, and a person who caused genuine harm.
Relief is not the opposite of grief. It can coexist with grief. It can coexist with love, even the complicated, painful love that can exist for someone who hurt you. These feelings are not contradictions. They are the honest emotional landscape of a complicated loss. You are allowed to inhabit all of it.
“Relief is not the opposite of grief. It can coexist with grief. It can coexist with love, even the complicated, painful love that can exist for someone who hurt you.”
How to process grief that is also anger that is also relief
If you are reading this and recognising your own experience in it, the tangled, contradictory, socially unsanctioned mess of losing a parent who caused you harm, I want to offer you what I am offering myself.
First: let all of it be true at the same time. Do not make yourself choose between grief and anger and relief. Do not decide that feeling one means you shouldn’t be feeling the others. The emotional reality of a complicated loss is not meant to be tidy. Trying to force it into tidiness is itself a form of abandoning yourself.
Second: understand that the grief you are feeling is probably not only for the person who died. It is for the parent they never were. For the relationship you deserved and did not have. For the child you were, who needed something different and did not get it. That grief is real and it is old. It deserves as much space as the grief for the person themselves, probably more.
Third: give the anger somewhere honest to go. Not suppressed, not performed, not directed at people who don’t deserve it. Write it. Speak it into a voice note. Move it through your body. Bring it into a therapeutic relationship where it can be witnessed without judgment. Anger held in the body becomes a wound. Anger expressed and acknowledged becomes a completion.
Fourth: do not let anyone, including yourself, shame you for the relief. You are allowed to feel safe now. You are allowed to breathe out. You are allowed to acknowledge, quietly or loudly, that something in your life has become less heavy. That is not a character flaw. That is your nervous system telling the truth.
Fifth: know that grief like this does not have a clear endpoint. It does not resolve itself on a timeline that other people’s condolences are designed for. It will surface in unexpected moments. It will ask things of you that simpler losses do not ask. It will, if you let it, become part of what deepens your understanding of yourself and the work you are here to do.
What I know, today
My father is gone. The man who moved his two girls to the other side of the world to punish their mother. The man who spent years ensuring we did not know she was looking for us. The man who was cruel in the ways that frightened, withdrawn people can be cruel, not always in dramatic gestures, but in the daily atmosphere of a home where love was rationed and safety was conditional.
He was also, somewhere, a person in pain. A person whose own wounds were so unexamined, so defended against, that he passed them on to his children rather than face them himself. I am not offering that as an excuse. I am offering it as the truth of how harm travels, from person to person, generation to generation, until someone decides to stop and look at it directly.
I decided to stop and look at it. That decision became my healing work. It became the Embodied Identity™ Method. It became my book, and my life’s work, and the reason I sit with people in their most complicated emotional places and say: all of this is allowed. All of it makes sense. All of it can change.
My father is gone. I am still here. I am, in ways I could not have imagined as the eight-year-old on that plane leaving her mother behind, finally free. That is not a betrayal of grief. That is its most honest completion.
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Read more from Louise Chapman
Louise Chapman, Author, Creator of the Embodied Identity™ Method and Trauma-Informed Life Coach
Louise is the author of You Are the Cause and creator of the Embodied Identity™ Method, the framework that proves identity, not effort, is what actually changes your life. A trauma-informed spiritual life coach with seven years in healing and certifications across NLP, somatic therapy, hypnotherapy, and the Compassion Key Method, she has spent her career doing one thing: orienting people back to the truth that they are the cause of their experience and, therefore, the only one with the power to change it.
