Empath Grief: Learning to Do Life with An Unhealed Parent

An unhealed parent is what many millennials are dealing with as they awaken to their personal growth journeys and explore spirituality as a pathway to deeper understanding. What many learn as they pursue self-discovery and universal connection is how little their parents taught them about emotional wellness, boundaries, and how to process difficult circumstances. As many deepen their desire to heal, they understand the generational nature of emotional disconnection and how it personifies familial dysfunction.

I lost my father when most of my close friends had not yet lost a parent, and because Western society operates on the frequency of relatability, those who have not been able to relate don’t get it. They have no idea how hard I struggle some days with grief and what it feels like to lose the parent who rooted for you the most.

Losing my father was hard, but waking up to the reality that I was left with an unhealed parent was harder. Most people don’t think too much of an adult child losing their parents as an earth-shattering event because it’s “the natural order of things” for you to lose your parents at some point. What is difficult is realizing through the experience of grief how little emotional awareness and maturity the remaining parent has available.

How does an empath grieve?

However, I never considered that grief could or would be exceptionally different for me as an empath. My father’s transition was the wake-up call that came too late, with the realization that my father’s absence would magnify my mother’s lifelong emotional traumas and leave me feeling utterly alone in a valley of emotions I had not encountered before as a personal experience. But instead of being swallowed into that feeling of abandonment, it took some time to understand that grief as an empath is harsher, and it takes longer to process personal loss because your grief comes secondary to the role of the rescuer and caretaker to others experiencing the same loss.

Accepting this truth helped me see that my mother has a complete lack of emotional awareness. I wish someone had explained that to me when I was younger and helped me understand that any expectation from her was ridiculous on my part. I always believed her rejection of me was because of something specific that I had done or a series of disappointments. The reality is my mother has never had emotional availability. Sadly, I didn’t begin to put the pieces together of her emotional state until I lost the parent who offered me the most compassion.

You have to accept early in your grief journey, especially when dealing with an unhealed parent and limited support from others, that it will be your responsibility to sort out your grief and create a support system as soon as possible. As an empath, I learned a bit late that grief must be experienced in isolation so as not to absorb the pain of others. The experience of grief in solitude is soul-crushing and disorienting without support. Empath grief support can only be sourced from an empath, spiritual guide, or deity for which you can receive spiritual discernment and authentic connection to the Source without feelings of guilt, and remorse as those with less connection experience.

I lost my father when most of my close friends had not yet lost a parent, and because Western society operates on the frequency of relatability, those who have not been able to relate don’t get it. They have no idea how hard I struggle some days with grief and what it feels like to lose the parent who rooted for you the most.

Constantly having to hold space for my mother, my unhealed parent, is just as unexpected as it is exhausting. In the grief journey, I realized I have always been my mother’s parent. She hasn’t been able to navigate her emotions, negatively impacting everyone who has come into contact with her. My grief has been minimized, and her emotional state has resulted in a push for her talk therapy rather than my own. I was checking in on her frequently rather than her considering the truth of my pain or connecting the relevance of my pain.

I think the worst part of dealing with someone who is unhealed is that it triggers emotional spirals because their life is constantly out of control. My mother has never transitioned into a place of offering wisdom as the parent of adult children. She mostly still parents the same way she did when my younger sibling and I were children. It resulted in her forcing reminders of my father’s death or his birthday and saying many other comments that triggered the unsavory feeling of grief but also discontent for her.

The nature of grief is to illuminate what is left behind, and many of her negative aspects have become front and center throughout this journey. She and my younger sibling have controlled all of my father’s belongings, never asking my input on sorting through them or offering me a single relic as my last physical memory of my father.

My mother never had an active father in her life, and in the absence of emotional awareness, she has not been able to comprehend or hold space for the magnitude of the loss for me even three years later.

All of these incidents and the negativity from my mother throughout this experience have taught me that we must spend more time learning about the emotion of grief and how it impacts the dynamic of a family before there is a significant loss. There was no preparation for the feeling or how to handle my father’s affairs as he left no will. I have learned how vital it is to teach children about sadness and suffering and that they should not only center their world around happiness. Happiness is just one aspect of life and not confined to childhood.

The lack of emotional awareness or a full range of emotions in childhood stunts our emotional growth as adults, and it is detrimental to maturity. The harsh reality that I witnessed as an Intuitive Guide is that many people don’t truly understand their negative emotions, so they subconsciously avoid them and what they can learn about themselves through them and prioritize their joyful moments and people that bring them warm feelings.

Though part of my growth in grief, especially as an empath, was the understanding that I wasn’t just a daughter who lost her father and is now stuck with a self-centered, unhealed mother; I’ve realized that it had to happen because I was being initiated into a more significant part of my purpose. There were places I needed to go on the journey as an empath that my external world wasn’t supporting. My father was my protector, shielding me from many things, especially my mother, in a major way. His death helped me realize the next level of gifts, and as I released him, I released stagnancy in my destined path.

The journey came into focus as I tried to merge the parallel nature of being an empath. On the one hand, grief should be a motivating force we experience in our lifetime to reflect, more potent than any planetary placement such as Mercury Retrograde. Every human incarnated may not be in tune with astrology or understand how to apply the information. Still, all beings encounter death as a witness and as an ending to their natural life. When we neglect to be more curious about grief despite the pain, we interrupt our growth potential and fall into a state of stuckness. I think that is how many people relate grief to this unnatural pause and overwhelm. The natural pathway out of that is through support. Still, when dealing with an unhealed parent, not much support can be initiated in a parental form, leading to an accelerated state of isolation when you have lost your other parent. On the contrary, as an empath, the more profound truth was that my mother was ill-equipped to support me in my grief, even if she was emotionally mature and balanced; the grief of an empath is not the grief of all. An empath's proper actuation in grief is learning to live inside the continuum. There will only be a select few who understand and can hold sacred space for an empath, so seek them.

It would be easy to say that we could bypass all of the pain of understanding grief late in life with more emotionally aware and present parents, but it’s too late for that for most. We can only utilize this awareness for the generation behind us. We can only be introduced to how to process grief experientially and as we are fed by other empaths who have already accepted their designation on the journey as guides.

Empath Lessons on Grief

In shifting and leaning in, we leave ourselves open to more profound empathy and a better wheelhouse to operate from in our personal lives and when we experience loss in other ways. I’ve learned it’s bigger than boundaries. To effectively heal, it’s more about your promises to yourself and less about who agrees to your terms relative to continuity in a toxic relationship. I have accepted that my mother has more empathy for the world around her than the world she lives inside, which may never change.

Millennials and Generation X still have an opportunity to be both students and teachers of grief before their children are left learning to cope and work with grief in a sea of unhealed people around them. If we can make this shift as a culture, we can access and integrate the wisdom of our ancestors and become less wounded as a consciousness. Grief is a separation, and if we could accept that, we would realize it does not exist for upheaval but to help you learn detachment and what it means to go inward. Attachments cannot serve a greater destiny. One has to do the hard part alone. Healing simply my mother’s unhealed aspects at this late stage won’t prevent the hurt and neglect I experienced and still experience in waking up to grief in an unexpected loss, but striving toward a collective consciousness of awareness of the deeper meaning of the full range of human emotion speaks to global evolution.

Are you ready to be supported as an empath, to harness light for the greater and universal good? Then schedule some time with me, and let's see if we can travel this road together.