By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
There’s a particular kind of grief that doesn’t have a ritual attached to it. The person is alive—and the relationship is gone anyway.
There’s a particular kind of grief that doesn’t have a ritual attached to it. No funeral, no sympathy cards, no bereavement leave. The person is alive — sending texts that go unanswered, showing up to school events they’re no longer welcome at, celebrating birthdays alone that used to be shared. Family therapists have a name for what targeted parents go through: ambiguous loss, and when the people around them don’t recognize it as a real loss, it becomes something more corrosive — disenfranchised grief.
Family therapists have a name for what targeted parents go through: ambiguous loss.
A Loss With No Framework
A child doesn’t have to die for a parent to grieve.
The concept of ambiguous loss comes from Pauline Boss’s research, originally developed to describe families of missing soldiers, and later extended to dementia, incarceration, and deployment — any situation where someone is physically present-but-psychologically-gone, or gone-but-not-confirmed-dead. It was never built with parental alienation in mind, but researchers studying targeted parents have found it fits with unsettling precision: the child is alive, sometimes nearby, sometimes still occasionally in contact — and the relationship is gone anyway, with no clear endpoint and no socially sanctioned way to grieve it.
Grief researchers call the second half of that experience “disenfranchised grief” — a term coined by Kenneth Doka for losses society doesn’t recognize as legitimate. There’s no box to check on a bereavement form for “my living child no longer speaks to me because of the other parent.” Friends run out of things to say. Some stop asking. The isolation compounds the loss itself.
What the Data Shows
The most substantial empirical study on this population comes from Lee-Maturana and colleagues, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies in 2020. Fifty-four targeted parents sat for in-depth interviews describing what alienation had done to their lives. The researchers found consistent patterns of depression, anxiety, chronic stress, and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress and adjustment difficulty. Parents in the study described the experience itself as a form of family violence — not a metaphor, but a category they insisted on applying to what had happened to them.
Parents in the study described the experience itself as a form of family violence.
The number that should stop anyone reading this: 23% of targeted parents in that study reported having attempted suicide. The researchers were direct about the implication — they recommend that clinicians working with targeted parents actively screen for suicide risk, treating it as a predictable feature of the population rather than an outlier concern. Similar patterns of psychological harm among targeted parents have been reported separately by Baker and Fine (2014) and by Harman and Biringen (2016), lending the finding more than single-study weight.
It’s worth being precise about what this number does and doesn’t say. The sample was self-referred — parents who sought out participation in a study about alienation — which means it isn’t a random population sample, and the 23% figure shouldn’t be read as “23% of all targeted parents nationally.” What it does show is that among people going through this experience severely enough to seek out research participation, self-reported suicide attempts were not rare. That’s a meaningfully different claim, and a narrower one, but it’s not a small one either.
Grief Without Closure
Researchers studying targeted parents describe six recurring domains of harm: emotional, behavioral, financial and occupational, cognitive, physical, and social. Parents in these studies report physical health symptoms alongside the psychological ones — grief that manifests somatically isn’t unusual in trauma literature generally, but it’s rarely discussed in the specific context of family court outcomes.
What separates this from ordinary grief is the absence of resolution.
What separates this from ordinary grief, according to the researchers, is the absence of resolution. Death grief, however devastating, has an endpoint people can move toward. Ambiguous loss doesn’t. The child might call tomorrow. They might not call for another decade. They might never call again. Every targeted parent interviewed in these studies describes living inside that uncertainty indefinitely — which is precisely what the clinical literature identifies as the mechanism that makes ambiguous loss so difficult to metabolize psychologically, compared to losses with a clear before and after.
The child might call tomorrow. They might not call for another decade. They might never call again.
What Coping Looks Like
The same body of research points to something practical: targeted parents who engage in active coping strategies — cognitive reframing, therapeutic support specifically oriented around ambiguous loss (rather than general grief counseling, which isn’t built for a loss with no confirmed endpoint), and peer connection with others who’ve lived through the same thing — report better outcomes than those who don’t. That’s not a small detail. It suggests the harm here, while severe, isn’t fixed or untreatable — but it does require support that recognizes what the experience actually is, rather than generic grief support built for a different kind of loss.
It’s the specific pain of a loss nobody around you is equipped to name.
The Weight of Being Unseen
What comes through across every study in this area isn’t just sadness — it’s the specific pain of a loss nobody around you is equipped to name. A parent whose child has died gets condolences. A parent whose child has been alienated from them often gets silence, skepticism, or worse — the quiet assumption that they must have done something to deserve it. That assumption is itself part of the injury the research describes, and it’s compounded every time a targeted parent has to explain, yet again, that their child is alive, and that this is still, somehow, a loss worth grieving.
Sometimes the hardest funeral is the one that never happens.
Sources: Boss, P. & Yeats, J. R. (2014), “Ambiguous Loss: A Complicated Type of Grief When Loved Ones Disappear,” Bereavement Care; Lee-Maturana, S. et al. (2020), “Targeted Parents Surviving Parental Alienation: Consequences of the Alienation and Coping Strategies,” Journal of Child and Family Studies; Baker, A.J.L. & Fine, P. (2014); Harman, J.J. & Biringen, Z. (2016), Parents Acting Badly; Doka, K. (2002) on disenfranchised grief.
A note, since this piece touches on suicide risk directly: if you’re a targeted parent reading this and recognizing yourself in these numbers, that weight is real and you don’t have to carry it alone — I’m glad to help you find support resources if that would be useful.
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