Grieving the Parent You Never Had
How to Heal from Childhood Emotional Neglect, an Emotionally Absent Parent, and the Love You Deserved
Grief and Loss416 pagesPublished 19 July 2026Kindle, paperback & hardcoverGrief and Loss
Your parent was there for all of it, and somehow you were still on your own.
There was no death, no dramatic rupture, nothing you could point to. Just a persistent absence inside the presence, and a childhood spent waiting for a version of them that never arrived. Most people never call that grief, because nobody gave them permission to.
This book gives the loss its proper name. Grieving a living parent is disorienting precisely because the person is still available to disappoint you, and every family gathering reopens the question. You are not mourning who they were. You are mourning the parent you needed and did not get.
Grieving the Parent You Never Had opens The Grief You Don’t Talk About, a series about the losses that never get a ritual, a card, or a day off work.
For readers carrying childhood emotional neglect quietly, and wondering whether they are even allowed to call it grief.
Or take the whole collection
The Grief You Don't Talk About
The losses that get no funeral and no sympathy card: the parent who was never there, the family that went quiet, the self you used to be, the job, the marriage.
Get the collection, $29.99Simone Adler · 8 books · instant download, read on any device
The series
The Grief You Don't Talk About
About the author
Simone Adler
Grief Counsellor
Simone Adler is a grief counsellor and trauma-informed therapist with more than twenty years of clinical experience working with clients navigating loss, identity, and the emotional experiences that fall outside the conventional grief narrative. Her work began with a simple observation: the people who came to her were rarely grieving only what they said they were grieving.
More about Simone Adler