Understanding Grief: Supporting Children and Healing Your Inner Child

Grief is a universal experience. At some point in life, all of us encounter it, no matter our age. While we often hope children can be spared from such pain, grief is inevitable for them too, and they go through their own grieving process. Because children are human, just like us, they naturally respond to loss—but their grief may look very different from ours. Instead of sadness, confusion might take center stage, and their reactions may not seem “socially appropriate” to adults. Think about how hard it is at 35 to put grief into words—now imagine trying to do that at five.

Maybe you were five when you lost someone important: a grandparent, a pet, a parent, or a friend. What was that like for you? Did you understand what was happening? Were you frightened by the big emotions of the adults around you? Did you wonder what “a better place” meant when everyone said that’s where your loved one had gone? Maybe you kept looking in the backyard, waiting for your dog to come back. Maybe you asked again and again if you would still see your grandmother at Christmas. Or maybe your whole life shifted—like moving in with your dad because your mom was no longer there to care for you. Children are resilient and intuitive, but they still feel the sharp pain of these experiences, even if they show it in ways we don’t always recognize.

Supporting Children
Children often don’t have the words or life experience to understand what’s happening around them. That’s why honesty and connection are so important. Giving clear, age-appropriate explanations helps them make sense of the loss without adding confusion. Avoid vague phrases like “gone away” or “in a better place,” which can leave them feeling lost or misled.

Equally important is connection—taking time to sit with children, listen to their questions, and reassure them that they are not alone. Just being present, even when you don’t have all the answers, gives them the safety they need to start processing their grief. It also helps for children to see adults expressing their own emotions. This normalizes feelings and lets them know it’s okay to have strong emotions.

Emotional management is a skill children learn by example. Talking about feelings is helpful, but so are activities that let them safely release emotions, like exercise, art, singing, or cooking. These practices can help calm intense emotions and give children tools to cope with grief in healthy ways.

Children’s grief isn’t always about death
While death is often the first thing we think of when we hear the word “grief,” children grieve many kinds of losses. Divorce, moving to a new home, changing schools, losing a pet, or not making the baseball team can all bring up deep feelings of sadness, fear, or insecurity. To a child, these changes may feel just as big as a death does to an adult. A move might feel like losing a whole world of friends and familiar places. Divorce can feel like the loss of stability and family unity. Not making the team can feel like all chances of feeling accepted by peers are gone. Recognizing that children grieve many different kinds of losses allows us to support them more fully, instead of minimizing what they’re going through.

Reflexive prompts for your inner child that wasn’t able to grieve
Sometimes, supporting children through grief stirs up memories of the child you once were—the one who didn’t get the chance to fully grieve. The one who kept wondering when their grandmother was going to come visit again with her warm hugs and delicious cookies. Pausing to reflect on your own inner child can be a powerful way to heal. You might ask yourself: What did I need most when I was grieving as a child? What words or comfort would have helped me feel safe? What emotions did I hide because no one seemed to understand? Journaling, therapy, or simply sitting with these questions can bring compassion to the parts of you that never had space to grieve. By tending to your inner child, you also strengthen your ability to show up with empathy and patience for the grieving children in your life today.

Grief and Trauma: When Loss Becomes Even More Complicated

Grief becomes particularly difficult to process when it is compounded by trauma. This extra layer can make it harder to move through the natural grieving process—especially when trauma symptoms interfere or when a person avoids their grief altogether to escape painful reminders. Sometimes the traumatic element also leads to self-blame, making the experience even heavier to carry.

Grief is often considered traumatic when the death is sudden, unexpected, or uniquely devastating. Examples include losing someone to a tragic accident, violence, natural disaster, or suicide, or witnessing an unexpected death firsthand. Grief may also become complicated when you were a caregiver to the person who died. Witnessing their medical trauma, a slow decline, or the toll of ongoing treatments can leave behind lasting emotional scars.

Loss by Suicide: “Why did you leave me…?” And “Could I have made you Stay?”

Losing someone to suicide can be especially complex. Feelings of anger, guilt, and “bargaining” often clash in painful ways. Because suicide may feel like a “choice,” anger can arise—anger that the person left. Yet, this anger is often followed by guilt: Did I not do enough to help them stay? These conflicting emotions can become so overwhelming that you feel paralyzed in your grief. Eventually, the devastating reality may crash down: your loved one was so weighed down by pain and depression that death felt like their only escape. There is no easy reframe, and no quick way to think yourself out of the sorrow.

Caregiver Grief: When guilt meets relief

Caregiver trauma is an especially heavy kind of grief. After so many doctor’s appointments, treatments, and long nights of worry, everything suddenly stops—and the silence can feel unbearable. Even before the loss, those days were often filled with pain and helplessness, and now the hard memories seem to outweigh the good ones. It’s common to feel torn—grieving deeply while also feeling some relief that the constant struggle is over. That mix of emotions can be confusing and overwhelming. Some people go numb, while others keep themselves busy just to avoid the emptiness. But when the busyness fades and the quiet returns, what you’re left with is the aching truth: more than anything, you just want your loved one back.

PTSD and Grief: They’re gone and now I feel broken

For some, PTSD following a traumatic loss overshadows their ability to grieve. Witnessing a death, experiencing a related trauma, or living with flashbacks and nightmares makes it nearly impossible to process emotions in a healthy way. At times, grief becomes intertwined with a profound sense of lost safety and security in the world. Treating the trauma can help aid in the grieving process In these cases, professional help is often essential to address the trauma and allow space for grief to begin healing.

Closing Thoughts
Grief is already one of life’s most painful journeys, and when trauma complicates it, the weight can feel unbearable. Understanding that these struggles are normal—and not a sign of weakness—can be the first step toward healing. While it may feel impossible to untangle grief from trauma, support is available. Therapy, community, and compassionate connection can help you begin to process both, making it possible to honor your loss while also reclaiming pieces of yourself. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting; it means learning to carry both the love and the pain in a way that allows you to keep moving forward.

1. Understanding Grief: A Journey Through the Waves of Loss

Grief is the natural human response to significant loss. It is an entirely individualized and unique experience that can feel profoundly physical in nature. Writing or talking about grief can be particularly difficult, as there are often no words that fully capture the depth of the experience. You may find that when you try to express yourself or connect with someone else about your grief, your words fail you. In such moments, simply being present with your physical and emotional experience (and with trusted, loved ones) can be enough.

One of the most confusing, difficult, and painful parts of grief is grappling with the fact that the person you knew, loved, or even had a complicated relationship with is gone forever. Our brains have a hard time comprehending this. You might catch yourself reaching for your phone to call them or walking through the front door with the familiar hope that they’ll be waiting for you, only to be reminded that they’re no longer there. This unique experience is not only gut-wrenching, but it can also be frustrating — and at times, even bizarre. How could this person just be gone forever?

One popular framework for understanding grief is the well-known “stages of grief.” These stages provide a map to help people make sense of the emotional turbulence they’re experiencing. The commonly referenced stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Recently, a sixth stage, “meaning-making,” has gained attention and research. While these stages are common emotional responses, it’s important to understand that they don’t follow a rigid, “one size fits all” pattern. Grief is not a linear journey; the stages are often fluid and may not appear in a predictable order.

Rather than seeing grief as a checklist of stages — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — it’s more helpful to view it as an ongoing, sometimes lifelong experience. These emotional cycles tend to come in waves. In the early stages, they can feel overwhelming, crashing down and leaving you struggling to find solid ground. Over time, however, the intensity may lessen, with grief coming in gentler, more manageable waves. Sometimes it will feel like a powerful tide, while other times it may ebb and flow softly.

The emotional cycles of grief often mirror the well-known stages: shock, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In shock, you may experience denial or isolation as your mind tries to process the loss. Anger may arise — directed at yourself, the person who is gone, or even at a higher power or the universe for taking them away. Bargaining can involve endless “what ifs,” as you mentally replay events and wonder how different actions could have changed the outcome: “If only I’d gone to that third doctor for another opinion… I could have saved them.” The depressive phase may bring feelings of helplessness, overwhelm, and despair. Finally, acceptance represents a more peaceful emotional reckoning with the loss, where you acknowledge the grief and the accompanying feelings. Throughout this process, you may also experience irritability, confusion, numbness, and fight-or-flight responses as your nervous system reacts to the trauma of loss.

It’s essential to remember that grief is inherently traumatic and activating to our nervous systems. This means that both our bodies and minds are under intense strain as we process our emotions. Because of this, it's crucial to avoid self-judgment or judgment of others during these already difficult times. Everyone grieves and processes loss differently, so we must cultivate acceptance for ourselves and others as we navigate the journey. Some people may throw themselves into work, others might appear to be falling apart. Some might attempt to escape their emotions, while others may push everything down. All of these responses are valid, as long as we find ways to connect with others, reflect on our experiences, and express our grief when we’re ready.

Ultimately, grief is a deeply personal and transformative process. It may not follow a set timeline, and it’s unlikely to fit neatly into predefined stages. Instead, it will flow in its own way, shaped by your unique relationship to the person or thing you’ve lost. The key to healing is patience with yourself, acceptance of your emotions, and the understanding that it’s okay to grieve in your own time and on your own terms.