Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist to heal from grief

Grieving a parent who is still alive is real grief, even if nobody around you treats it that way.

You can love your father and still dread Father's Day. Both things can be true at the same time.

Estranged adult children are often told to fix it when what they need is acknowledgment of the loss.

Every year, Father's Day arrives right on schedule. For some people, so does everything they've been trying not to think about or feel. The posts, the tributes, the throwback photos, the messages about how Dad was always there sometimes start appearing the week before. For a lot of people, that reflects something real and worth celebrating. For others, it is a reminder of something that was never there, or something that was there and then wasn't, or something so complicated there are sometimes not words to describe it.

Not everyone has a father to call. And for those who do, not everyone wants to or are able to. Some people lost their dad to death, some lost him to addiction, mental illness, a significant other, or years of silence that eventually became permanent. And some never had a father in the picture at all. Others had one who showed up physically but was never quite there in the ways that mattered. And then there are people dealing with something that gets talked about far less—grieving a father who is still alive.

That last one is its own particular kind of hard. When a parent dies, there is grief of course, but there is also structure around it. There is a funeral, there are people who acknowledge your loss and support you, there........

© Psychology Today