Episode 8: How Child Loss Changes the Entire Family System | Beyond the Loss

When a child dies, grief does not impact only one person — it reshapes the entire family system.

In this deeply compassionate episode, I explores how child loss changes family dynamics, emotional roles, communication patterns, and the way each person searches for stability after heartbreak. From silent misunderstandings to emotional distance, this conversation offers a powerful systems-based perspective on why families often grieve differently while carrying the same devastating loss.

This episode is a gentle reminder that grief is not something to “fix,” but something to understand with greater compassion, awareness, and honesty.

Topics Covered:
• Why grief is never experienced in isolation
• How child loss alters family relationships
• Different grieving timelines within families
• The invisible emotional structure of grief
• Why a child’s place in the family still matters
• Moving beyond blame and misunderstanding

If you are a grieving parent, family member, therapist, or someone supporting a bereaved loved one, this conversation will help you better understand the emotional complexity of loss and healing.

Connect and Subscribe:

Website: https://sharonspano.com

Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/podcast-beyond-the-loss/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host

Substack: https://substack.com/@drsharon

If this episode speaks to you, I hope you’ll consider subscribing, sharing, or leaving a comment. These conversations matter deeply, and together we can continue creating more compassionate space for grief, healing, and life after child loss.

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You’re welcome to reach out and share your interest:
https://sharonspano.com/podcast-guest-beyond-the-loss/

Transcript: Here
 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Beyond the Lost. This is a space for parents who have lost a child in any way at any age, where no grief is ranked, explained, or excluded. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, developmental coach, systems thinker, and a parent whose life was forever changed by the death of my own son Michael. When a child dies, life doesn't return to what it was. Identity shifts, meaning fractures, and yet life continues to ask something of us. These conversations are for parents living this reality and for the professionals who support them. My intention is to offer a space where loss is not compared, judged, or explained away. When a child dies, it's not just an individual loss. Something shifts in the entire family system. Welcome back. Today I want to talk to you about something that often goes unnamed, but it's deeply felt by almost every parent who's ever lost a son or daughter. I'm sharing this with you because this understanding is something that helped me through my own early stages of grief after the death of our son Michael. One of the most important things I came to see is that the loss of a child doesn't just happen to us as parents. This type of loss disrupts the entire family system in ways that we often don't recognize. And that disruption is often at the very heart of the tension, confusion, isolation, and maybe even the pain that follows. Equally important is the way our identity is impacted within that system. So most conversations focus on the individual, how you're feeling, how you're coping, how you're making sense of what's happened. But what often gets missed is this. As parents, we are not grieving in isolation. We're living inside a larger system that includes family members, friends, colleagues, and others who are also deeply impacted by our own loss. They too are trying to find a way to cope with what's happened. Basically, what I'm trying to say to you is that the many systems in which you live, work, and play are not the same. And I'm sure many of you have noticed this already, that relationships feel different, that people who once feel close perhaps now feel somewhat distant. Or maybe it's the opposite. Somewhat unexpected becomes a source of support. And there may be tension where there wasn't tension before. Misunderstandings that don't quite make sense. Moments where maybe you think, why can't they meet me here? Why don't they understand? Or why does this feel so hard between us now? All of this is a normal part of the grief experience. I really want to emphasize that. This is not because people don't care. It's because, again, the entire family system has been disrupted. And when we look at our grief from a systems perspective, everything changes. So let's talk about the family system for just a moment. Every family operates within a kind of invisible structure, if you will. There are patterns of connection, there are family myths and historical perspectives, ways that people relate. There's an energy, if you will, that exists in your family system, unspoken roles and expectations. And over time that system finds a kind of balance. But when a child dies, that balance is profoundly shaken. And the system begins often unconsciously trying to reorganize itself. And sometimes it's easier to see this when we look at it from the outside. I'm reminded of the early episodes of Shrinking, one of my favorite shows. And if you haven't seen it, it follows a father and a daughter navigating life after the sudden loss of the wife and mother in a car accident. The show holds both humor and depth, but what stands out is how clearly you can see the disruption in the family system. The father, who also happens to be a therapist, by the way, becomes consumed by his own grief. He starts drinking, partying with other women, and for a period of time, he's actually basically absent from the family system. And in that absence, his teenage daughter is left to navigate the loss of her mother in her own way. It's a powerful example of something we often see. Not that someone doesn't care, but that they are so immersed in their own experience of loss that they're unable to see what's happening around them. This is often why we hear stories of people divorcing after the loss of a child. There are ways and reasons to understand why that's possible, because again, one party going in a different direction from the other. And it's not unusual. It's also not something I'm naming to judge because each of us responds to grief in the only way that we can at that time. But what this illustrates so clearly is this. When we're not aware of how our loss impacts the entire system, we can unintentionally contribute to further imbalance within it. So I want to share with you some simple ways to begin to see what might be happening in your own family system as a result of grief. And I'm not offering these as roles, but as a lens, if you want to think of it that way, so that you can better understand your own experience. The first lens, then, and one of my favorite, is the principle of time. Everyone moves through this experience differently, at a different pace and in a different way. While one person may still be in deep grief, the other is beginning to re-engage with life. And I remember a point in time where my husband asked me, Why are you doing better than I am? And my response was, I'm not doing better, I'm just doing it differently. You see, my husband is a man of action. And for him, that meant continuing to care for Michael in the only way he knew how, very concrete ways. So in those early stages, he would go to the cemetery two or three times a week, making sure that everything was in order. That is part of his Italian culture, but it's also just part of his own personality. He likes things in order. Even now, so many years later, Michael's graveside is one of the most carefully manicured, tended to spaces in the entire cemetery. But my grief responses and my practices were a bit different. I didn't feel the need to go to the cemetery as often. Instead, I preferred to journal letters to my son. I spent time in prayer and quiet reflection. So different expressions of grief will rise up depending on who you are and where you are in your own life cycle. And I'll be talking more about that in later episodes. But the point here is this we do best when we can honor our own way of grieving, while also understanding that it will not look the same for the people around us. And as that understanding deepens, we begin to see that while each of us grieves in our own way, our ways of coping do not exist in isolation. And that's a very important point I want to make. Our ways live within a larger system and they affect the people around us. And I don't want to call judgment to that, but in a way that invites awareness because sometimes the smallest shift is simply recognizing I'm not the only one in this grief experience. And how I move through it touches others too. And this doesn't mean that every way of coping is equally supportive, either for you or for the people around you. We'll talk more about disruptive ways of coping that can dramatically impact the system in negative ways. But some responses can create more strain within the system, especially when you're overwhelmed or don't yet have the capacity to see what's happening around us. And that capacity, of course, is directly impacted by the circumstances of your own child's death. Even more than that, when we begin to see that our way of grieving exists within this larger system that I'm talking about and inevitably impacts others, this can create less tension and angst within the system and even within ourselves. A little more space for each person to be where they are. So there's no shared timeline for grief. And when we expect one, it does create the tension I've mentioned. Now, the second lens that I want to really emphasize is that of place. In every system, each person has a place. And when a child dies, that place doesn't disappear. But it does often become very unclear. Sometimes the child is no longer spoken about or their presence is avoided, or family members relate to them in very different ways. But when a child's place is not acknowledged in the system, something is off, even if no one can explain why. And this applies to even early miscarriages. So there was a time when people didn't talk about loss, especially the loss of a child. Remember, we don't even have a word for it in the English language. Imagine no language for it. That tells you how much we've avoided the reality that this happens in our world, in our society. So the belief was when such a thing occurred, it was better to just move on. That stoic, you know, we're tough, we're survivors, let's move on. Let's not bring it up, let's not speak their name. I have met people literally who were never even told that they had a younger brother or sister that passed away. And it is very disruptive to that individual, even within themselves. So when we're not to make others uncomfortable, we're not to acknowledge this person. But what we now understand based on the latest research and trauma is that unacknowledged loss doesn't disappear. It actually stays in the system, our own physical, emotional, and psychological system, as well as the overall family system. So in my work, I've seen how important it is to give each person their rightful place within that system, to acknowledge that they were here, that they mattered, that they are still part of the family. When we acknowledge who came before, as we say in my field, we begin to feel a very different kind of peace because the system will naturally settle into its own order, its own reorganization, if you will. I often like to use the Disney example because I live in Orlando, the land of Disney, and I come from California and I grew up going there. And if you walk down Main Street, you'll see the names of the people who helped create the various parks. They're honored in the windows above the building. Somehow Walt Disney and the people that came after realize it was important to acknowledge those who came before. And even when something changes, when a new ride is brought forth or whatever, it is not erased, it is remembered, as are the characters. It's given a place. This is systemic order, as we like to call it in my field. And this reflects what the renowned Bert Herlinger often referred to as the orders of love. The idea that everyone who is in the system still belongs in that system. They continue to belong in some way, shape, or form, even if it's only in our memories and our hearts and our souls. So when a child is no longer physically present, we must remember that they still have a place. They remain a part of the family system, not in some weird, odd way, but just in a way that we acknowledge that they were here, that they mattered. When someone is not acknowledged in the system, others begin to carry that absence in ways that they often don't fully understand. And it's impossible for them to begin to move in a new direction and to embody life in a whole new way. And this affects everyone, more particularly siblings, because they don't know their order in the family system. Parents, the extended family members, as I've mentioned before, everyone in their own way. We must always remember this, is trying to find where they now belong in a system that has been disrupted. We'll continue to talk about these things, but the third lens I want to offer you is the balance of exchange, which often is equally disrupted after the loss of a child. Every human system seeks balance. And in relationships, this shows up as how we give and receive what's often referred to as reciprocity. After loss, the balance can shift because we're in different places in the grieving process. So one person may carry more emotionally, trying to hold everything together, trying to find order. I very quickly wanted to reorganize Michael's room and get all the hospital stuff out of the room and any sense of illness. I wanted to restore his room to what it was before he died, clean out his closets, all those kinds of things. My husband wasn't ready for that. He was not ready for the room to be painted and reorganized. And I moved too quickly. And I felt the resistance from him, but didn't quite understand what the resistance was about until I learned more and more about systems and how they actually happen. So I was trying to reorganize our life in very concrete ways. He's trying to reorganize the gravesite in very concrete ways. But sometimes one member of the family, you may find that person withdrawing, focusing on practical things, as I just gave you an example of, or struggling to even engage. They kind of check out, if you will. And I often see this idea of reciprocity, the balance of exchange, if you will. It shows up in how we try to support one another. One thing that I see with my husband is a need to check in constantly. He's always making sure I'm okay, checking in with me, alerting me to weather changes, those kinds of things. All that paternal love that he had for Michael sometimes is pushed in my direction. And sometimes it can feel too close. I value it and I recognize his need, but we want to make sure that the other person has the capacity to receive, maybe in the same way. And sometimes that's not always the case. They may pull back, they may need more space, or they simply don't know how to respond if they can't recognize that this is the need of the other person. So over time, these kinds of very practical but not often understood issues can create tension. One person feels I'm trying to be here for you, and the other feels I don't know how to meet you right now where you are. So when the balance of giving and receiving is disrupted, relationships can feel strained, even when love is still very much in the mix. And again, this isn't about someone doing it right or wrong. It's about capacity. That's a very important thing to understand. What each person is able to give and what they're able to receive in the midst of their own grief. When we begin to see this from a systemic point of view, we can soften our expectations of one another. And we can allow the relationship to find a new kind of balance over time. So if you found yourself feeling disconnected, misunderstood, or even alone within your own family, there may be more happening within the system than you're able to see right now. These are not personal failures. They are part of the process. They are systemic disruptions, systemic responses to more profound disruption. When you begin to see the system as an entity in and of itself, it becomes less personal, becomes less about me versus you or us versus them. It's just a system issue and the patterns and what's occurring in that system at this particular point in time. So we can stop blaming and we can step into a deeper level of understanding. And with that understanding, sometimes comes a very different kind of compassion for yourself and for the people around you. Now, as always, I want to close the episode with a pattern to practice opportunity for you, something for you to think about. I want to leave you each week with something simple that you can carry, not to change anything. We're not trying to force healing, just asking you to notice and maybe develop a different level of awareness. So over the next few days, see if you can gently shift your attention outward. Earlier, I asked you to be looking inward. Now I'm asking you to look outward at the system and the patterns within that system around you. Instead of focusing only on what you're feeling, I want you to begin to notice again what's happening around you, the patterns and how people interact, who moves towards you, who might be pulling away, where tension shows up. And again, you don't need to fix anything, just begin to see. If you feel like it, you can journal some of your awareness, some of your noticings, and see what patterns again start to emerge over time. Because here's the thing sometimes the moment you can see the system, something in you will begin to settle. I mentioned this earlier because what I've learned in my work over the years is this the system never lies. So just to recap, when a child dies, the family system doesn't stay the same. We gotta honor that. But over time, something new can begin to emerge, can begin to take shape, not by forcing it, not by trying to fix it, not by trying to heal or move forward in the way that other people think you should, but by simply having awareness of it and maybe understanding it a little bit better. And as that understanding deepens, we begin to see that while each of us grieves in our own way, our ways of coping don't exist in isolation. They live within a much larger system and they affect the people around us. Not in a way that calls for judgment, but in a way that invites awareness because sometimes the smallest shift is simply recognizing I'm not the only one in this experience. And how I move through it touches others too. And from that awareness, something begins to soften. Next week I'll be talking about how grief becomes disruptive to the family system in very specific ways. And I hope you'll join me. Until then, this is Dr. Sharon Spanner reminding you to take gentle care. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this conversation stirred something for you, you don't need to make sense of it right away. There's no timeline for understanding and no right way to carry what remains. Beyond the loss exists to honor parents who've lost a son or daughter and all the complexity that this implies, and to support the professionals who walk alongside them without comparison, judgment, or explanation. Wherever you are in the long after, you are not required to arrive anywhere else. Until next time, take gentle care.