Episode 20 The Hidden Side of Parental Grief: Debunking the 5 Stages of Loss

In this episode of Beyond the Loss, I step into one of the most tender and unspoken territories of The Hidden Aftermath: the quiet presence of anger. While the world readily accepts sadness, anger can make people uncomfortable. Consequently, many parents hide their frustration—whether it is sparked by well-meaning clichés, institutional medical failures, spiritual doubts, or the painful realization that the world keeps moving forward while their child is gone.

Pulling from my own journey raising my medically fragile son, Michael, I break down why anger often presents itself subtly as body tension, irritability, or low emotional bandwidth. I dismantle the misconception that every parent must move linearly through Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's 5 stages of grief, offering clinical and somatic perspectives to help you approach anger with curiosity rather than shame. This episode provides practical language to help you discover what your anger is guarding without letting it turn into destructive bitterness.

In this episode, we discuss:

 • The Disguises of Anger: Recognizing how quiet anger shows up physically as jaw tightness, restlessness, impatience, or exhaustion.
 • Dismantling the 5 Stages: Understanding why Kübler-Ross's framework was designed for terminal illness and why parental grief does not fit a clean timeline.
 • Institutional and Medical Trauma: Validating the anger caused by broken support systems, insurance struggles, and missed diagnoses.
 • What Anger Protects: Shifting from self-judgment to asking curious questions about what boundaries or truths your anger is guarding.
 • Somatic Regulation: Practical steps for noticing where anger lands in your physical body and honoring it safely.
 
Connect with me:
 • Website: https://sharonspano.com
 • Podcast Page: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/podcast-beyond-the-loss/
 • YouTube: youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host
 • Substack: substack.com/@drsharon

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Transcript

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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. What if anger after the death of a child is not a negative aspect of grief, but a natural human reaction when something so sacred has been lost? Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Loss. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, and this season we've been exploring what I'm calling the hidden aftermath of child loss, the more subtle realities parents may carry after the first layer of grief has been experienced. This month we're staying with the feelings we don't always know how to name or even talk about. And today I want to turn toward a different feeling, one that many parents experience but don't always feel free to speak about. Anger. Not the dramatic kind of anger that gets attention, although that may be a part of it. I'm not the anger that explodes in a way that harms others. I'm talking about the anger that sits beneath the surface, the anger that appears when something ordinary happens, and suddenly your whole body remembers that the world has moved on and your son or daughter is no longer a part of it. Sometimes this anger rises up when people say something cliche, or when you remember all the many systems that seem to fail your child, whether it be medical support, insurance, friends, or even family. It might even be when someone else puts expectations on you that you're not ready for. Things like gratitude, peacefulness, or my favorite, you'll get over this in time. All those well-meaning words and intentions that attempt to move us forward before we're fully ready. And perhaps even more difficult, the anger that has no clear place to go. Because after the death of a child, anger can be complicated, just like all the other feelings and emotions that we've been talking about. And it may be directed towards doctors, hospitals, other systems, family members, as I said, maybe even friends, God. God is one that we hear about all the time. Even the circumstances, even yourself or the person who may have caused harm to your child, or simply the brutal unfairness that your child died and life around you has kept moving forward. Sometimes the anger makes sense to us and sometimes it frightens us. Sometimes we judge ourselves for even having it. And sometimes we don't even recognize it as anger at first because it may come disguised as irritability, exhaustion, numbness, impatience, or even withdrawal. So today I want to make room for anger as one of those hidden feelings in the grief journey process. And it's not my intention to glorify anger or certainly not to excuse any harmful behavior that may arise from it. And I'm definitely not suggesting that anger is the only appropriate response. The goal here is to give anger its place in the grieving process. So if you're in that place where anger is a part of it, I want to ask you to consider letting go of any guilt or shame that may rise up as a result of this very normal response to grief. The important questions I'd ask you to consider are: what is anger asking me to protect? What is it trying to tell me? What is the information around this? And why do so many of us feel the need to hide it when we do experience it? Before we move further, I also want to offer you a gentle reminder. This conversation, as many of the ones that we're having, may touch tender places related to the death of your child. And it may conjure up memories of specific struggles or injustices that you and your family have encountered. Things like medical trauma, spiritual struggles, and emotions that often feel overwhelming. So I want to encourage you to please listen in a way that feels right for you. If something feels too close, please pause, step away, or return when you feel ready. This podcast is offered for reflection and support, but is not a substitute for therapy, counseling, or medical care. If you're feeling overwhelmed or unsafe, I want to encourage you to please reach out to a trusted professional, crises resource, or someone who can support you more directly. When we talk about grief, anger is often treated like an emotion we need to move past quickly. People may be more comfortable with sadness because sadness seems softer. And it people expect, of course, you to be sad and they find themselves more available to you and able to offer sympathy. But anger can make people uncomfortable and they often don't know how to respond to our anger, what to say, what to do. And they may even have anger of their own that is related to your specific loss. So as we consider anger's place and our grief journey, I want to call attention to the fact that not all parents experience anger after the loss of a son or daughter. You've heard me reference the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the renowned Swiss American psychiatrist who was a pioneer in near-death studies. She also developed the five stages of grief, commonly known as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, these five stages were originally developed for people who were terminally ill. And through the years, however, mental health professionals sometimes refer to these stages in the context of grief, in the context of parental grief, often assuming or implying that we all go through these stages in a very linear fashion. I want to emphasize again that the grief journey is different for every one of us, all depending on the circumstances of our loss. I, for instance, never experienced anger in relation to either my son's birth or his death. I think when he was born, I was just too shocked and busy and trying to figure out what he needed to have anger. And I can't even tell you why I didn't have it when he died, except for the fact that there was some level of relief that he was no longer suffering. I can tell you that I did experience anger, however, and frustration many, many times throughout the course of his life with the institutions around us that were supposed to offer support for a medically fragile child, and yet somehow often, too often, failed to do so. So, yes, anger is a part of that journey. And sometimes that grief journey begins before our child has actually even passed in a physical sense. It begins with the many systems and processes that we're forced to encounter that can even begin to let us down and cause us even more anger, frustration, and stress. So the point is if you're experiencing anger over the circumstances of your child's death, it is right for you to have these emotions. It's acceptable for you to have them. It's expected. It would also be wise, I might suggest, for you to find help if you need a grief specialist or someone to help you make sense of these emotions, particularly if it's anger. But again, I would caution against any professional who attempts to place your experience inside the box of the five stages. You want someone who understands the nuances and the complexity of your unique situation. So having said this, let's take a moment to explore a few of the most common examples where anger may surface. Anger may rise because something inside you still knows that what happened should not have happened. And it may come up because your child suffered as mine did, or because a diagnosis was missed, because an accident occurred, because someone was careless, or because of just the complexity of addiction or mental illness or violence or disease and how those elements played a role in the death of your child, or because systems much larger than you failed to protect the life you loved. It may rise because you had to make impossible decisions with incomplete information, or because the world can feel so fragile and unpredictable that it becomes almost impossible to make peace with the fact that your son or daughter is gone and again, life around you continues. So, again, I'm not suggesting that anger is clean or simple. None of this is. It rarely is. And anger can become, again, entangled with guilt, fear, sorrow, regret, and helplessness. And it can turn inward. And when it does, we have to be very careful of that because it can lead us into depression. It can attach itself to people who do not even deserve the full weight of it. And it can come out sideways when the real wound is really too deep and too painful to touch directly. But here's the point I want to stress. Anger, in and of itself, is not a moral failure. I really want you to get that. Sometimes anger is the part of us that refuses to pretend the loss was acceptable. I think one reason anger can be so difficult after the death of the child is that for many of us, it's cloaked with worry. We don't want to burden others. So we worry about what we might say or do that could do that. So we keep our anger and our worry to ourselves, again, because we don't want to burden other people. And we also may be wanting to show up as very strong, particularly in our work environment. We don't want to make people uncomfortable. Maybe we don't want to broach the subject at all. And if you live by a specific faith tradition as I do, you may also worry that anger means that you're somehow failing spiritually. And let's face it, one of the things that I hear often from parents, particularly if they've lost a child in a sudden accident or some other form of tragedy, they may address and feel internally anger at God. For after all, what kind of God would take my child away from me? So, with all these thoughts within us around anger, is it no wonder that we tend to keep it to ourselves or stuff it underground? So let's talk for a second about what anger can actually look like. In case you're not sure yourself, if you're one that's not demonstrating it in outward ways, it can look like a lot of things and in very subtle ways. So it could be like the tightness in the jaw, perhaps a short response when someone talks to you over just something, you know, that is minimal, a restless body, an inability to feel comfortable in your own skin, maybe a sudden impatience that rises up, or the inability to tolerate small complaints. We've talked about a difference in our bandwidth after such a loss. Maybe even the need to leave the room when other people are talking about things again that might seem mundane. I know that I personally used to be great at cocktail parties or parties in general, talking chit-chat. And now I just don't have the bandwidth for that. And it kind of bore me. Or maybe it's even exhaustion that comes after holding everything in. So here's the thing that sometimes when anger has nowhere safe to go or we don't even recognize that it's within us, it can just begin to feel like what is the reason I want to talk about this today. Because what I really want you to consider is in all of this, is that anger is not something to be ashamed of. Obviously, if you're exercising it in ways that are harmful to yourself or others, then you'd absolutely need help in moving past that or moving into a different place around it. But in and of itself, it is part of the process. If it is true for you in the moment, it is part of your truth. More importantly, it doesn't need to lead the story and it doesn't need to be the main focus, but it does need a place as part of your story if that's what's coming up for you. So is that there's a difference between letting anger have a voice and letting it take over. If it's taking over to the point where you're debilitated or again, you're acting out in harmful ways against yourself or others, then you need more immediate support. There's a difference between acknowledging anger and using it to wound others and saying that this is important, this is a part of my grief journey. And we certainly want to also consider bitterness because it may then become the only way that we relate to the world. I knew a woman some years ago whose son was killed tragically, and she just carried the weight of that for the rest of her days. I mean, there was a bitterness and an anger that she was never able to fully integrate into a healthier way of life. So that's what we're talking about again, is the integration. Many parents understand this and know this, and this is often why, you know, we can shy away or be even afraid of our own anger. We don't want to hurt anyone. We don't want to become someone that we don't even recognize ourselves. And we don't want our child's memories, certainly, to be surrounded only by rage. And the easiest way to overcome that is to start to focus yourself on the joyful memories. And those would be the memories that you would talk about if you're comfortable doing so and sharing with others and emphasizing. But we also want to realize that we don't want to deny it, as I've stated earlier, it does because it won't disappear again if you deny it. And it will find another way to speak. So it can speak through the body, as I said, through distance. Sometimes we'll just distance ourselves from other people or the relationships in our life out of anger. And it may speak through the inability to tolerate things that once seem manageable. And there's a kind of numbness that may come from it that can begin to protect you from feeling too much at once. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. That is your entire system doing what it needs to do to protect you from, frankly, just losing it altogether. So I want to invite you to focus less on getting rid of the anger if that's real for you, and more on becoming curious about it. Curiosity to me is always one methodology, one way to lean into whatever you're experiencing. So as I close out for this week's episode, I want to leave you, as I always do, with a pattern to practice, something that I want you to notice this week. And again, we're never trying to change it or fix it. Just notice it, develop more awareness around it. If anger is something that rises up for you, I want you to pause before judging it or pushing it away. And then you might begin by just simply and quietly within yourself asking the question, or rather, I should say, stating, anger is here. It is here. And then if it feels possible, ask yourself, what is this anger protecting? Or what information is it giving me? Not what is it proving, not who am I blaming, but what is the anger protecting, or what is the information it's giving me? Is it protecting your love for your child? Is it protecting a truth that has not yet been spoken? Is it perhaps protecting a sorrow that is so deep that you just can't even go there yet? Is it protecting a boundary, a memory, or a part of you that feels unseen? And then bring your attention to your body. I'll always ask that of you, and just notice where this anger might land. People can usually tell me it's in my throat, it's in my chest, I feel it in my heart. So just notice where it is and wherever it is, if it's your stomach, your jaw, wherever, don't try to change it. Just notice it. You might gently place your hands on that area, take a deep breath, and just say something within yourself like, I acknowledge that you are here. All right. Sounds kind of weird, but it does help. And then ask yourself one more question. What would help me hold this anger without letting it harm me or without letting it harm someone else? Maybe you could journal about it, you know, write privately for a few minutes about what's come up for you. Maybe it's going outside, taking a walk in nature with some deep breaths and just bringing a beautiful, gentle memory of your child, a joyful one to mind. Maybe it's talking about it as I often do with my best friend Jane, a very trusted memory, a trusted friend. And I can say to her, I'm angry today because this, this, or this happened. I don't need you to fix it. I just want you to listen. Or maybe it is bringing that anger into therapy, prayer. Certainly, prayer is useful in asking God, whatever your faith tradition, to lift that from you, any kind of spiritual direction or whatever safe space is appropriate for you in that time. So the practice, again, is not to get rid of the anger. That would be very difficult to do. It's just to observe it with curiosity and to give it its place within your system where it can be held with honesty and care. One last thing to think about is that sometimes anger becomes less frightening when we stop treating it like an enemy and begin listening to it with compassion and care for the grief that it's carrying. So just to recap, anger after the death of a child, your child, can be difficult to name because it doesn't always feel acceptable to ourself or others. But it is and could be part of your truth. It may be protest, it may be grief, it may be love, all refusing to pretend that this loss was ordinary. If anger is part of what you carry, I hope you will meet it with care. Not by letting it harm you and not by letting it become the whole story of your child's situation, but by listening for what it may be trying to protect. Because beneath anger, there is often something very tender, as we've enumerated here today. Until next time, this is Dr. Sharon Spano wishing you gentle care. God bless. 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.