A woman recently began therapy hoping to make sense of the difficult emotions she is experiencing in her marriage. She is in what she refers to as a sexless union, and in spite of her varied attempts to address this part of their relationship with her husband, the absence of physical intimacy is tearing at her in ways she can no longer ignore.

She is trying to discern whether she can continue in a marriage that exists on life support in this one area, even as she remains deeply aware of their relationship history and the life they have built together. As our work barely begins, she begins to speak about the staggering distress tied to a brief relationship that recently ended.

This significant upset is not what she said brought her to therapy, yet it quickly complicates how she understands the pain she is already carrying.

She speaks with care about her marriage, describing her husband as kind and someone she loves deeply, even as she struggles with the painful recognition that she no longer feels in love with him. Living with both truths only deepens her confusion about where her grief belongs, particularly as she feels unable to speak about it with others.

When the brief relationship ended, she was surprised by the intensity of her distress. The connection was short and was out of character for her, which makes the sense of loss even more difficult to understand. Alongside guilt, which she expressed bitterly as she has never before stepped outside of her marriage, she also felt a flood of relief, relief in having felt desired and emotionally awake in a way she has not felt in years.

What troubles her most is not only the pain itself but the bewilderment about why this is the pain that feels most acute. The kind of grief she is experiencing has a name. Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief in the 1980s to describe losses that are real and painful yet lack social permission or recognition.

Many people expect their emotional lives to follow a kind of moral logic. They believe the deepest hurt should come from the longest or most significant relationship, and when their feelings and that expectation are mismatched, they often begin to question their own character.

She keeps wondering why this loss feels so piercing when the relationship was brief and when her marriage holds so much history. What she is slowly discovering is that emotional pain often gathers around what has been missing, not around what is most familiar. The intensity of her reaction is not a sign of disloyalty but a sign of how deeply she has been living without something she needs.

When someone’s grief does not match the story they believe they are supposed to be living, it can become difficult to talk about. She feels unsure of where her pain belongs, unsure of how to name it, and unsure of whether she is even entitled to feel it.

The loss is real to her, yet it exists in a place she does not feel she can openly acknowledge. This leaves her with pain that has nowhere obvious to go. She keeps trying to sort her emotions into categories that make sense, but nothing fits neatly. The result is one kind of private suffering that grows harder to explain the longer it goes unspoken.

Situations like hers often invite strong reactions. It can be easy to focus on the circumstances and decide what someone should or should not feel. And for those who have been betrayed, the pain caused by infidelity is real and lasting, deserving of care and recognition in its own right.

At the same time, understanding a person’s emotional experience does not require agreement with their choices. In my role as a therapist, my responsibility is not to excuse harm or render judgment but to attend to the person sitting in front of me and to help her make sense of the tumultuousness inside her.

While this is one woman’s experience, the dynamic it reveals is not unique to her or to the circumstances of her life.

Many people carry losses that others do not take seriously, or that feel difficult to explain. It may be grief after a relationship that never seemed to “count” to anyone else, or pain that feels far too strong given the circumstances.

Sometimes the loss is tied to a dream or direction a person once held that never came to fruition. When there is no clear permission to mourn, people often turn that confusion inward, questioning not only their pain, but themselves.