When we think about grief, we tend to think about death. Losing someone we love. Saying goodbye to a person who is no longer here.
But there is another kind of grief that can accompany growing up in a family affected by alcohol harm. It is the grief of losing things you never really had in the first place.
The childhood you wish you had experienced. The parent you needed but didn't have. The feeling of safety and security that should have been yours. The family relationships you hoped would change, but never did.
For adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs), this grief can be difficult to recognise because there isn't always a single event to mark the loss. Sometimes, it takes years to understand what was missing and how deeply it affected you.
Grieving what could have been
Growing up, you might have learned to minimise your experiences. You told yourself it wasn't that bad, that other people had it worse, or that you had no reason to complain.
Perhaps you became the caretaker, the peacemaker or the person who tried to hold everything together. You learned to adapt to your environment rather than ask what you needed from it.
You may have spent years hoping your parent would stop drinking, that things would eventually be different, or that one day you would finally have the relationship you always wanted.
And perhaps part of you still hopes for that.
There can be grief in recognising that the parent you needed may never be able to give you what you long for. There can be grief in realising how much of your childhood was spent managing circumstances that were never yours to manage.
And there can be grief for the person you might have become if so much of your energy hadn't gone towards navigating your family environment.
These are real losses, even when the people involved are still alive.
Grief doesn't follow a timeline
You might experience anger at what happened, sadness about what you missed, or guilt for feeling these things towards a parent you love.
You might replay the past, wondering whether you could have done something differently. You might minimise your experiences one day and feel the full weight of them the next.
Grief can resurface at different points in your life. Becoming a parent yourself, building relationships, or seeing other families can bring a new awareness of what you experienced and what you needed but didn't receive.
There is no single way to grieve these losses, and no fixed timeline for working through them.
Part of the process is allowing yourself to acknowledge what happened without immediately dismissing it, justifying it or feeling responsible for making it better.
You can love your parent and grieve the childhood you had. Both can be true.
You can acknowledge the past without living in it
For a long time, you might have focused on understanding your family, making sense of your experiences or trying to find a way to change how you felt about them.
That understanding can be important. But moving forward can also require you to acknowledge the losses, give yourself permission to feel what comes with them, and recognise that you cannot rewrite what happened.
You cannot recover the childhood you didn't have. You cannot make someone become the parent you needed. And you cannot go back and change the circumstances you grew up in.
But you can begin to change your relationship with those experiences.
You can learn to recognise the patterns you developed to cope. You can begin to understand how they influence your life today. And you can build the self-trust, emotional capacity and sense of security that allow you to make different choices as an adult.
This doesn't mean forgetting what happened or excusing the harm. It means recognising that your past is part of your story, but it doesn't have to determine the rest of it.
Healing isn't about getting over your childhood or pretending the losses didn't matter.
It's about giving yourself permission to grieve what you needed and didn't receive, while also making room for the life you want to build now.
You are allowed to grieve what was lost. And you are allowed to move forward.