The Losses Teens Carry Quietly

Loss comes in more shapes than we name

We tend to save the word "grief" for death. Yet the teen years are full of losses that never get a service or a sympathy card. Loss can look like a family that split up, moved, or has a parent who is here but not really the same anymore. It can be a best friend who stopped talking to them, or a friend group that quietly left them out. It can be the loss of a part of who they were: the starter on the team after a bad injury, the good student who is now struggling in class. And sometimes it's the loss of the life they thought they were going to have: finishing school with the same friends, holidays in one house, everything the way it was supposed to be.

Grief researcher Kenneth Doka calls this disenfranchised grief, or in other words, hidden grief: "a loss that's not openly acknowledged, socially mourned or publicly supported." When a loss isn't recognized, the person carrying it loses permission to grieve it out loud.

Family therapist Pauline Boss named a related idea, ambiguous loss: grieving someone who is physically here but emotionally gone — a parent lost to addiction, illness, or a hard divorce. Teens carry these losses too.

How parents can help

Parents and caregivers can help, because you don't need perfect words. These go further than advice:

• Start by calling it what it is: "That's a real loss. Of course it hurts." Naming it gives your teen permission to feel it.

• Hold the silver lining for later. "You'll make new friends" and "It's for the best" are meant kindly, but they can sound like "move on." Let the sadness have room first.

• Stay close without trying to fix. A car ride, a late-night snack, or sitting in the same room tells them they are not carrying this alone.

• Expect mixed feelings. Relief and sadness, anger and love can show up together, especially after a divorce. That isn't confusion; it's what grieving something complicated looks like.

A common pattern I see in practice is a teen whose routines and behaviors shift almost overnight. The activities they used to love — sports, family time, school, and their community — no longer hold their interest. Grades slip. Classes get skipped. Teachers describe defiance and disrespect, and reports from the school office start piling up at home. Detention and suspension become more frequent. When they walk in the door, they head straight to their room and don't want to talk, when just months before they shared everything about the day. Old friends become enemies. New friends arrive carrying the same attitude. Parents don't understand the change, and the people around them shrug: "It's the age. They'll get over it."

Meanwhile, the teen is watching how everyone reacts in silence. Even when they say, "I don't care," the pain grows, because they can see that the people they love are too busy with their own lives to stop and ask, "What's going on with you?" Some parents try. Others don't, because they're fighting their own battles and end up minimizing what looks, from the outside, like a kid's problem.

Time passes — weeks, months, years — and the behaviors keep escalating to a point where, as a parent, you cannot ignore them anymore. You suspect that your adolescent might be experimenting with tobacco, drugs, and alcohol, maybe sex, or dangerous self-inflicted behaviors. But you are in denial that all of this could be happening right in front of you, and that you hadn't noticed it before. It takes a minute to process and understand that this is real, and that it needs you to step in NOW. But you don't know how to approach it, because anything you do could either push the teen into more rebellious behavior or push them further away. So you try every possible way: hard discipline, taking everything away from them, even physical confrontations, and then shifting into being very permissive, thinking that will keep your child close to you and bring their trust back. None of it works, and as a parent you feel stuck in "limbo." You try advice from family and friends, search the internet for solutions and other people's stories, reconnect with your spiritual beliefs and try to force your kid into caring about theirs, and finally, as a last option, admit they need professional help.

Let's talk about what's missing

Your adolescent is experiencing multiple losses, and they don't know how to grieve. It doesn't have to be the loss of a person who passed away, necessarily, though that may be part of it. They are going through changes they don't understand and don't feel they can get through. When something matters and is now gone, grief is the fitting response — not drama, not weakness. All they know is that nobody can understand how they feel; they see everything happening around them as a threat, as if the world wanted to harm them somehow; and they feel trapped at an age where they can't be independent enough to do the things they want to do.

On top of all the physical changes like hormones, growth, and natural processes, they may also be moving through other life transitions. There may be a divorce or separation from parents. But there is also the shift from childhood into adolescence, with school changes into middle school or high school, where the social dynamics are harder and peer pressure is heavier. Teachers can feel out of reach when the teen needs help getting through class, as they expect them to do more independent work. Friends they counted on may no longer be in the same school or class, slowly drifting away. Strange, unfamiliar feelings start showing when they start being attracted to another peer. Their body starts changing in ways they don't like or don't know how to manage. Embarrassment kicks in at a high level, self-esteem drops to zero, and all they want is to escape from the world.

When therapy helps and when it becomes urgent

On a regular basis, adolescents experience sadness, mood swings, anger, and acting-out behaviors. Therapy at this stage is preventive: it gives your teen healthier ways to manage emotions, tools to break the thoughts that lead to self-destructive patterns, and support for dealing with bullying and peer pressure.

So how do you know when the situation is more serious than preventive care can hold? These are some signs to watch for in your teen that call for professional intervention, because your adolescent's life is at higher risk:

• Substance use, such as tobacco, alcohol, or drugs

• Depressive symptoms, including anhedonia (losing the ability to feel pleasure)

• Long periods of crying that you may suspect but can't always see

• Impulsive anger, such as fighting with siblings, friends, or school peers; breaking and destroying things at home and elsewhere; or public disturbances

• Self-injury, such as cutting (even superficial), binge eating, or not eating at all

• Disrupted sleep, with long naps during the day, being unable to sleep at night, or spending all night on games or their phone

• Nightmares they won't talk about but that keep them from wanting to go back to sleep, until exhaustion finally takes over

A place to name what's underneath

Counseling offers a place where the loss can be spoken plainly and not minimized, not rushed, not measured against anyone else's timeline. At Amare Integrated Clinical Services, I sit with teens and their families as they name the losses that often go unspoken. Together we find a way through them, without anyone having to pretend they never happened.

If you'd like to talk about your teen, you can reach me:

📞 928-940-2120
✉️ joan@amareics.com

If your teen talks about feeling hopeless or not wanting to be alive, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. If they are in immediate danger, call 911.