When Grief Leaves You Feeling Unseen: A Trauma-Informed Look at Cassandra-Like Experiences After Loss of a Parent or Caregiver

When a family loses a parent, the focus if often the shared grief, the sadness everyone can see. But for some people, the most painful part of the bereavement isnt just the loss itself but the quiet ongoing experience of feeling emotionally unseen within the family that remains. Cassandra syndrome is not a formal clinical dignosis but is most often discussed in relationship to partners of autisic or emotionally unavailable individuals. At its core it is experiencing ongoing emotional invalidation, feeling unseen, unheard or disbelieved leading to feelings of chronic lonliness within close relationships and being told directly or indirectly that your emotional relality is "too much", "wrong", or "not real".

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity" - Simone Well

This feeling can occur after the death of a parent, where other family members can unintentioally recreate these conditions due to the difference in family members grieving processes. Some avoid emotions altogether, where some become hyper-functional or stoic and others supress grief to "hold it all together".

If one person feels that they need to talk about their feelings and others cannot or will not engage that person may, feel invisible or emotionally abandoned and begin doubting their own needs, whils experiencing profound lonliness despite being "with family".

After a parent dies, a child or sibling may unconciously take on roles such as being the "emotional caretaker", "peacekeeper" or "being the strong one", often meaning that their grief is sidelined . This can also happen when a child is living in a household where there is a neurodivergent sibling, as the feelings of cassandra syndrome are heightened when the family are so focused on the needs of the other child. The child can unknowilngly begin to take on these roles as there seems little space for their own experiences.

How parental loss can create Cassandra like dynamics

In these families there will be beliefs that are adopted like, "we dont talk about it", "stay positive", or in the sense of grief the old saying "it's been long enough now". and "we musn't upset the surviving parent". These can be extremely damaging to the childs sense of self. When someone unknowingly breaks these unspoken beliefs they may be dismissed or subtly corrected, leading to "self-silencing", feelings of shame around grief and feeling emotionally unsafe to express. If there is berevement for example there can be survivors guilt and invalidation, guilt for coping "better" or "worse" than others or being told that their grieving style is incorrect or feeling blamed for the tension in the household. This all mirrors the cassandra syndrome, the experience of being pathologized instead of understood. (We must remember that cassandra syndrom is a desriptive concept, not, a diagnosis,, but most useful when someone is trying to explain their experience of chronic emotional invalidation). In the concept of grief, therapists can often use terms such as "Disenfranchised grief", "relational trauma", "attachment rupture" and complications of "traumatic bereavement". For the person who needs to talk, feel, remember, or make meaning, these rules can feel silencing. Over time, they may start to feel like the problem, rather than recognising that the family system no longer has the capacity to accomodate their feelings.

A trauma lense helps us understand why this hurts so much

Through a traum informed lense, these experiences are not oversensitiveity or weakness, they are attachment wounds. When grief is met with invalidation, the nervous system registers this as a threat to connection. This can lead to chronic self doubt ("am I overreacting?"). Emtional numbing or shutdown, being hypervigilant to others moods and guilt for having needs met at all. This isn't just grief this is grief without safe relational support, your grief needs connection, and the system around you cannot offer this to you. This can be deeply distressing and deeply lonely. People in this situation are experiencing two losses, the death of a parent, and the loss of a parent to a more emotionally demanding sibling or the loss of emotional safety within the family.

You can absolutely experience Cassandra like distress in a family after losing a parent or in a pre-occupied family, not because something is wrong with you, but because these issues can fracture emotional attunement, leaving some members of the family unseen and unheard for long periods of time, which can have lasting effects on the future lives of those affected.

What can you do if this has been something that has affected you in your family? Firstly, reaching out to a trusted therapist who can validate your feelings, this can be trauma-informed or grief focused. Working towards naming the loss of both the parent and the emotional safety of the family whilst learning to externalise invalidation ("This is about capacity, not my worthiness") and working on building a emotional support network outside the family system if needed.

If this resonates, it doesn't mean you are broken or difficult. "it means you are human, and that your grief is asking to be witnessed. Healing often begins with not fixing family dynamics but with finding spaces where your emotional reality is believed, respected, and held with care. Sometimes that space is therapy, sometimes it's chosen relationships, sometimes it's learning to trust your own inner voice again. Your experience makes sense, even if it was never made sense of for you.

"To be listened to is, generally speaking, nearly the highest good" - Bertrand Russell