I took a thanatology course in high school, many moons ago (I'm 45 y/o now.) We touched on topics of bereavement, suicide, and the 5 stages of grief. What we didn't discuss, however, were the unconventional grief and loss issues, many of which I've outlined in my original post, but which were beyond the scope of the course I had taken in high school.

Grief work in therapeutic settings, for some, is challenging. Whenever interpersonal victimization is on our list of lifetime traumatic experiences, emotional expression of any kind becomes scary - something to avoid, something to stuff down, something to neglect within ourselves, something that our abusers didn't want to see, something that our abusers punished us for, something that came with consequences of more loss and pain. Not surprisingly, many people who have unconventional grief issues, such as the ones listed above, avoid certain emotions that naturally come with grief, such as crying or expressing verbal anger. We may avoid talking about it, too.

After years of avoiding grief work, I decided to ask for it. Unbeknownst to me, I've not found one therapist who has agreed to work with me on these issues. I've been through decades of coping skills for my various other symptoms, but I've not yet found a therapist who trusts me enough when I say that I've been through the first stages of trauma work, but not that middle stages, or when I say that I was rushed past the grief work and told to jump into societal integration with newfound social skills. The lack of processing grief backfired, and only made my conditions regress.

In essence, I've been grieving alone for about 10 years now. My losses are not uncommon, but they are sometimes minimized by therapists, who would rather see the positives. I've tried being positive, and do think positive every day - hence, my lack of giving in to suicidal ideation, and my constant desire to improve my life and my future. If the therapists had only seen my past progresses, treatments, and innate strengths, they would know that I'm ready to process grief, however painful that is for me to experience (or my parts, as I have DID on top of PTSD), and however painful that is for a therapist to witness. Because it is often taboo and traumatizing (vicarious trauma/secondary trauma) for layperson to hear their loved ones grieve, the therapeutic relationship coupled with online groups help me to address my grief issues without avoidance.

After having read the following article 11 Kinds of Therapy to Help You Grieve a Loss
...I realized that I was doing most of the things on that list of 11 informal therapies that exist outside of clinical settings. However, my only beef with those reintigrations to normative living or moving on is that the emotional expressions remain bottled up inside, the invalidation from past victimization ensue, and the loneliness in suffering remains. Although such suggestions might work for conventional grief issues, such as losing a job (but not a career) or grieving a loved one who had died for whatever reason, it may not always work for grieving over unconventional losses.

I plan on going through the list on PC to find an article that discusses these losses and different grieving treatments available, but if you know of any other tips or suggestions, I'm all ears.

Here's a general list of what PC offers (which I have yet to read, so maybe what I'm looking for might already exist somewhere on PC): Coping with Grief | Psych Central