Sarah Graham
Therapy is a space designed to provide a holding environment—one where we can gently turn towards those parts of ourselves that have been hidden from us. A therapist offers a calm, curious presence that we may not yet have developed within us because of life’s challenges and trauma. Within this haven, we learn to rely on and trust the therapist, and ultimately, ourselves.
But what happens when the person we turn to doesn’t provide space for all the parts of us we long to reclaim? What happens when they leave us feeling more alone?
At the age of 40, after experiencing a miscarriage, I turned to therapy to navigate my grief. My therapist at the time was understanding and compassionate regarding my immediate loss. However, when it came to grappling with the profound grief of being permanently childless, he was out of his depth.
Instead of sitting with me in my pain, he suggested, “Why not try for adoption?” –despite knowing my husband was opposed to the idea; “He’ll come round to the idea”, was his tone. In an attempt to prove his point, he handed me a newspaper clipping of a Swedish study, claiming that couples who adopted after failed IVF were happier than those who remained childless.
Years later,at age 48, I remained trapped in a painful limbo. The silence of those around me left my grief frozen. I was stuck in a vulnerable void – unable to mourn, and therefore unable to let go of a hope that was hurting me. To heal, I needed someone to sit with me in the absolute finality of my loss. Instead, I was left in total isolation.
When I eventually tried seeing a new therapist, the pattern repeated. When she asked, ‘Have you considered adoption?’, my defenses collapsed. Cut off from any external validation, I surrendered my own reality entirely; I began to doubt myself and deferred to her authority, reopening a door that had already closed.
From the outside, choosing not to adopt may seem like giving up. It often gets framed as a failure. However, the truth is far more complex - and requires genuine courage. Adoption promised an immediate cure for our isolation; it was an invitation back into parenthood, into societal inclusion, into being recognised as a ‘proper’ family.
But that would have been a lie. When my husband finally agreed to consider adoption, I could have seized the moment. However, I knew his heart wasn’t in it, and neither was mine. The reality was that I wanted a child with my husband. I never wanted to adopt. The truth I was never allowed to voice was that I didn’t want to adopt. Nobody wanted to hear this. I was constantly pushed towards it because it suited everyone else’s narrative. To others it was a tidy solution to an uncomfortable problem. Why face so much agonising pain when you could just adopt? As if it were that simple, as if a child were a commodity, an item to be ordered off a shelf to replace what was broken. They wanted me to swap one life for another to make my grief more manageable for them.
Looking back, I can see how impossible it was to trust my own voice. When your entire support system, right down to your therapists, unanimously pushes adoption, it creates a subtle, overwhelming pressure to doubt your reality.
I sought therapy hoping for a safe space to grieve—somewhere I could be seen and companioned in my loss. Instead, it felt impossible. On many levels, both were skilled therapists in their fields, but they could not hold space for my childless grief. Once again, I was abandoned in my pain, left to navigate this lonely path.
In his book Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas Hubl writes:
Attentional violence is to not see another person, another human being in terms of who they really are or for their highest future possibility. When who you truly are goes unseen by society, a form of violence is inflicted upon you.
Hubl p.176
This violence manifested for me as a sense of annihilation—a chronic ignoring of my pain through its erasure from almost all conversations. The responses of both my therapists to my childless grief mirrored wider societal attitudes. The silence became so acute that I soon learned to internalise that oppression and silenced myself. My grief remained trapped for many years.
At 50, I attended a Reignite weekend and finally found the support I had been longing for. Meeting other childless women was transformational. I soon realised that the themes of silence and invalidation ran through almost every childless woman’s story. The shared theme of inadequate therapy deeply resonated, and I became determined to highlight this profound deficit within the professional therapeutic world.
Committed and passionate to bridge this clinical gulf, I spoke with other women to document their stories, eager to compel the therapeutic community to listen. Unfortunately, this proved far more challenging than I anticipated.
A woman I met during this weekend told me, “It's not the not having children that’s the problem, it's the way society is behaving towards me”
She is right; it isn’t just the absence of children that creates suffering—true suffering is what happens when that loss is minimised, misunderstood, ignored or met with unsolicited suggestions about what we should do to fix it. Whether it is a therapist pushing adoption or a well-meaning acquaintance offering toxic positivity, this constant influx of silence and unsolicited advice only serves to intensify our grief and deepen our feelings of isolation.
So many women’s stories resonate with my experience, each unique but carrying the same familiar thread. Susie’s story was particularly shocking. She began therapy after one of her close friends announced her pregnancy. After carefully searching for an appropriate therapist, she interviewed several before choosing someone who clearly seemed to truly understand her. Yet, only 3 months later, her therapist announced her own pregnancy, seemingly oblivious to the profound impact this would have on her client. Susie told me she was profoundly shocked. She thought to herself, “Where are the cameras”? The situation felt so utterly surreal and shocking that she couldn’t actually believe it was happening.
Lynne, a psychotherapist, said. “My experiences of therapy during my childless journey have been pretty brutal and harmful. Being marginalised and silenced in this setting compounded my sense of shame and separation.”
Laura echoed the profound isolation she faced: “I felt like I was doing all the grief work on my own; my therapist didn’t know what to do with the heaviness of it.”
From my experiences of grief and mourning, this can be a profoundly powerful time—one of heart-wrenching pain, yes, but also, potentially, of life-affirming transformation. It reminds me of the journey of the caterpillar. To become a butterfly, it cannot simply grow wings. It must enter the darkness of the chrysalis and completely dissolve into liquid mush. It is a messy, painful, and terrifying undoing of everything it once was. Our grief demands the same total dissolution—an surviving this requires a ferocity and resilience that conventional life rarely demands.
Perhaps society is uncomfortable because the power born from deep transformation threatens those who dare not face their own pain. They want us to skip the mush— and simply show them our wings. But we cannot fly until we are allowed to dissolve and transform.
True therapy must hold space for both dissolution and transformation - not by demanding to see our wings, but by sitting with us while we are still in the dark.
For a childless person, that dark is often a grief few understand, and they should never find themselves abandoned in the very haven meant for their healing.
