It’s Complicated with Loss
Complications with Complex Loss
When loss is nuanced and complicated, it’s not easy to sit with or settle into those experiences. Complicated grief often feels like loss is compounded—textured with unresolved emotions such as remorse, rage, guilt, or anguish that contribute to feelings of uncertainty, overwhelm, and emotional strain. Complicated loss may involve multiple experiences of grief occurring at once or layers of loss unfolding simultaneously. The enormity of the experience can feel like wading through brackish waters — tainted, strained, and unclear. These struggles are hard to navigate while trying to find steady ground and remain afloat.
There isn’t an immediate resolution to processing complicated grief, nor does there need to be. There are practical things that can be done, but grief is not always practical, logical, or makes sense. Emotions, feelings, and thoughts may feel like they are swirling lately, or they may come and go in waves as fragments of awareness and perception begin to show and reveal themselves.
What Does Complicated Grief Look Like?
What does complicated grief look like? Complicated grief can overlap with collective and ambiguous forms of loss, where uncertainty, prolonged stress, and unresolved experiences make loss difficult to fully process. What has changed or been taken away? The current state of the world, constant overstimulation, and the emotional demands of daily life can feel overwhelming in themselves, leaving little room to pause, reflect, or recover — let alone feel grounded enough to simply function and move through everyday life as a human being.
It’s too much, all of the time. Textured, multilayered, and tattered.
Loss can look like and feel like a tapestry — layered, textured, and woven from many experiences, memories, and emotions. Complicated grief may feel like frayed or torn threads within that tapestry, but those threads still belong to the whole. The pain, wear, and unraveling do not take away from the meaning, connection, or purpose held within the larger piece of the tapestry.
The experience of grief and loss can feel like hand sewing. Each stitch moves slowly toward creating something whole again with care, intention, and purpose — even if what is being made is a patch. Restoration is a process. Garments offer covering and protection; the process becomes an act of presence: tending gently to what has been worn, torn, or altered. To be still in grief is like a stitch, to remain present with what is, held and part of the whole.
Layers in Loss and Complicated Grief
Some examples of complicated grief and layered losses:
Caregiving
One of the most difficult roles to carry is taking on a caregiving role, whether for a loved one or as a profession. You can deeply care for and love someone and still grieve the life you had before caregiving, the realities of caregiving itself, and the aftermath that follows. Caregiving often involves invisible labor, ongoing responsibility, and the tension of emotional strain that often goes unseen or unsupported by others.
The daily responsibilities of feeding, dressing, managing appointments, monitoring medications, advocating, or providing ongoing care can take a significant emotional, mental, and physical toll.
Sometimes you may become the person a loved one trusts most, recognizes most, or depends on entirely. Whether caregiving was a role willingly embraced or one stepped into out of necessity, it can carry exhaustion, grief, guilt, relief, love, resentment, devotion, and loss all at once.
Legal Proceedings
Experiences such as divorce, incarceration, custody disputes, or adoption and foster care can carry forms of complicated grief because there are often multiple losses unfolding into the main fold. Relationships, roles, routines, identity, stability, and social expectations may all shift simultaneously.
The more involvement there is in a legal proceeding or the aftermath of a legal proceeding, the more there may be to process emotionally, mentally, and physically. These experiences also often extend beyond personal or family life and involve outside systems such as courts, attorneys, law enforcement, or documentation processes.
The loss can continue to feel alive and ever-present through paperwork, hearings, records, or ongoing legal realities long after the initial event has occurred.
This kind of grief can feel haunting, as though the loss is repeatedly revisited and personified through systems, documents, and ongoing reminders that make it difficult to create distance or regain a sense of safety and stability. These experiences often carry secondary losses as well, taking away feelings of security, predictability, trust, or control in ways that continue long after the initial event itself.
Death of an Abuser
The death of an abusive person can bring deeply conflicting emotions. Relief, numbness, sadness, rage, confusion, or even a sense of freedom may exist together. Thoughts such as “I’m glad it’s over,” or “It’s finally over; they’re no longer here,” do not make someone morally wrong or uncaring. This does not erase, dismiss, or minimize the harm that was caused.
Pain is the realest form of evidence. The pain carried from these relationships often becomes its own form of evidence—a lived reminder of the emotional impact, complexity, and reality of what was experienced.
The injury and lasting impact may remain, even after the person has died. It can feel deeply frustrating and emotionally conflicting to grieve someone while also carrying the aftermath of the relationship, the abuse, and the unresolved experiences connected to both the person and their death.
Grieving the death of an abuser is often complex because the relationship itself was complex. There may be grief for what happened, what never was, for unmet needs, or grief tied to unresolved pain and a complex history. For some, an abusive person was not harmful all of the time, creating a relationship rife with conflict, uncertainty, and confusion.
The pain of loving or caring about someone who could feel both safe and unsafe, comforting and harmful, can create deep emotional confusion and conflict. There may be moments remembered with tenderness alongside experiences of fear, hurt, betrayal, or grief. The complexity of holding both realities at once can feel bittersweet, disorienting, and difficult to untangle. Relief and grief can exist together, and both are valid experiences.
Loss is Layered & Textured
Any loss that continues to compound beyond the initial event can become complicated and layered over time. Grief is not always tied to a single moment or experience; loss can unfold through ongoing stressors, secondary losses, unresolved emotions, disrupted safety, shifting identities and relationships, and repeated reminders of what has been altered or taken away.
Loss is like a tapestry, often layered and textured. Some aspects of grief may feel overwhelming, overstimulating, or difficult to make sense of, while other parts may feel familiar, comforting, or closely connected to memories, relationships, and meaning. There can be contradictions within grief. Relief and sadness, gratitude and anger, love and resentment may exist alongside one another.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but rather a reflection of how complicated grief often carries multiple layers of loss that continue to unfold over time.
Navigating Complications with Complex Loss
If you are navigating grief, emotional overwhelm, compounding stresses, trauma, or life transitions, support is available. The 3 Brushes offers grief and loss-informed art therapy for children, teens, and adults seeking a compassionate space for expression, reflection, and emotional processing.
Art therapy offers a space to explore grief through both creative expression and conversation. Whether you are grieving the death of a loved one, navigating a significant life transition, carrying complicated emotions, or feeling disconnected from yourself, support is available.
Learn more about:
• Art Therapy for Grief and Loss
• Art Therapy for Children & Tweens
If you are curious about how art therapy may support you, I invite you to schedule a free 20-minute consultation to explore whether this approach feels like a good fit.
When words are not enough, support is still possible.
© 2026 The 3 Brushes, LLC. Created by The 3 Brushes Art Therapy. All rights reserved.www.the3brushes.com
