She hasn’t cried yet.
That’s often how it starts in my office. A woman sits across from me, accomplished, articulate, probably the person everyone else leans on, and she tells me about the loss. The divorce. The death. The friendship that quietly ended. The mother who was never quite there. And then she says, almost apologetically: “I know I should be more upset about this.”
She’s not broken. She’s high-functioning. And in my work as a grief and trauma therapist serving Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and greater LA County, I see this pattern constantly.
What Is Grief Avoidance?
Grief avoidance isn’t the same as not feeling grief. It’s the largely unconscious process of keeping grief at a distance by staying busy, staying productive, staying needed, so that the full weight of a loss never quite lands.
For high-functioning women, avoidance is rarely a conscious choice. It’s a strategy that was built early, often in homes where emotions weren’t safe, or where being capable was the only way to feel worthy of love. The competence that protects them in the boardroom, in the family system, in every relationship where they are the reliable one, that same competence becomes a barrier between them and their own grief.
Why High-Functioning Women Avoid Grief
There are a few reasons I see again and again in clinical work. First, many high-functioning women learned early that their feelings were a burden to others. They became the “strong one” not because they wanted to be, but because someone had to be. Grief requires a kind of surrender that can feel deeply unsafe when your entire identity is built on holding it together.
Second, grief is slow. High-functioning women are often not. The pace of productivity is incompatible with mourning, which asks you to sit still, feel what you feel, and let it move through you without immediately solving it.
Third, and this is where my work as a complicated grief therapist gets layered: many of the women I see are carrying grief that predates the current loss by decades. The loss that’s in the room is real, but underneath it is something older. Something from childhood. Something that has to do with their earliest attachment relationships and what was missing there.
The Connection to Early Attachment
This is the core of my framework, Grief, Trauma & Your Mama™. Grief and early relational trauma are rarely separate. When a child grows up in a home where her emotional needs went consistently unmet, she learns to survive by suppressing those needs. She becomes skilled, capable, self-sufficient. The grief of not being fully seen or held gets stored rather than processed.
Years later, a loss arrives and activates all of it. The current grief plus the old grief. The woman in my office who “should be more upset” is often not numb. She is flooded, and her system has been managing that flood for so long that she no longer recognizes it as grief.
This is also where the framework of Mother Hunger®, developed by therapist and author Kelly McDaniel (kellymcdanieltherapy.com), becomes relevant. Mother Hunger® names the specific longing that comes from not receiving nurturing, protection, and guidance from a mother figure. In many high-functioning grief-avoidant women, that longing has been quietly running in the background for their entire adult life.
What Healing Looks Like
Healing grief avoidance doesn’t mean breaking down. It means slowly, carefully, building enough safety to let yourself feel what you’ve been holding.
In practice, that looks like: learning to recognize avoidance as a protective pattern rather than a character flaw, understanding the early relational history that taught you feelings weren’t safe, building enough nervous system regulation to tolerate emotional experience without collapsing or shutting down, and finding space to grieve not just the current loss, but the older ones too.
This is the kind of work I do with women in Los Angeles and across California, Washington, and Arizona via telehealth. If you’ve been “fine” for a long time and some part of you suspects you’re not, that’s worth exploring.
You Don’t Have to Keep Being Fine
The woman who hasn’t cried yet isn’t broken. She’s protected. And at some point, that protection stops serving her. If you’re in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, or anywhere in LA County, or if you’re in California, Washington, or Arizona and prefer telehealth, I’d be glad to sit with you in that process. I see clients in person on Mondays at Shakti Ranch in Malibu.
