Many adults carry a private grief that is rarely spoken plainly. They continue to care for parents they neither trust nor feel loved by. While they arrange appointments, answer late-night calls, manage medications, absorb criticism and eventually sit beside a hospital bed, the reason they do it is often unseen. Outsiders see an apparent labour of love, but it is often something else entirely: a vigil for hope – the hope that one day the parent will finally turn towards them with warmth, recognition or remorse. Occasionally, this hope is not misplaced.

I was, perhaps, a fortunate adult child. After years of intensive Jungian work, much of it circling the gravity of my relationship with my mother – something shifted near her end, not least because of my growing ability to hold space for her, facilitated by my own therapy. Two weeks before her death, my mother said, with a clarity I had rarely heard from her, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a vile human being.” It was not polished or rehearsed, nor did it land gently or completely for either of us. But it was very real. In that moment, something long frozen began, at last, to very quickly thaw.

I accepted what she could offer. Yet even then, there was a quiet, complicated truth beneath it: whatever love had finally emerged between us would have to continue growing mostly after her death – in memory, in imagination, and in the internal life shaped in her absence.

Emotional reality

Moments like this can feel salvific – having the power or intention to redeem or restore. They seem to confirm that the child’s suffering was seen, that the years of waiting were not entirely in vain. But more often, nothing arrives. The parent dies as they lived – defended, withholding, unable to acknowledge the emotional reality of the relationship. The adult child is left not only with grief, but with the exhaustion of having invested years in a redemption that never came.

From the perspective of attachment theory, this persistence makes sense. Children are biologically organised to seek closeness with caregivers, regardless of the quality of care received. A child cannot afford to conclude: “My parent is incapable of loving me.” That recognition carries a more frightening implication: “Then there must be something fundamentally wrong with me.” So instead, the child revises the story: “If I try harder, become easier, more useful, less needy, then I will finally be loved.”

This bargain often survives into adulthood – long after its impossibility should be clear. What continues, then, is not naïveté but adaptation. The psyche prefers the pain of hope to the collapse of that early organising belief. To relinquish hope is not just to give up on the parent, but to confront a deeper loss: that something essential was never available to begin with.

The psyche’s loyalty

Jungian thinking might see this as an attachment not only to the parent, but to what the parent comes to represent – no longer just the person themselves, but an inner image shaped by hope and absence: the loving mother who could still emerge, the father who might finally see the child. In this way, the parent becomes both a sign of what was and a symbol of what might yet be fulfilled. Much of the suffering lies not only in what happened, but in the psyche’s ongoing loyalty to what never did. The adult child remains bound not just to memory, but to possibility.

In this way, unresolved parental longing becomes a kind of complex, shaping relationships and identity. The question quietly repeats itself across a lifetime, attaching to partners, authority figures and friends: “Can I finally be chosen now?”

A substitute for belonging

There is also something distinctly Adlerian in this pattern. As Alfred Adler observed, children who cannot secure love often discover that usefulness can substitute for belonging. They become indispensable: the reliable one; the achiever; the caretaker. From the outside, this can look admirable. But beneath it, there may remain a private logic: if I give enough, endure enough, remain long enough, perhaps I will finally matter.

The tragedy is that the hoped-for recognition often depends on capacities the parent never possessed. Some parents cannot offer emotional reciprocity because of their own limitations – rigidity, trauma, narcissism or emotional immaturity. Time does not necessarily soften these structures. Sometimes it simply exposes them more starkly.

This leaves many adult children suspended in ambivalence: “I resent you”; “I pity you”; “I still want your love”. These truths coexist, often accompanied by guilt, especially when caregiving continues in the absence of emotional return. But exhaustion is not cruelty. It is often the natural consequence of a lifetime of one-sided emotional labour. The deeper task, then, may not be reconciliation with the parent, but reconciliation with reality – not with who they might have been, but with who they were and are.

A grief with no rituals

This is a form of grief for which there are few rituals: mourning not only a person, but an un-lived relationship. Society understands loss after love; it struggles to recognise the weight of loss after deprivation. And yet, there is a quiet kind of freedom in allowing the waiting to end. Not because the longing was misguided, but because it was profoundly human. The adult child waited because the child within was still expectant of something it was told: perhaps in the family storyline; by culture or by society that parental love would come – but it never did.

The true adult task then is, perhaps, different. It is to decide whether life – and even love – can finally be lived fully once that waiting is no longer organising the heart.

All rights reserved © Copyright Duncan E. Stafford 2026. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author of this post is strictly prohibited. Author contact via website Contact page. Website version and image © Copyright Therapy Place Bristol 2026. Article published May 2026