The experiences of those who are childless not by choice often intersect with both complicated grief and complex trauma, making the journey toward healing especially challenging. By exploring the specific difficulties faced by individuals dealing with involuntary childlessness, I will provide strategies for coping with the grief and highlight the importance of self-compassion and seeking professional help. Involuntarily childless women may be suffering from prolonged grief due to its ambiguous and intangible nature; however, they are also striving to find ways of dealing with their internal pain in order to live with their loss. Child-free individuals by choice report comparable life satisfaction to parents, while those facing involuntary childlessness experience complicated grief. Both groups encounter social stigma, which is often the primary driver of psychological distress rather than childlessness itself. This book is both a first-person reflection about the existential questions posed by involuntary childlessness and a readable account of the way the silence surrounding this topic is socially and politically constructed. This post is the first in an ongoing series about childless grief. I will look at the 16 types of grief, and how they relate to the childless, not by choice experience. This post explores some of the many layers of disenfranchised grief that can accompany childlessness. These include the grief of unfulfilled hopes, identity shifts, relational losses and the futures that didn’t come into being. BACKGROUND: Around 4% of all couples remain involuntarily childless. These people often experience insufficient social support, which further aggravates the distress symptoms such as physical health problems, anxiety, depression and complicated grief. But disenfranchised grief, hands down, is what students want to talk about the most. They give me countless examples of losses they’ve experienced and haven’t been “allowed” to grieve. Therefore, this study investigates the reasons for involuntary childlessness as well as the relationship with potential feelings of loneliness throughout the life course of older adults.