Recently, I was asked whether neurodivergent people experienced grief differently. My answer is potentially both no and yes. Thinking through my answer to that question has led to this blog post.
Everyone, whatever their neurotype, experiences grief in their own way. Nor is there any ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to grieve. The experience of losing someone is shaped by the relationship you had with them, your attachment history, previous experiences of loss, the circumstances of the death, what else is happening in your life, the people around you and the meaning the relationship held for you. It is also informed by cultural, social and religious expectations and mores. Two people within the same culture, neighbourhood or family can both lose someone they loved deeply and experience that loss in very different ways.
I know someone who didn’t cry at her mother’s funeral, who’d felt almost nothing at all, only to find herself in floods of tears seven weeks later when she came upon the receipt for her mother’s new gardening gloves in a drawer she was emptying late. She wondered whether the delay meant that something was wrong with her, or worse, whether it meant she hadn’t loved her mother enough. Someone else described a different kind of bewilderment: everyone around him seemed to expect his grief to lessen with time, and yet it hadn’t. Even after many months had passed, a piece of music or a particular smell could still transport him to the immediacy of his loss as vividly and gut-wrenchingly as it had done in the first days. Surely, he thought, he should be ‘over it’ by now; there must be something wrong with him. Both of these people were grieving. Both doubted that they were doing it ‘right’.
We need to challenge the idea there’s a right way to grieve from which some people simply deviate. In the dominant culture of the contemporary UK, particularly within the white, middle-class and broadly Western traditions that shape much of popular psychological and therapeutic discourse, the ‘five stages of grief’ have become a familiar shorthand for how grief is ‘supposed’ to unfold: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It doesn’t unfold that way for most people. There’s an additional problem with borrowing this model for bereavement specifically. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969) developed the model from her work with people who were facing their own terminal illness and impending death, not from research into how people grieve after someone else has died. Even within that original context, she didn’t present the stages as fixed or universal: people might experience them in a different order, skip some altogether, or repeatedly move back and forth between them.
Grief researchers largely moved away from this ‘stages of grief’ model decades ago, not because the feelings it names are inaccurate, but because it implies a uniformity that doesn’t reflect lived experience. In the morning, you might feel devastated finding one of their belongings, then spend the afternoon dealing pragmatically with paperwork, before watching something completely unrelated and enjoy it. The apparent inconsistency is perfectly normal within the influential ‘Dual Process Model’ of bereavement, which describes people moving between ‘loss-oriented’ experiences that confront the reality and pain of loss, and ‘restoration-oriented’ demands, such as practical responsibilities and adjusting to a changed life. Sometimes we need a break from both (Stroebe and Schut, 1999).
What this looks like for any one individual varies enormously. Research suggests that the extent to which a person leans towards confronting their loss directly or towards distraction and rebuilding, and how they relate to the person who died, whether by continuing to hold them close or gradually letting them go, is informed by attachment style and relational history (Stroebe, Schut and Stroebe, 2005), as well as by the cultural, religious and family expectations that shape what mourning is ‘supposed’ to look like.
I therefore don’t want to talk about neurodivergent grief as something that differs from a standard neurotypical grief which doesn’t exist. Disorganised attachment, an estranged or complicated relationship with the person who died, and a lack of people around you who understand can each make grief harder to bear, in their own particular ways. Neurodivergence belongs on that list too, not apart from it.
So where might neurodivergence come into the picture?
As a UKCP-registered relational integrative psychotherapist working with neurodivergent adults, this is the point where my own clinical experience and the emerging research start to add something more specific. Everything I’ve mentioned above applies equally to neurodivergent and neurotypical people. Nonetheless, autistic people, and those with AuDHD or ADHD, cannot experience grief except from within their own neurodivergent systems. This doesn’t mean that neurodivergence explains their grief, or that we can predict their experience from their neurotype. It means that whatever else is happening, they are experiencing it through their own particular neurodivergent way of processing the world.
We cannot assume in advance what someone’s experience of bereavement is based on their neurodivergence. Rather than assuming that a person’s grief should look a particular way, taking neurodivergence seriously invites us to become curious about how their ways of processing, communicating, relating and making sense of experience interact with this particular loss.
Recent research into grief and bereavement among autistic people, for instance, also points to the considerable diversity of autistic experiences of grief. Some autistic people have described their sensory processing shifting alongside their grief, an increase in what’s sometimes called ‘autistic inertia’, difficulty starting or shifting between tasks, and more frequent shutdowns. Others report marginalisation and the difficulty of having their experiences understood within wider social expectations about grief (Pang, 2023; Mair et al., 2024; Titlestad et al., 2026). In these studies, several autistic people described something grief researchers call ‘disenfranchised grief’: loss that goes unacknowledged or unsupported by the people around you, a term Doka (2002) first used for relationships or losses that society doesn’t fully recognise as grief-worthy, and here extended to a grief that was entirely real but expressed in ways others simply didn’t read as grief.
One thing that struck me in this research is how important active and social continuing bonds with the person who died turned out to be for the participants: talking about the person, reconstructing their biography, finding ways to stay connected to them, rather than the more private, internalised process sometimes assumed. This matters, because if your way of processing a death is to research the illness that caused it in detail, or to talk about the person factually and repeatedly rather than performing feeling in the way others expect, that isn’t avoidance, and it isn’t a lesser version of grief. It may be exactly the connection-making work continuing bonds theory describes, done in a different register.
When grief becomes difficult for other people to recognise
Some expressions of grief are more readily recognised within the cultural and social contexts in which we live than others. Someone who is crying inconsolably, talking incessantly about the person who has died, or saying that they cannot imagine life without them is likely to be understood as grieving. Other responses may be harder for those around them to interpret.
You might become intensely practical, concentrating on the necessary arrangements. You might become preoccupied with exactly what happened medically and thoroughly research whatever caused the death. You might withdraw from people, or appear remarkably composed. None of those responses tells us, by itself, how much you cared or how deeply you’re grieving.
Behaviour needs context. If someone repeatedly talks about the medical details of a death, for example, that might be a way of trying to understand something that feels incomprehensible. It might provide a way of keeping overwhelming emotion at a manageable distance. It might be part of making meaning from what has happened. It might be all three. The behaviour itself doesn’t tell us which.
This is an important principle in relational integrative psychotherapy generally: before deciding what a response means, we must be curious about what it means to the person experiencing it.
The extra weight of masking while you grieve
If you’re neurodivergent, grief has probably arrived on top of an existing, exhausting effort to appear composed, capable and in control. I’ve written before about the toll of sustaining that performance in ordinary life; bereavement asks for it under far worse conditions. Both Pang (2023) and Titlestad et al. (2026) describe masking, sensory difficulties and burnout as part of some autistic people’s experiences of bereavement. That may make sense once you consider what’s actually being asked of you: attending a funeral, a setting that’s often loud, brightly lit, unpredictable and full of unfamiliar social scripts, while also managing everyone else’s need to see appropriate emotion from you.
This is disenfranchised grief in a slightly different sense to Doka’s original formulation. It isn’t only that certain losses go unrecognised. It’s that your real loss can go unrecognised because you don’t perform grief in a legible way, arriving late, expressed factually, delayed by weeks, interrupted by shutdown rather than tears. None of that makes it smaller. It often means more of your limited resources are going towards making the grief presentable to other people rather than towards the grief itself.
Grief, attention and ADHD
If executive functioning is something you already find difficult because of ADHD, bereavement adds a long list of new demands at precisely the point you’re least equipped to meet them: arranging a funeral, sorting through a loved one’s belongings, transferring utility bills into your name, all require planning and organisation while you’re depleted (Bauer, 2025).
This can make grief and ADHD genuinely hard to tell apart from the inside. Oscillating between confronting a loss and attending to the practical demands of life may be particularly complicated when the executive function difficulties you already experience with ADHD are compounded by grief (Bauer, 2025). Forgetting to eat, losing track of what day it is, struggling to return calls, these might be grief, or they might be the time agnosia and executive function differences that were already part of your daily experience before this loss. Neither explanation makes the other less true, and they may be compounding each other..
There’s a version of this that other people might view as under- or over-expression. You might go through periods in which the loss barely enters your awareness because your attention is absorbed elsewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not grieving; it may simply be where your attention is at that moment. It also might be exactly the break from grief the Dual Process Model describes. When something brings the person back into your mind, the emotion may arrive with surprising force, and be hard to regulate. Structure can cut either way here: some people find intense, absorbed focus on a seemingly irrelevant detail at the funeral genuinely helps them cope, while others find real relief in returning to the structure of work straight away. Either response is doing the same job, giving your attention somewhere organised to go.
It occurs to me that you might also feel guilty for not having been in touch with the person who died as much as you’d have liked while they were alive, for the same reason: they simply weren’t in view. Such guilt can tip into harsh self-criticism, particularly when you’re already questioning what your response to the loss says about you. But how much of this applies may depend enormously on the quality of the relationship you had with them.
And if you’re highly sensitive?
If you’ve read what I’ve written previously about High Sensitivity, you’ll know I’m cautious about treating sensitivity as purely either a gift or a vulnerability. The same caution applies here. Belsky and Pluess’s (2009) work on differential susceptibility suggests that if you’re more responsive to your environment generally, you’re likely to feel more of what happens to you, whether that’s good or difficult. Applied to bereavement, this offers a plausible reason why grief can register so intensely for you without that intensity being a sign of fragility or of coping badly. A nervous system built to register more may be more likely to register loss more too. That’s a description of temperament, not a verdict on your resilience.
What tends to help
None of this adds up to a case for developing a separate approach to neurodivergent grief. What I would argue for is curiosity about what your grief is actually doing, rather than measuring it against the shape of an imagined normative grieving process.
If you need to talk about the facts of an illness in detail before you can access any feeling about it, that isn’t a ‘defence’ I need you to work through. It may be the route in. If your grief seems to have taken its time to arrive, we don’t need to ask why it took so long, but we might wonder together what was happening internally or externally before it became possible to feel it.
This is where relational integrative work as I practice it tends to help, because it doesn’t ask you to arrive already knowing what your grief should look like. Depending on what you bring, this might mean somatic attention to where grief is held in your body, EMDR where a particular memory connected to the death still carries an intense charge, or simply space to talk about the person who died in whatever register feels true to you. That might be factual, associative, circling, a mixture of them all or something else.
Is this you?
This is for you if you’re grieving in a way that doesn’t look the way you expected it to, and you’ve started to doubt yourself. It’s also for you if you’re autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, highly sensitive, or wondering whether any of those descriptions fit, regardless of whether you have any formal diagnosis. You don’t need your grief to look a particular way for it to be real and for you to deserve support.
If any of this has struck a chord, I offer a free 20 to 30-minute initial conversation so you can get a sense of whether working together might suit you, with no obligation to proceed beyond that.
Garthine Walker is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist based in Cardiff, offering online therapy across the UK. She specialises in trauma, attachment wounds, neurodivergence, burnout and maladaptive daydreaming.
References
Martina Bauer (2025). Exploring the Lived Experience of Grief in Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Antioch University Seattle.
Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess (2009). ‘Beyond Diathesis-Stress: Differential Susceptibility to Environmental Influences’, Psychological Bulletin, 135:6, 885-908. DOI: 10.1037/a0017376.
Kenneth J. Doka (ed.) (2002). Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. Champaign, IL: Research Press
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.
Ally Pax Arcari Mair, Emy Nimbley, Doug McConachie, Karen Goodall and Karri Gillespie-Smith (2024). ‘Understanding the Neurodiversity of Grief: A Systematic Literature Review of Experiences of Grief and Loss in the Context of Neurodevelopmental Disorders’, Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. DOI: 10.1007/s40489-024-00447-0.
Joanna Pang (2023). How Autistic Adults Experience Bereavement: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study. Unpublished DCPsych thesis, Middlesex University / New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling.
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut (1999). ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description’, Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. DOI: 10.1080/074811899201046.
Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut and Wolfgang Stroebe (2005). ‘Attachment in Coping with Bereavement: A Theoretical Integration’, Review of General Psychology, 9: 1, 48–66. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.1.48.
Kristine Berg Titlestad, Wenche K. Lien, Anette Vie et al. (2026). ‘Grief, Bereavement, and Related Care for People With Autism: A Scoping Review’, Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. DOI: 10.1007/s40489-026-00567-9.