Recovery Grief and Disenfranchised Grief — The Mitre Tavern

I walked out of the bathroom and through an archway and for a split second I thought I saw Dan.

This kind of thing has not happened for a while. Even here in Melbourne.

It was not him. Once I looked closer he was younger, different. Just the glasses, the quarter zip, the backpack. But for a moment it was him. The version of him I knew when we used to come here together.

I was standing in the Mitre Tavern in Melbourne. Thursday at 5:30. The courtyard was full, the way it always was. I could hear the energy in the conversations around me. Passionate, animated, like everything being said really matters.

I recognised this. I lived inside this.

And what came up for me was not nostalgia. It was grief. A specific kind of grief I am still learning to name.

What the Mitre held

The Mitre Tavern is not just a pub. For a chapter of my life, it was a gathering place. Somewhere that Dan and I went with friends. Not just on Thursday or Friday evenings but at lunchtimes, on quiet weekdays, across the whole week in a way that I can see now was its own kind of structure. A rhythm built around a particular kind of relief.

At 5:30 on a Thursday, the courtyard was doing what it always did. Filling up with people finishing work. The first drink after a long day kind of energy. That collective exhale, that shift in focus, that sense of having earned something.

I recognised it immediately. In my body, before my mind had caught up. And I realised my body was spotting it as a false promise. I was getting better at spotting these. For me, when alcohol left, it left for good, but other things find their way in and promise things when I am in need. The sneaky little false prophet loves to show up, and I imagine I will humbly spend forever keeping an eye out.

So, what followed was not the warm recognition of a beloved place. It was a mirror. A clear, unflinching, almost brutal reflection of what that chapter had actually been.

We thought we were really here. We were not, really. Not fully.

How much of that time was spent counting down the hours of the workday so we could break away to this. How within an hour of arriving, we would no longer really be here at all. How the conversation that felt so alive and meaningful and passionate was, underneath, increasingly not that. The certainty of being onto something. The energy that felt like connection and was, in part, the particular illusion that alcohol creates. The feeling of presence without the substance of it.

I am not saying this with contempt for the people in that courtyard. I am not even saying that is absolutely the experience of everyone there. I am saying it because I saw myself in at least a few of them for a long time. And standing there sober, looking back through that archway at who I was then, what I felt was grief.

Not judgment. Grief.

What I wanted to say to Dan

When I thought I saw him through that archway, I noticed something.

I did not want to say I miss you. I wanted to say, have a look around. Just pause. Notice.

Notice how we spent the whole day counting down to this. And then within an hour of arriving, we were already somewhere else.

That is what I am grieving. Not the loss of him, not the loss of this place. But the presence that was not there. The time that felt full and was stealing and emptying.

Dan never got the chance to get sober. He never got to stand in that courtyard and see it the way I can see it now. He never got to grieve what that chapter cost him, or to build something different on the other side of it.

That is its own particular grief. Grieving on behalf of someone who never made it to the other side of the thing that was taking them. Grieving the conversation we never got to have. The version of him that might have existed if things had gone differently.

I do not know what he would have done with sobriety. I do not know if he would have chosen it. But I know that I am standing here with something he never got to have. The clarity, the view of the slurred words and the jumbled conversations, the ability to see it for what it was. And there is grief in being the one that made it out that I am still learning to hold.

Two kinds of grief that do not get named enough

It took me a minute to name what was happening in that courtyard. Two clinical frameworks belong here. Not because we need to over-explain or pathologise, but because I think these concepts give people permission to acknowledge and share these things.

The first is disenfranchised grief. A term developed by grief researcher Kenneth Doka to describe grief that is not openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. Grief that does not get a funeral. Grief that others do not recognise as real, significant, or worthy of space.

Disenfranchised grief shows up in many forms. Grieving the end of a relationship that others thought you should have left anyway. Grieving a friendship that dissolved. Grieving a version of your life that never came to be. Grieving someone who is still alive but no longer present in the way they once were.

And, as I was discovering in that courtyard, grieving years spent inside something that was slowly taking you further from yourself.

The second is recovery grief. A concept well documented in addiction recovery literature, though rarely talked about as grief explicitly. Recovery grief is what surfaces when you get sober, or when you make any significant shift away from a way of coping, and you begin to see clearly what was lost inside it. The years. The relationships. The presence. The version of yourself that was somewhere else while the drinking was in charge.

Recovery grief is complicated because it does not have a clear object. There is no single thing that died. There is instead a slow, accumulating recognition of all the moments that were not fully embodied. All the connections that were made through a haze. All the time that felt full and was, in some key way, sneakily emptying.

Standing in that courtyard, I was in the middle of both.

Recovery grief is real grief

I think this part often gets missed.

When you get sober, or when you move away from any significant coping pattern, the grief that follows is not a side effect. It is not an obstacle to recovery. It is part of it.

You are grieving the years. The relationships that were conducted through the haze. The moments that you were not fully present for. The version of yourself that was doing the best it could with what it had, and was still, in some essential way, not all the way there.

And at the same time you can be grieving the simplicity of the escape, hold envy for those that still have access to it, and then judgement for yourself for even letting that part of yourself have a voice again.

This grief does not have a clean object. There is no single loss to mourn. There is instead a vast, accumulating reckoning with time. With what was, and what might have been, and what was not.

And because it does not look like conventional grief, it often does not get the same permission. People in recovery are encouraged to move forward, build new lives, focus on the present. And all of that is important. But without space to grieve what was lost inside the years of using, that grief goes underground. And grief that goes underground does not disappear. It finds another way through the cracks.

This is one of the reasons I think the grief work in recovery is so essential and so underserved. Not as a replacement for the other work, the community, the accountability, the rebuilding, but as something that belongs alongside it.

The Mitre Tavern showed me that I am still in the middle of this grief. That it surfaces in unexpected places, in unexpected moments, when a courtyard full of people looks exactly the way it always did and your body knows the difference even when nothing else has changed.

Being here is holding up a mirror. And I am grateful I can see it now.

What disenfranchised grief asks of us

The broader point, and the one I keep returning to in my work, is that grief not only needs permission, it needs an invitation.

Grief that is not named does not move. It gets held tighter, felt longer, sometimes more intensely over time rather than less. The grief hole exists whether or not we acknowledge it. And when we are not given permission to acknowledge it, when the loss is not recognised as real, when the grief does not fit the expected shape, when there is no social container for the mourning, the grief goes underground and does its work from there.

Disenfranchised grief is everywhere. In the people who grieve something they chose. In the people who grieve someone who is still alive. In the people who grieve years rather than a person. In the people who are rebuilding after addiction and carry the weight of what they lost inside it without any ceremony or acknowledgement.

It is real in the body. And it deserves an invitation to grieve.

And, thank you body for, always, already knowing this.

I did not plan to grieve at the Mitre Tavern on a Thursday evening in Melbourne. I walked in for an NA IPA poured into a cold glass, and to see friends of ours I had not seen in a while. But the grief was already there, waiting in the archway, and when I walked through it, I knew.

This is what grief does. It finds us in the places that hold it. And if we can sit there long enough, allow a little fidget, or the bounce of a knee to show our discomfort, but stay anyway, it will show us something true.

You were never meant to grieve alone. Not even the grief that does not have a name yet.