39. Complicated Grief; Healing from Betrayal, Abuse, and Divorce

 hello. Hello, my amazing listeners. Thank you for joining me today, and thank you to those of you who have left reviews and shared your healing journey with me. You are amazing. If you haven't left a review on Apple Podcast, this does really help spread the message to those who are looking for support around divorce.

Specifically around betrayal, addiction and abuse. So I would love it if you took your very precious time out of your day to do that. The topic today is a heavy one, but so important to address because a lot of you are grieving.

From the many losses. Some of you probably haven't even identified all of the different losses,

maybe every day or every week that goes by, your brain is identifying yet another loss that warrants grief to come back. Grief comes with the human experience. Loss of any kind requires the experience of grief, and it's how we approach our individual grieving process that allows us to move forward. So when we avoid, when we resist the grief, it only intensifies the emotions.

The stages of grief are not linear, but they do include the experience of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. And because it's not linear, sometimes we think acceptance is like the final. The final stage. Yes. David Kessler did write a book called Finding Meaning, and it is about.

Acceptance. However,

he wrote that based on grief from the death of a loved one, you are grieving the death of a marriage. The death of. What you thought your marriage even was. You are grieving so many additional losses that go along with this, and because this other person who betrayed, abused you and even your children because of that betrayal to them as well, and they're, they're still alive.

It makes this kind of grief.

A lot more complicated.

Most who experience grief have a normal period of that sorrow, guilt, anger, and numbness, depression, those different experiences in grief, but the reality of the situation sets in and then they start to accept that this has really happened and that they take the steps to move forward one step at a time.

And they find healing more and more available as they go along, and there seems to become more and more days of peace and calm rather than sad and mad after the loss of a marriage. And a marriage that included betrayal, betrayed partner violence, where you have experienced several losses for perhaps several years.

These stages of grief don't dissipate over time as normal grieving tends to do. This is called complicated or complex grief. I've even heard it described as prolonged grief disorder. When you are unable to move through the stages of grief and a year goes by, two years go by. After your divorce,

you are experiencing complicated grief. Now you may be more susceptible to complex or complicated grief when you've had childhood trauma, chronic anxiety, chronic disease, chronic pain, just the lack of sleep that you get going through. B, betrayal, trauma and mental health conditions like P T S D absolutely contribute.

To this complicated grief. As with any loss, there's intense pain and rumination over that loss, but when the ruminating thoughts are just as present a year or more after you have complicated grief. I will give you more indicators to what complicated grief looks like here in just a minute. But first, I just wanna make sure that I clearly communicate that this episode is not intended to diagnose, only inform and if you feel you may be suffering from complicated or complex grief or have thoughts of suicide, please, please contact a safe person and a professional to help support you. You really do not have to, nor should you do this alone. I wanted to talk about this today because there are so many experiences I had through my journey where I didn't have a language to describe what was going on for me.

I was obviously sad that my partner did what he did, but a year, year and a half after this divorce, I was still feeling intense emotions due to the intensity of abusive behaviors that I was still experiencing. I was still having nightmares and panic attacks. I would feel incredibly debilitated by just the simplest tasks and avoid social interactions, things like that.

I tried to not be that way. I pushed her really, really hard. I put on a face, but for me, because the abusive behavior was not decreasing, neither was my grief. So I, I wanna first just remind everybody that. Your loss is the greatest loss, and there is no purpose in comparing your experience to anyone else's.

So as you listen to these most common indicators of complicated grief, please be compassionate with yourself. Stay as much as you can in curiosity rather than judgment. You're not doing anything wrong if you are experiencing complicated grief. Okay, so. Some of these indicators are intense, sorrow, pain, and those ruminating thoughts over the loss of your loved one.

Another indicator is you find yourself not being able to focus on anything else but this. You're almost hyper-focused on the divorce or on what caused the divorce or trying to make sense of the divorce, or maybe even hyper-focused on how he's behaving since the divorce, focused on his life and his life of maybe somebody else.

Just a real intense focus on this person.

Another indicator is you have a lot of triggers, so there's a lot of reminders of this loved one, yet you're not doing anything to to try and control those triggers. Something really simple is, Maybe every time you get in the car, maybe right away or within minutes, the, with the radio on songs playing, you're triggered and you have tears rolling down your face and yet you don't turn the radio off.

Or we can go to the other extreme where we have an excessive avoidance of any reminders. And so now we have So many restrictions and barriers aren't around ourself that we're not really even living life. Another indicator is the intense and persistent longing or pining for them, where even with the reality and the knowledge of their destructive, abusive, painful behaviors, we still have a longing to be with them Another indicator is we really are not accepting the divorce. We're having a really hard time stepping into that phase of grief, right? That acceptance piece. So that means we're staying in denial, rationalization minimization, because accepting it.

Means facing the reality. All right. Another one is when you feel very detached or numbing out to life in general,

You might be feeling extremely bitter about the divorce, extremely bitter about how it went down, extremely bitter, about every little thing he does or doesn't do, and it just kind ofs and piles on. I remember just every little thing. I mean, he could just breathe and I'm like, see, he breathed wrong. Every little thing is just, we're very, very, very bitter about all of the losses.

But we're not putting those to rest. We're not we're not grieving those, we're actually just becoming more and more bitter every time. We are reminded about the loss.

Another indicator is feeling like your life now that you're divorced, has no meaning or purpose, or very little meaning or purpose. You're having a hard time seeing yourself as valuable or worth anything, not married.

What can happen in this space? Here is we get into another unhealthy relationship. Seeking to find that purpose outside of ourselves But another person can't make you more purposeful Lack of trust. You're having a really hard time not only trusting yourself, but nobody is trustworthy and we are ha, we have a very high guard around all people. Now, naturally this comes with betrayal And it's absolutely part of the healing journey. But if, again, we're not doing anything to lean into trust, to lean into trusting ourselves and navigating that, We're just continuing to block people out and validate over and over how we can't trust people and we never will trust people. That is complicated grief. When you find yourself really not being able to enjoy life or have any positive experiences, even with your children,

that might feel like a struggle. You might be pretending or forcing yourself and trying so hard to have these positive experiences with friends, family, children, but you're really just not finding joy.

Complicated. Grief is when this has been persistent for months and months, if not years persisting. Complicated grief can also.

Show up when you're just finding yourself really having a hard time, creating a normal routine in your life. Again, isolating, withdrawing from social experiences. A lot of self blame, a lot of guilt. You're putting a lot of the responsibility maybe on yourself and not letting other person or this other person own any accountability.

Perhaps you're still making excuses for them when you believe that you did something wrong that could have prevented the divorce. So we're still in that bargaining stage, but in a more intense and prolonged state.

And at times people with complicated complex grief may consider suicide. If you are thinking about suicide, please again, talk to someone you trust. Please call the suicide hotline you are not alone. Complicated grief, I feel is unique and does show up more for those who divorce after a betrayal or abuse, not because not only do you have this complex and contradictory feelings that show up with the ordinary grief.

But your betrayal trauma most likely means you suffered from P T S D, which also prolongs the symptoms of grief, and you're also likely recovering from that self, that part of the self that you had to bury in order to survive. Abusive relationships require us to swallow our anger, hide, hide our feelings, our voice ourselves.

They can absolutely be crazy making and mind bending. we end up losing access to our feelings and our likes and dislikes and our values and our voice. Really those things that make us, us,

because we're either shamed out of it.

Or we have to hide all of that stuff, all of that again in order to survive that relationship. Your grief is also gonna be complicated by the trauma that you experience and the blows to your self-esteem and your self-worth with just repeated criticism and blame. And you've internalized all the problems in your relationship are your fault because you've been told that.

What complicates this even more is if you did experience abuse in the relationship, it most likely wasn't 100% of the time. There were good times to be had. So hence the complication of this grieving. Your ruminating thoughts can include not just over those destructive parts, but the good parts your brain's trying to determine.

Are those good parts really good? Like if what you thought was happy, was it really happy and your brain's trying to figure out. All of that, because if not, then we need to count that as a loss too and more grief. This can keep you unhealthily connected to your ex as your brain just isn't sure about the reality of the relationship as a whole.

this is also why trauma bonding can happen when the grief is complicated. Again, feeling like you're crazy and weak or inherently broken. For being in a relationship like this, and if we went back and forth, back and forth with staying or leaving, staying or leaving, even if only in your mind, the bond to that trauma becomes complicated

with these types of destructive behaviors from your partner, it is a very normal response. The intense longing for a person who betrayed and abused you is complicated grief. Your everyday functioning is impacted and it seems it's just not getting less intense and you're not finding relief. Please again, reach out and work with a trained professional to help you.

In the meantime, I wanna offer a few tools to consider to practice. The first one is to name your losses. Literally ride out every loss you have experienced through this journey. Take your time. This doesn't need to be a one sit, wonder, observe throughout the days what you have lost. When I left, due to the intensity of the situation, I had a very small window to get away, and so I packed a few boxes.

In the car and left with my kiddos. Six, eight months later, maybe. I don't quite recall, but he finally came out to Arizona with a truck of our stuff, but there wasn't everything in there. I grabbed as much as I was allowed to and was able to.

But there were so many times, years after that that I would think about an item and go to find it and it wasn't there. And there's the loss. And there's the grief. But write those things out. Describe the complication that those losses now offer you. What are you now having to do because of those losses?

The next thing is to self-regulate and observe and be aware and reflect on your thoughts and your feelings and your actions. Are you numbing out and how so are you avoiding emotions? How and what emotions are you avoiding? Increase your self-compassion and validate yourself in all of your feelings and the space that you're in at this time.

You do not need to be anywhere other than where you are at right now. Next, build healthy connections. Join my support group. When you can share your pain with those who get it, it really will help you move forward through this complicated grief. Another tool is to lean in another tool to lean in. Another tool to lean into here is setting realistic and simple goals and a routine, even if it's you eat breakfast at the same time, you wake up at the same time and you have three things that you do every morning.

Keep this. This can really help regulate your system. My therapist told me to get up out of bed and make my bed every day. Just get up, make the bed, get up, make the bed. I kind of hated that idea at first because all I wanted to do was crawl in bed and I left it unmade on purpose cuz it was just always beckoning me and ready for me to just crawl in it, which is probably why he suggested this.

But I did. I got up and I made the bed and I got dressed. Showering was optional, but , those routines that schedule, it really did help. It's gonna help you regulate because your brain knows what to expect and then your central nervous system knows what to expect, which certainly is really helpful when you have been through so much of that uncertainty.

Right. Another way to move through this And this one most likely requires this one-on-one help. But those situations you are avoiding, the things that you're not confronting, even if it's the laundry on the chair, we want to come up with strategies to help you lean into those things. It's.

Really helpful in the beginning to avoid trigger places and people and things like music, the beach, right? Managing. Those are absolutely your responsibility, and when you're working to calm the nervous system down, we control what we can, however, avoiding certain things long-term. Right year or two out, they can start to have an adverse effect, especially when we're avoiding them from a place of hopeless, powerless, fear rather than choice and empowerment.

So again, working with someone to help you kind of create a strategy on how to lean into those things that we're we're avoiding. Okay, this one is an important one, and I encourage you to check out the episode on owning your story that I did a while back, but being able to reflect on your experience and confront the hard emotions that come with it.

To accept your story and share your story is also healing the complicated grief, secrecy, denial. It breeds the shame and keeps you out of reality. And keeps you stuck. Your experience matters. Your experience is yours and validating it. However you see healthy and healing is your right. Sometimes just knowing what your experience was can feel very daunting.

So again, maybe working one-on-one with someone to help you identify what your experience was can be really beneficial. Now, the last tool that I'm gonna offer you here are around those memories. When your brain pulls up those memories from the past, and it's still trying to make sense of the reality of it all, trying to determine where this other person's thoughts and feelings were during that time, like, I was happy.

Was he, was it fake? Was he happy because he was just with the affair partner, or you remember having a romantic time on a trip and now that you know, he wasn't faithful, was he cheating during that time? So was that really a romantic trip? Everything is in question, right? And your brain is not going to most likely, unfortunately, have any of those pieces or those answers.

So what I wanna offer here is to validate anytime your body felt differently. Then maybe what perhaps you were being shown or told. You wanna validate your body's experience, your sensations, your gut instinct. Even if you don't have any proof, I want you to validate what your body thinks it knows,

And with those memories that you have positive and happy thoughts about, you were choosing those thoughts and feelings from a healthy, loving, faithful place. And you get to own those memories. You get to keep whatever good memories you want. They do not have to be corrupted by another person.

You don't have to give them power over those memories. Decide which memories you wanna keep, which ones you wanna own, which ones are meaningful to you because you worked so hard. For that memory you showed up, that's yours to own. The ones that you don't want to own anymore may be the ones that you're ready to let go and bury.

I wanna offer you this exercise. Ride down the memories that you wish to let die grieve them and bury them. Literally, some of my clients have had really great creative ideas with this one.

But sometimes even just that act of writing them out and letting yourself grieve, and then the act of burying them and having a ceremony even around it, whatever that looks like for you, can be really, really healing. Support during this time really is key. The link to my divorce support groups are in the show notes.

You are not alone and you do not have to do this alone. Remember, your grief is yours. It is not bad and you are not wrong, and please be patient with yourself. As you heal. You have experienced trauma and yes, it is complicated. It is complex

If a lot of this resonates with you and you are feeling like you wanna explore perhaps this diagnosis, then meet with a professional who can help you understand more about how this is showing up for you. In the meantime, while you do wait to get into somebody, those tools that I did offer you can be really beneficial when you intentionally practice them.

I really just wanna hold space for all of you who are listening. You are experiencing complicated grief. It is really difficult, and I am so sorry that you have experienced this.

Thank you for joining me today and joining other women who also share your experience. See you next time.