Grieving after Abuse

I've been reviewing the story of my personal transformation and creating these newsletters and you tube videos in order to help people understand that we can recover from trauma of this magnitude.

I discovered that we can all create a wonderful life, once we learn how to grow our self-love and self-esteem as a result of our experiences. One of the strangest things was learning how to grieve somebody who had never died. I learned a lot about how to heal from loss and grief as a result of this experience.

The Emotional Tsunami

After leaving a narcissistic relationship or having been discarded, survivors are caught in an emotional tsunami that can be overwhelming. It's also a time of confusion, anger, fear and also there is often a huge sense of loss. I’m going to explain what role grief has in our recovery and share some tips that may help you to manage this very difficult time. You can find relief from this. I will also share some of my story when I went through this myself.

Living Life Abuse Free

When you have realised that you are now free, having left the abuser, there comes with that a sense of exhilaration and feeling that you can look forward to days of being abuse-free and making decisions about what you can do to start making your life better. In some ways it's an exciting time, you understand that you were in a dangerous relationship and probably feel a huge sense of relief that you are now out of it. It's a feeling of release. It brings with it a new sense of freedom.

Living with a Sense of Loss

There will also be times when you are reflecting and the sense of loss feels so heavy. It's confusing. How can you feel relief and loss at the same time? It's complicated. It's often referred to 'complicated grief'. During this time it really is essential that you have at your disposal healing tools and protocols that you can process deep emotional reactions. Or if you have a therapist, take these thoughts and feelings to therapy. We have suffered many losses. Some emotional, some physical and financial and spiritually as well. It's an incredible burden. Yes, the question remains…

Why would we want to grieve someone who treated us so badly?

At this time, you may also realise that the hopes and dreams you had for the relationship, were literally just dreams and figments of your imagination. Wishful thinking. The person you thought you were married to was fictional. He didn’t exist, it was all in your head. This is further exacerbated by the appalling post-separation abuse you may be experiencing.

It can be crippling.

It’s also really hard for others to truly understand.

Why would you feel grief for someone that treated you like that?

This can also leave you feeling unsupported.

Feeling minimised.

People might also tell you to just 'get over it'.

But it still feels completely overwhelming to you.

Here are some of the stages that may help to direct your healing at this time.

They definitely helped me.

1. Allow yourself to feel the pain and grief as fully and completely as you can. 

Give yourself some dedicated time on your own and sit with these feelings. Journaling can help too to get the process started. Maybe recounting a time that is a particularly painful memory. I was fortunate that I had a healing toolkit that I could help me through this process. Tools like EMDR, EFT, Theta healings, breathwork and other trauma processing tools are available to help you with this. 

Surrender to the process and allow those feelings to surface. If it feels physical, it’s because it is. The grief will feel like a physical pain or sensation in your body. It might not be pretty but however that pain needs to be felt just allow it, scream, shout, cry... 

Let it all out. 

Allow it to be felt. 

Once the pain has been allowed to express you will feel relief

2. At some level we have to accept the reality of our losses.

Some losses are easier to accept than others. Maybe there are heavy physical losses as well as a sense of loss of love, sanity, youth, optimism, and reputation. You could probably add more to that list.

This is something you can’t just think it away, you can’t speak it away. These feelings are stuck in our being. You can’t just say ‘I let it all go’. How I managed to get to move on from these losses was self-forgiveness, or more accurately self-compassion.

I don't advocate for forgiving the abuser because this takes your focus off your healing. It's not about them, it's about you!

I do however give myself compassion in bucket loads for finding myself in this situation and also understanding that this isn't my fault. In recovery, selfcompassion becomes your healing superpower. 

I didn’t knowingly allow all of these horrible things to happen. They happened and now I am going to let myself off the hook for them because I am creating a happier life and it's going to be better than it ever was before. All of these things I feel I’ve lost, I now realise that they were a part of my old life, and I don't want to be in that energy anymore. Any bodily sense of grief on any these issues, I journaled and felt in my body fully and allowed the pain to move out. Please research somatic healing and breathwork, to get knowledgeable about these tools of trauma processing.

3. Creating a new life.

Grief will compel us to live with a heavy sense of loss and that is why we have to feel it. We have to feel the losses and accept them. ‘Feel it to heal it’ is the way to go. Only then can we move to the next step. We are creating a lovely, abuse-free, life for ourselves. Grief blocks your happiness and emotional pain and keeps you stuck in the past.

This thought kept me focused on my task. I didn't want to be stuck in the past.  I was creating new better dreams for my future. Self-compassion created emotional space for me to focus on what I really wanted in my life. I was now free to do this. It was liberating to start creating from new ideas and setting my new life in motion. I think it was because of this I was able to get free from attracting narcissists relatively quickly.

The pain was beginning to subside and if I ever felt any more sense of loss or grief I would repeat the healing process to clear more out of my body. It’s a kind of spring cleaning. When we create that kind of emotional spaciousness, we can also create what we do want. It’s the beginning of learning how to create consciously, or manifest the life you really want.

4. Keep your focus on you.

I realised that the little self-confidence and self-esteem I’d got, had actually hit the deck. It was my job to rebuild myself from the bottom up. It was lovely to be able to do this, I was learning to love myself. It was fun to imagine what my future may look like when I loved myself instead of being self-critical. I started creating better self-beliefs and my quality of life improved very quickly. It can for you too. You can change your life trajectory with your thoughts!

It's a challenge to move through these grief processes, the first two especially. But it is very necessary to be able to move on and get your life back on track. If you would like to know more about how I transformed from abuse victim to Thriver, then why not check out my latest video upload here.