Six Steps to Process Grief

Welcome back to Dr. Leslie Intentionally Disturbing. We may be changing the title of this podcast because things are happening and it is moving fast. But for now, we're gonna stick with this. And we are continuing on our topic of getting out of a DV relationship Today, the plan is talking about mourning the loss of the person you thought you were with, mourning the loss of the relationship. You have to grieve even if he was a fucking monster. People don't tell you that when you finally get out of the relationship, you're going to grieve. But what does that mean? You're not gonna grieve the man that scarred you, that abused you, that hurt you You're gonna grieve the one that love bombed you and the one that you thought you were with and hoped he would get back to. the one who made you feel chosen, seen. And when that grief hits and it will, you might feel completely insane. So I'm here to tell you, don't worry, it's normal. It's normal in friendships too. It's normal in anything that we got our hopes up and it didn't turn out to be true. But first, let's make a distinction between anyone who loses a relationship, you get to be sad because it sucks. You get to be angry because there's anger. There is normal grief. That is okay and expect it, and the world is okay with it but no one really talks about what feels like abnormal grief, grieving the bad guy. The devastating part is that your love for him was real. Y feelings for him The life you imagined for yourself and your family was real. The relationship you thought you had, the meaning of it, it was real. It wasn't a delusion. But now you've lost it and that lost, that's the grieving. It was genuine experience. It just wasn't mutual. So what you are grieving is not just a person, You are grieving a reality that turned out not to exist And that is a fundamentally different type of grieving than if you break up with a partner for good reason. There was even a study on this in twenty twenty four. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. I didn't even know this journal existed. I think we all need to subscribe. So the study validated the first formal gaslighting relationship exposure inventory. I'm not even aware of this. and I mean, I definitely never trained in it, but I'm gonna to get it and I willll teach it to you guys. So they looked at about nine hundred people. They found that gaslighting produces very specific emotional and cognitive injury and different than any other types of abuse you endure. It leads to a destabilized sense of reality. You don't just lose the person. lose your confidence in your perception of what you think is real. And you have to grieve that as well We don't even get pay for having a baby in America like you get three months off. I feel like when you leave a DV relationship, you need like years off. You need years to process this and just be with yourself and be in boatloads of different kinds of therapy. One of the reasons that grief feels so overwhelming is that it's not singular It's like a stacking of so many different things, so many losses, so many experiences, so many memories all at once occurring while you try and ve. That's not simple shit. I'm gonna name the six most common losses The person you thought he was The future you planned, the past that you now have to reinterpret, your identity, your trust in your own judgment and closure, because you will never get it from him. A narcissist will not give you that. But why doesn't anyone validate it? And well, there's a concept in psychology called disenfranchised grief. It's basically that people around you don't acknowledge your grief because it's not book how they experienced it. They didn't see the narcissistic abuse. They weren't there. He hid it in the house with just you They thought he was the best dad. The best husband, the best partner, whatever kind of fucking show he put on for the world. But people will say better off without him. I never liked him anyways Why are you sad? He was awful to you? Shouldn't you be relieved? And sure, maybe those statements are well intentioned, but they're communicating one thing and it's that your grief is inappropriate. You shouldn't have it and you should be feeling a different way. So people don't understand it, and that's why they disenfranchise it And in the same way, you self disenfranchise, self gaslight yourself about the grieving from the gaslighter. You suppress it, you deny it. You don't believe it. And it's not healthy for future attachments. fucks with our minds. So I'm here to tell you, you have the right to grieve this, notot because the relationship was real Because it was real to you, you lost real things, you lost hope, you lost your safety, and you gave everything. Let's cut to a celebrity example, especially one I like very much, Ais Witherspoon. Now in twenty twenty five around September, she gave a pretty darn good interview I think it's a New York Times podcast called The interterview. W wayay, she said something that I want you to sit with aute And I know I'm like talking about a celebrity. Most of them are vapid. She actually has a little bit of a smart ster. I like the celebs who actually stand up for people, fight, do legislation. I like her. So in this interview, she was describing what it felt like to get out of an abusive relationship. And she was in one when she was young. She said, My spirit had diminished because I thought all those awful things that person said to me were true had to I had to rewire my brain. She was a working actress at the time, showing up doing her job looking fine from the outside. But internally, she had absorbed her abuser's narrative. and she struggled to separate his voice from her own She said, I thought all those awful things he would say about me were, this is what sustained psychological abuse does to you. It doesn't just hurt you. It instills itself in you. And that is why when I was standing before federal Judge Carter in Orange County I said to him, coercive control is far more dangerous than physical violence. He's like eighty three and he was shocked. Judges need to be educated on coercive control. We have endless cases right now of men using coercive control, financial control to hurt women and to take their children, especially Billion. Look at Ashley Sinclair coming out and talking about her experience with Elon Musk. She had his baby. He doesn't even know the kid and now he's trying to take the kid. Look at the case of Philip Pline and that hockey player Kain so much manipulation and coercive control in the way they are abusing the legal system and trying to take kids to hurt the moms Anyways, back to Reese. H voice became hers. It becomes your narrative. You start to think you are all the shitty things the person says about you. So what was her internal work? It was grieving that voice. She had to learn how wonderful she was. She had to realize when his words were present and they weren't her own And she's not weak. She was targeted. She described it as having to reconstitute herself. That word is doing a lot of work. To reconstitute, it basically means you're rebuilding something from the very beginning, not recovering that were broken, fully rebuilding from scratch. What was she like before The abuser entered her life. And sometimes we have abuse all the way through childhood and it's a process to figure out our identity. It can take years. And I'm telling you, give yourself the time to do it. And don't date some kind of pushy man who's narcissistic, who's gonna get in there, and you feel like he's giving you an identity again because you're only gonna ret traumatize yourself You need to find out who you are before you have a partner. I think about the true crime case, Gabby Petito too, because it strongly applies here. This was back in twenty twenty one and the big thing was that the relationship people saw was very different than the actual relationship. On social media, Gabby and Brian Laundry they seemed like they were living dream And that's because most of social media is fucking fake. She actually went home after her first dinner with him and told her mom There's something off about that guy. and then dismissed it as we're trained to do. Don't listen to your gut, your intuition, you're so dramatic. blah, blah, blah. And look how this turned out. It turned out to be a february twenty twenty five Netflix documentary, which you never want to be. because he killed her The documentary used her journal entries, her text messages, there was footage that no one had ever seen, police footage. And what you could basically see was she was being controlled. There was an escalation of violence an escalation of this circular DV cycle, she was doing everything she could to manage this horrible man and she was drowning. How does this relate to grief? Well, her family now has to grieve her loss and the loss of what they thought they knew was going on. The loss of the dream that they thought they were going to have with the perfect couple And the followers, social media, peopleeople around the world knew her and then had to realize and wake up and grieve the loss of this poor young woman. I share that story because grief is vast and you may be grieving things all the time and not really understanding fully, but we are so flooded with social media and news and people's personal stories that some should not be telling online like about vaginal things, it's like too much guys, toooo much. But once it's in our mind, we start thinking about it and building. And then we have these parasocial relationships with celebrities and then they break up and everybody's grieving the loss of that relationship that they thought. Okay, but let's talk about how do you actually move through this this kind of grief. I'm gonna give you six steps to move through Grief. one. Let it is. stop trying to make sense of it, stop trying to explain it to people. You get to feel it without judging it, without understanding it. This isn't just emotion. This is an organization neurologically. and part of it means you can't always do much. Sometimes you have to sit in it and let your brain Reorganized. That's why EMDR trauma therapy is so powerful. Number two, separate the layers. To me, that means journal Organize your thoughts, journal, write things down, and eventually you'll be able to start separating the emotions and the stories and the memories to figure out what is more potent, what is hurting more, what hurts less, what to prioritize. Number three, find the people who get it Don't sit there explaining it to people who are invalidating you or who have never experienced it. Find the people who truly get you, like the women who have left narcissistic relationships with DB. One thing I love about my husband is that he is a psychologist and we don't have to go into detail about things because we just get it We speak the same language. We use the psychological jargon to explain things to each other. We sync up easier and faster with less effort And I want you to find people like that Step four, stop waiting for closure from Him. You're not going to get it and if you get anything, it is selfish and it's not what you want. It needs to come from you. Five, grieve your former self with compassion You can still love and be proud of the woman who was in that relationship and who survived it. You don't have to be hard on yourself. You don't need to blame yourself. You survived it and you're here on the other side. And six, therapy, I know, get into therapy that is for this type of grief. I really like narrative therapy. You can reconstruct a coherent story of your life with the therapist. You integrate what happened to you in the past relationship, but you don't let it define you And then like I said, EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. You move your eyes left to right back and forth over and over while holding ono images. And what happens is you are calm in your therapist's office, like my hot pink cozy office with like a fountain on or something with you know, lavender smells. And you're going to replace the emotions, the negative emotions that occurred during the violence and the bad times in the relationship. You're going replace them with a safe, calm feeling So if I had an example of that, I would say, if you're on an airplane and you see the TV right in front of you, like on the seat in front of you, it's really vivid. You can see it, it's clear. But after you do EMDR, what happens, the memories become more faint. So it's almost like they're a TV on an airplane chair, W ros ahead of you, The emotions aren't as strong and they start to fade. You may always have the memory, but that's okay. It's more about not having the negative emotions that gut punch you when you have the memory. Okay, I want to leave you with this. You were not wrong to love him. The love, the capacity for it, the depth of it The willingness to build a life with someone is not a flaw It is a wonderful feature but he found it and he used it. That is on him not. The grief you feel is not proof that you were foolish. It is proof that you were that you showed up genuinely to something you believed was mutual. You bght self you brought your whole self to a relationship that was designed to take everything from you and give nothing back. That deserves grief. realal messy, non linear grief. There's no timeline for that And slowly, you will buildu the pieces of yourself back together, back up, the person you were before him and an even better person that he can't fucking have. Imagine the things you used to like, the things that you would think about, the brilliant funny things that you used to say That he took from you because you were so fucking deflated. Imagine your friendships, trusting your instincts, your intuition, being aware, feeling joy, feeling happy again. I'm here to tell you, girl that you didn't disappear. You just went quiet for a little while. She's still there. She's just waiting for you to come back Be well and sit with the parts of this that matter. And if it matters to somebody close to you or they're going through it, send them this to help guide them as well. And remember, psychologytoday. com is a great place for you to find a therapist because you can find ones that specialize in narrative therapy, EMDR, trauma informedrap So I will catch you next week, Wednesday and I'm not sure what we're gonna talk about. Let me know if there's anything of interest. We can talk relationships, true crime. We've always got pop culture and there's so much drama going on in the world today. Like that motherfucker who hurt his daughter and then She took her life and the judge just gave him Oo in prison. stay aware Stay alert, look for those monsters, and don't be