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I think one of the hardest parts about healing from a toxic relationship is realizing that the grief doesn't end when the relationship does. In some ways, that's when it actually begins. Because when you're in it, while you're managing him, managing the house, managing the kids, managing your own face so it doesn't give anything away, you didn't have room to feel the full weight of what you were losing. You were too busy surviving it. And then one day the chaos settles. The relationship ends, or it changes, or you finally stop bracing for the next thing. And for the first time in longer than you can remember, there is space. And into that space comes everything you didn't have time to feel. Not just the grief for the relationship, grief for yourself, grief for the years you've spent shrinking, grief for the dreams you quietly set down somewhere along the way and never picked back up. Grief for the friendships that faded because you didn't have the energy to maintain them. Grief for the version of you who believed for so long that if she just tried a little harder, things would finally get better. And maybe most painfully of all, grief for the woman you had to become just to survive it. This episode is for that grief. The kind nobody sends flowers for, the kind that doesn't get a name. Let's give it one today. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. And before we begin, as always, when I talk about unhealthy or abusive relationships, I generally use he for the person causing harm. That reflects my own experience and the experience of many of the women that I work with. But I recognize that abuse happens across every gender and every kind of relationship. So if your story looks different, this space is still yours. Today we're talking about grief. Not the kind people send flowers for, not the kind that comes with casseroles or sympathy cards or a community of people checking in on you because everyone understands what you've lost and why it hurts. This is the invisible grief, the kind that often goes completely unnamed because from the outside, your life still looks intact. You're still showing up to work, still getting the kids to school, still answering texts, making dinner, functioning in the way that's visible to everyone around you. But inside, you are mourning. And a lot of the time you don't even fully realize that that's what's happening. You just know something feels heavy, and you can't quite name why. Because nobody taught us that grief isn't only about losing people, grief is about losing anything that mattered. Anything you invested in, anything that you hoped for, built toward, and gave yourself to. And women lose so much inside toxic relationships, time, people, versions of themselves, whole years that don't come back. And I also want to say something directly to the women that I think this episode is going to land hardest for. The ones who are a little further down the road, who aren't in their 20s, wondering what might have been, who are looking at 15 years, 20 years, 30 years or more and doing the math that they didn't want to do, wondering what they could have built in that time, who they could have become. If that's you, I see you. And I built this episode with you specifically in mind. Or I feel numb, or I'm just so tired and I don't understand why, because nothing dramatic is even happening right now. And they assume something is wrong with them, that they're broken or ungrateful, or failing to just move on in the way that they think that they're supposed to. But when we slow down, when we actually sit with what they live through instead of rushing past it, what's usually underneath that anger, that numbness, that exhaustion is grief. Grief that was never named, so it never got processed. It just sat there, taking up space, showing up sideways as irritability or fatigue or a strange flatness that won't lift. So let's name some of what's actually being grieved, because I think most women have never heard this said out loud, and hearing it might be the first time some of these losses get to actually be real. You are grieving the years you spent trying to earn a love that should have been freely given, not negotiated for, not performed for, just given the way it's supposed to be, and instead you spent years auditioning for it. You are grieving the opportunities you passed on because someone else's needs always came first, the job you didn't take because it would have required too much independence, the degree you didn't finish, the risk you didn't take because the conversation about it wasn't worth having. You are grieving the hobbies you stopped doing because they caused friction, the thing you used to love that quietly disappeared from your life, not because you decided to stop, but because continuing it costs more than it was worth. You are grieving the goals that you put on hold indefinitely, the career path you never pursued because the timing was never right, or the support that never came, or the energy required to fight for it on top of everything else was more than you had left to give. You are grieving the parts of yourself that you learned to hide because they were inconvenient to someone else, your opinions, your ambition, your sense of humor if it was ever too much, pieces of you tucked away and rarely taken back out. You are grieving the version of your body that you used to feel at home in before stress and hypervigilance and years of managing a chronic threat rewired what it feels like to simply exist inside of your own skin. The sleep that used to come easily, the appetite that wasn't tangled up with anxiety, the years that your body spent bracing instead of resting. You are grieving milestones that should have felt celebratory instead of felt like one more thing to survive, a birthday spent managing his mood instead of enjoying your own day, a holiday spent performing normalcy for extended family while something inside of you was quietly breaking, an anniversary that should have marked love and instead marked one more year of getting smaller. And then there are the relationships, the friends you slowly stopped calling because it was easier than dealing with his jealousy or his sulking or the argument that would follow if you spent the evening laughing with someone who wasn't him. The family members you pulled away from because you were tired of defending him, tired of managing their concern, tired of the awkwardness that settled over every holiday, the people who tried, gently or not so gently, to tell you that something wasn't right, and you weren't ready to hear it yet, so you put distance between yourself and the truth, which meant putting distance between yourself and them. The invitations you declined one after another until people stopped extending them. And the community you lost, not all at once, a little at a time, until one day you looked around and realized how small your world had become. Not because you wanted it that way, because survival required it. And there is real, legitimate grief in recognizing how much you shrank around you, your friendships, your ambitions, your sense of who you were allowed to be while you were focused entirely on getting through each day. Toxic relationships don't stay contained to the relationship. They reshape you. And that reshaping doesn't end the moment the relationship does. Because when you have spent years, sometimes many years, learning to tolerate disrespect, dismissiveness, or inconsistency, you do not automatically stop accepting those things just because the source of them is gone. The conditioning follows you. You find yourself staying silent at work when someone crosses the line because speaking up has been trained out of you. You overextend yourself in friendships, giving more than you receive because that imbalance has started to feel like what relationships are supposed to be. You become the person everyone leans on, but no one actually sees the reliable one, the strong one, the one who's always fine. And somewhere in there you lost track of when anyone last asked you how you really were. You tolerate one-sided dynamics because you were taught, explicitly or through years of repetition, that your needs come second. You laugh things off that genuinely hurt you. You catch yourself saying, Oh, I'm probably asking for too much, about things that are not too much at all. You become remarkably, almost unconsciously skilled at abandoning yourself before anyone else gets the chance to do it first. And then one day, you look around and realize that you are miserable in places that have nothing to do with your former relationship. A friendship that drains you, a work dynamic that disrespects you, a new relationship that's starting to feel a little too familiar in the wrong way. And the instinct is to think, what's wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. You have been conditioned. You spent so long adapting to an unhealthy dynamic that unhealthy starts to register as normal. Your internal compass got recalibrated to a broken setting, and that compass doesn't reset itself automatically just because you changed your circumstances. There is grief and recognizing how many corners of your life you've quietly been settling for lesson. Not because you don't know what your worth is somewhere deep down, but because the part of you that's supposed to enforce it got trained into silence. This is the grief that women whisper about. The one that they almost never say out loud, even to people who love them. Sometimes the one they've never said out loud to anyone, including themselves, in any kind of direct, unflinching way. It's the grief of looking back at choices that you made and not recognizing the person who made them. It's the grief of remembering all the times you overrode your own instincts, the moment you knew somewhere underneath everything that something was wrong, and you talked yourself out of it anyways, because believing it would have required you to do something about it and you weren't ready. It's the grief of recognizing how much you accepted, how much you explained away, how much you excused on someone else's behalf, constructing reasons and context and explanations for behavior that looking back now with clearer eyes never deserved that much grace. It's remembering the specific moment. Maybe you can picture it right now, when a friend or a sister or your own mother looked at you with concern and asked if you were okay, and you said yes, smiled, changed the subject, knowing somewhere underneath that smile that you were not okay at all, and carrying that small private betrayal of yourself for years afterward. Women say this to me, almost word for word, over and over across completely different lives and circumstances. I don't know how to respect myself after this. And I understand that feeling completely. Because when you wake up, really wake up, and recognize that you spent years betraying your own instincts to keep someone else comfortable, shame arrives fast and it arrives loud. I want to offer you something different to hold on to instead. The woman that you are struggling to respect right now is not weak. She is exhausted. She adapted to an environment that required her to ignore her own needs in order to function inside of it. That is not a character flaw. That is what human beings do inside chronically unsafe or unstable environments. They adapt. It's not optional. It is how the nervous system protects itself. She made impossible choices using the information, the support, and the resources she actually had access to at the time, not the clarity you have now with distance and hindsight and everything you've since learned. She did not have what you have now. She had what was available then and she used it to survive. She survived. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the whole thing. Healing does not happen by putting that woman on trial. It happens by understanding her, by getting curious about what she actually needed in those moments instead of what you wish she'd done, by forgiving her for doing the absolute best she could with what she had, and by becoming, starting right now, the woman who no longer leaves her behind. I want to take a few minutes here to talk about grief itself, because I think one of the most disorienting parts about this whole experience is not knowing what you're supposed to be feeling or when or for how long, and assuming that confusion means that you're doing it wrong. You're not doing it wrong. Grief was never designed to be tidy. Most of us were raised with the very simplified idea of grief, that there are stages, that you're supposed to move through them in order, and that eventually you arrive at acceptance and you're done. And while there is some truth buried in that idea, the reality is so much messier and so much more human. Grief does not move in a straight line. It moves in waves. You can feel like you made some real peace with something, genuinely, solidly at peace, and then six months later a song comes on, or you see a couple laughing together in a way that used to be yours, or your child asks an innocent question, and the grief is right back, just as sharp as ever. That's not regression, that's not failure. That is simply what grief actually is. It doesn't get resolved once and just stays resolved forever. It gets revisited again and again, often for the rest of your life, just with less power each time you visit it. If you let it move through you instead of fighting it. Here's something else that matters so enormously, especially for what we're talking about today. Grief is not only about losing something good. You can grieve something that was bad for you. In fact, some of the most confusing grief is exactly that kind. Because you're not only grieving the relationship as it was, you're grieving the relationship that you hoped it would become, the version of him that you fell for, the version of the life that you thought you were building, the future you pictured, that never had a chance to exist outside of your own imagination. You can know with complete certainty that leaving was right. And still grieve enormously. Those two things are not in conflict. They live together constantly in this kind of loss. There's also something important to understand about why this grief can feel so much heavier and more confusing than other kinds. When you lose someone to death, the world generally recognizes the loss. People bring food, they check in, there are rituals, funerals, anniversaries, ways of marking what happened that tell you clearly that this matters, this is real, and you're allowed to be devastated. This kind of grief doesn't really get any of that. Nobody brings a casserole when you finally leave a relationship that was quietly destroying you for a decade. Nobody sends a card marking the loss of the years or the friendships or the version of yourself who used to laugh without thinking about it first. Often people expect you to be relieved and only relieved, and any sadness underneath that gets met with confusion. Oh, but you're better off. Why are you still upset? That lack of recognition doesn't make the grief smaller. It just makes it lonely. And loneliness layered on top of grief is one of the heaviest combinations a person can carry. And I also want to name something that I think explains a lot of what gets misread as being stuck. Healthier grieving doesn't actually mean severing the connection to what was lost. It means learning to carry it differently. The years you lost do not have to be erased from your story in order for you to move forward. They can stay part of who you are, informing you, having shaped you, without continuing to define or control what comes next. That's a different goal than just get over it. Getting over something implies that it should disappear. What actually happens in healthy grieving is more like integration. The loss becomes something that you carry rather than something that carries you. Grief is not a problem to be solved or a phase to be completed on a schedule. It is evidence that something, your time, your hope, your years, the person you were before, mattered enormously. And the goal is never to stop feeling that. The goal is to feel it without it running your whole life. And for the women listening who are a little further along, who have been carrying this for years, not months, I want to say this directly. If you are 50 or 60 or possibly older, and you are still finding waves of grief about a relationship from decades ago, that is not a sign that you fail to heal. That is simply what grief carried honestly actually looks like over the span of a real human life, as long as you're not letting it dictate how you're living your life still. And that's why I want to talk about mourning the time itself for the women that are counting the years. And I want to spend some time here because I think that there is a particular kind of grief that hits differently depending on where you are in your life when you finally face it. If you are in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, and you're looking back at 15, 20, 30 years spent inside of a relationship that took far more than it gave, the grief is not just about what happened. It's about the time itself. There is a particular kind of mourning that comes from doing the math that you didn't want to have to do. Counting the years, realizing how much of your one life, the only one you get, was spent managing someone else's moods, shrinking around someone else's needs, surviving instead of living. And there can be a real fear underneath that grief, a fear that whispers, is there enough time left to build something different? Am I too old to start over? Did I miss my window? And I want to address that directly because I think it deserves more than a quick reassurance. Yes, time was lost. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I don't think that you believe me if I did. Those years are real. They matter. They are worth grieving fully and honestly without rushing past them to get to something more comfortable. And also, the years ahead of you are not a consolation prize. They are not what's left over after the good part already happened. They are simply the next chapter, and they belong entirely to you in a way the previous ones may never have. I have watched women in their 50s and 60s build friendships more honest than any they've had in decades, start businesses they've quietly dreamed about for 20 years, fall in love again, not despite their age, but with a depth of self-knowledge that made the love itself entirely different from anything they've experienced before. They've traveled alone for the first time in their lives and discovered that they like their own company more than they expected to. None of that erases what they lost. It doesn't need to. Grief and possibility are not in competition with each other. You can mourn the decades that were taken from you and still build something real with the decades you have left. Both things, again, can be true at once. I think of a woman I worked with who left after 36 years. 36. She told me that she felt like she was standing at the base of a mountain that she was too tired to climb, that everyone her age was already at the summit of their lives, and she was just now finding the trailhead. I understood why she felt that way. The fear was completely reasonable. A couple years later, she sent me a photo from a pottery studio that she opens a couple mornings a week, not because it makes her rich, but because her hands finally get to make something that is entirely hers, with no one in the next room whose mood she has to track while she does it. She told me that some days she does still grieve the 36 years, and some days she catches herself laughing, completely alone, completely unwatched, and thinks, I didn't know I still had this in me. Both of those things were true for her, often in the very same week. That is not a contradiction. That is simply what it looks like to grieve honestly while still building forward. The years you spent surviving were not wasted in the sense of being meaningless. They shaped a woman who is right now capable of recognizing the truth and choosing something different. That is not nothing, that is the foundation, everything else gets built on. But you are allowed to wish simply and honestly that you had those years back. Both of those things live in the same chest at the same time. That is what this particular grief is. So let's talk about recovery because I think the word itself sets up the wrong expectation. Recovery is not just about leaving the relationship. Recovery is about reclaiming yourself. And those are two very different processes that often get conflated. And reclaiming yourself does not have to happen in one dramatic moment. There is no single day where you wake up whole again. It happens in tiny, almost invisible ways, so small that you might not even notice them as significant while they're occurring. As always, I say this every single time. It starts with noticing what you actually want. Maybe it's what you want for dinner before asking everyone else what they want first. Maybe it's reaching back out to a friend that you've missed, even though it's awkward, even though time has passed, even though you're not sure what to say, I've missed you is usually enough. Maybe it's taking the class you thought about for years and never signed up for. Maybe it's putting on the music you stop listening to, the songs that used to be yours before they quietly got retired, and letting yourself feel whatever comes up when you hear them again. Maybe it's buying the shirt that you actually love without running through a mental filter of what someone else might think about it or say about it. Maybe it's just saying plainly that doesn't work for me, and not following it up with three sentences of justification. It's paying attention to your body's signal instead of talking yourself out of them. The tightness in your chest, the exhaustion that doesn't match your schedule, the relief you feel in certain rooms, and the dread you feel in others. Your body has information. Recovery means starting to listen to it again. It's learning slowly and against the years of conditioning that taught you otherwise that peace does not have to be earned. You do not have to perform enough or sacrifice enough or prove enough before you're allowed to feel calm. Peace is not a reward. It is something that you are allowed to have. And it is discovering what you actually enjoy when no one else is telling you who you're supposed to be. That discovery can take time. You might try several things before something feels true to you. That's not failure, that's exploration, which is something that you may not have been allowed to do in a very long time. It's also small moments of letting yourself rest without justifying it, sitting down in the middle of the day without a list of reasons ready in case someone asks why. Saying no to an obligation without softening it into three apologies. These moments will feel uncomfortable at first, maybe even wrong, like you're getting away with something. That discomfort is not a sign that you're doing it incorrectly. It's a sign that you're doing something your nervous system has never been allowed to practice before. Reclaiming yourself at its core means becoming someone that you trust again and trust in anyone, including yourself, is not built through one grand gesture. It is built through small promises kept consistently over time. Every time you honor what you actually want in some small way, you are making a promise to yourself and keeping it. And eventually, those small kept promises accumulate into something that feels like trust. You do not have to rebuild your entire life today. You only have to stop abandoning yourself in this exact moment and then the next, and then the one after that. That is the whole practice. It is not glamorous, it is not fast, but it works. If you are grieving right now, in whatever form that's taking, on whatever timeline, however many years out from whatever you lost, I want you to hear this clearly. Your grief makes sense. It makes sense to grieve the relationship, even the parts of it that hurt you. It makes sense to grieve the years, all of them, not just the easy ones to grieve. It makes sense to grieve the friendships that faded, the opportunities you set aside, the parts of yourself that got buried so deep beneath survival that you sometimes wonder if they're still there at all. They are still there. But please, and I mean this as gently and as firmly as I know how, do not mistake your grief for failure. Do not let anyone, including the voice inside your own head, tell you that feeling this means that you're not healing fast enough or correctly enough or on the right schedule. Grief is not evidence that something is wrong with you. Grief is evidence that something mattered. And the fact that you can still feel the size of what you lost means that you are still fully, completely alive inside of your own story. You cannot reclaim the years that have already passed. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I won't lie to you in an episode about telling the truth. But you can reclaim yourself. You can decide right now, today, in this very moment, that the woman who spent so many years surviving deserves more than survival going forward. She deserves joy that doesn't have to be earned. She deserves peace that doesn't depend on managing anyone else's moods. She deserves relationships where she never again has to disappear in order to be loved. And most importantly, she deserves your compassion, not your judgment, not your impatience, your compassion. Because the goal was never to become exactly who you were before all of this happened. That woman doesn't exist anymore. And chasing her is its own kind of grief that doesn't need to be added to what you're already carrying. The goal is to become someone who would never again abandon herself. That woman is available to you starting now, starting with whatever small true thing that you can do for yourself today. Someone who needs permission to mourn something that nobody else seemed to notice was lost. And if you haven't already, leaving a review helps more women find this space. And it helps them realize the way I hope you felt today that they are not alone in this. Until next time, keep breaking every pattern that taught you that your worth depended on how much of yourself that you were willing to sacrifice.