Ep.25: Navigating grief while finding joy

This is the episode for all protective parents navigating grief. We name it, we validate it and we learn to live with grief, while ensuring we also live lives with joy and happiness too. The two, grief and joy can in fact coexist. 

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Transcript

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0:01

Welcome everybody to The Survivor's Playbook. I'm your host, Chantal Contorines, and this is the podcast for every survivor of abuse. If abusers can have a playbook, then why can't survivors also have a playbook so that you can learn to live lives you love despite what the abuser in your life does or doesn't do. This week, there's a lot of grief. There's been some really horrible things that have happened locally to me, and also elsewhere. And so today, inside of the collective, we talked a lot about grief. My newsletter this week is about grief, and so I thought today's podcast could also be about grief. This is for the protective parent, for the parent doing everything in their power to shield their children from harm while carrying a grief that is very rarely actually named. And I wanted to talk about this grief. And it's not the kind of grief that people can immediately recognize. It's the quiet, layered grief that lives inside protective parents. And I wanna also touch upon and talk about something else, something equally important, how grief and joy can actually coexist. So let's name the grief that nobody talks about. There's a very specific grief that comes with parenting alongside an abusive. Narcissistic parent. It doesn't always show up as tears. Sometimes it shows up as exhaustion, sometimes as numbness, sometimes as anger, guilt, or an overall ache in your body, your mind and your spirit that you can't quite pinpoint and you most definitely cannot explain. And often it goes unnamed. But when grief goes unnamed, it gets carried alone. It gets heavier. So today I wanted to name it. And there are layers to this grief, and the first and oftentimes deepest layer is the grief for the childhood. Your children will not get one of the deepest griefs that protective parents experience is mourning the childhood their children should have had and would have had, had they not had an abusive parent as their other parent. This is the childhood where. Love is steady and predictable. Safety is automatically assumed it's a given. Emotions are met with care and not punishment. Adults take responsibility for their behavior. Parents meet their children where they need to be met, and all decisions revolve around the children's best interest Instead. Your children may have to learn things far too early, how to read the room, how to manage an adult's emotions, how to brace for unpredictability, and as a protective parent, you see this, you feel it in your body when your child is hypervigilant, when they come back incredibly dysregulated, when they struggle to relax and be at ease. When they lose their ability to be playful. Spontaneous when they're far too mature, far too early grieving. This does not mean you are failing your children. It means that you are incredibly attuned to what they deserve and what they need, and that matters. Next up for many protective parents is grieving the family you thought you would've had. Another layer of grief is the loss of the family story. You believed in either staying married to this person and having a wonderful life with your partner, the person that they sold you on when you first met them. But if that doesn't work, at least being able to co-parent with this person. The co-parenting relationships so many of you had hoped for. You knew that you didn't work as a partnership inside of a marriage, but you hoped that they would be able to come to terms, come to some sort of reasonable space where they could co-parent for the sake of your children. The shared milestones that have become battlegrounds. The belief that if you just explained it better, tried harder, stayed calmer, things might change. Many protective parents carry shame here. A lot of shame, so much guilt too. And it is not your shame or your guilt to carry the shame and the guilt lies squarely on the shoulders of and at the feet of your abusive counter parent. So let me be very clear here. You didn't imagine abuse into existence. You imagined health. You imagined accountability, you imagined safety. That was never naive. That was human. That's it. You were human. You expected the best from your children's other parent grieving. The loss of that imagined future is real and it's very valid. Next up is grieving yourself, and this is a grief that is often the hardest to face, right? The version of you who was lighter, who was more playful, who was more spontaneous, the parent you thought you'd get to be without constant vigilance. The nervous system that didn't always live on high alert. Protective parents are often praised for quote unquote, being so strong and you are. That is one of your superpowers, but you shouldn't have to be this strong for so long, and strength does not erase or mitigate the loss that you feel and experience. You can be resilient and heartbroken, capable and exhausted, grounded, and still grieving. These truths can exist at the same time. And this is the part that I really want you to hone in on where grief and joy can coexist. And I know it's possible because I see it every day in my work with the clients that I coach, the members inside of my membership, the protective parents that I work with. And this is where many parents get stuck because somewhere along the way we were taught that grief and joy cannot coexist. That if you feel joy, you must be over it. And if you're still grieving, you're doing something wrong. That's not how the nervous system works, and it's not how healing actually works. You can laugh with your children. You can be playful, silly, goofy, and still ache for what they've endured. You can feel proud of how far you've come, what you've accomplished, what you've overcome, how strong you are. And be devastated by what it's cost you and your children. You can create absolutely beautiful memories for your memory bank and for your children's memory banks while still carrying sadness. That's not a contradiction. This is emotional maturity. Joy does not betray grief. Grief does not cancel out joy. They're allowed to live side by side, and they can, and they often do. So if you are a protective parent listening to this and you're in the season of grief, and that real season of feeling devastation and anxiety and stress about what you are experiencing and also about what your innocent, vulnerable children are having to endure with their other parent. I wanna talk about some ways that you can support yourself through your grief. I really don't believe in fixing it, but I do believe in tending to it. So here are a few gentle, nervous system informed ways to support yourself through this. First, I want you to name it without minimizing it. Try saying, I'm a big fan of saying things out loud, as crazy as that might look and sound, of course this hurts. Anyone in my position would feel this way. Validation is regulating. Second, I want you to understand that grief is cyclical. It comes in waves, especially around holidays, milestones, transitions. Nothing has gone wrong when it returns, right? It's healing is three steps forward, one step back, and it's okay to feel grief every now and then to experience. The crashing of it back into your life. Third, I want you to release the pressure to be over it. There is no finish line. You are being actively counter parented by a person that you thought would love and support you for the rest of your life, and they are using your children to hurt you. You don't get over that. There's no finish line. There's only integration learning to live alongside this because the system oftentimes fails survivors, both children and adults alike. So learning to focus on what you can control and trying to focus less on what you cannot control. For example, your active counter parent, I want you to be intentional in your creation. Of pockets of joy on purpose. So I want you to create these pockets of joy on purpose. Joy doesn't need permission from grief. Small moments matter more than you think, right? So having a backwards day or an upside down day, or a yes day with your children, or eating breakfast for dinner, or wearing your pajamas to, to dinner, or building a fort and having a pizza party with a movie inside of that fort. Playing silly games, inject more playfulness into your lives. I want to leave you with this. Your grief is not a weakness. It's evidence of your love, your awareness, your refusal to normalize harm, and the fact that you are still choosing to cultivate joy for yourself and for your children is extraordinary. You are not broken. You are grieving while growing. You do not have to carry this alone. Thank you so much for doing the work that you do. Thank you for protecting your children and thank you for attending to yourself too. Please know that you are not alone. Thank you for listening to the Survivor's Playbook. If today's episode helped you feel less alone, more confident, more empowered, more capable, more educated, please share it with someone else who might need it. And if you're ready for deeper support, you can join my monthly membership or grab free tools and resources on my website. All links are in my show notes. Remember, your clarity is your power. Your calm is your resistance. You are not crazy. You are not alone, and you are not powerless. Until next time, keep going. I see you.