Why grief from narcissistic relationships never truly ends
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DISCLAIMER: THIS INFORMATION IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A SUBSTITUTE FOR CLINICAL CARE. PLEASE CONSULT A HEALTH CARE PROVIDER FOR GUIDANCE SPECIFIC TO YOUR CASE. THIS VIDEO DISCUSSES NARCISSISM IN GENERAL.
THE VIDEO DOES NOT REFER TO ANY SPECIFIC PERSON, AND SHOULD NOT BE USED TO REFER TO ANY SPECIFIC PERSON, AS HAVING NARCISSISM. PERMISSION IS NOT GRANTED TO LINK TO OR REPOST THIS VIDEO, ESPECIALLY TO SUPPORT AN ALLEGATION THAT THE MAKERS OF THIS VIDEO BELIEVE, OR SUPPORT A CLAIM, THAT A SPECIFIC PERSON IS A NARCISSIST. THAT WOULD BE AN UNAUTHORIZED MISUSE OF THE VIDEO AND THE INFORMATION FEATURED IN IT.
Especially when you’re going through a trauma bond, you feel addicted to that person. It’s like you feel the need to hear from that person every single day just to feel alive and the scariest part is the cognitive dissonance, when you know that they’re not a good person but you keep trying to convince yourself that they’re not so bad.
CPTSD from childhood causes us to become codependent & enable narcissistic behaviors because we’re stuck in limerance as well as magical thinking
Life and death, the money that’s left
And the vultures dive to intercept
And the friendship rolls onto its side
And you wait for it and you die
I didn’t have the vocabulary. The best I could come up with was Complex Grief because it wouldn’t/couldn’t end. In a foreign country, isolated and utterly discarded after “the best years” spent. Grief remains
I grieve for all the time I wasted, now I’m too old to start again, I’d rather have peace at the price of being alone.
I’m starting over at 62!! We absolutely can start our own dreams for our future!! I’m divorced after 26 years of marriage!! The time I wasted was immense because I didn’t put myself first!! I’m learning yes I am lonely but I was when I was with him!! Get out and make new friends!! Read Let Them as well!! Also therapy is the key!! You are worth it!!! ❤
I’m 66, split from the narc 10 years ago. Still can’t conjure up the nerve and interest to try again.
Me too. I am 76 and I walked away from my family over a year ago because of narcissistic abuse. I would rather be alone at this time in my life. I’m having fun exploring who I am for the first time in my life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to try to have new relationships. Time will tell.
I feel the same way. I squandered the last 7 “good” years of my life with him. He was fully aware of my desire for a family and deceitfully claimed he wanted the same. Yet, he continuously found excuses to delay any progress, and eventually became so abusive and erratic in his behavior that I realized it was no longer a healthy situation. I kept hoping, trying, and waiting for things to improve, waiting for the right time to start the family he had promised, but they never improved, and come to find out, he had no intentions of following through on any of his promises. He had emotionally “checked out” of the relationship years before, but kept me on the line with a carrot dangling in front of me, going to just enough therapy, and changing just enough for short periods of time, to keep my hope alive. Then, when I was 42, he coldly and calculatingly discarded me, knowing full well that finding someone new and starting the family I dreamed of would be nearly impossible at that age. It wasn’t enough for him to try to break me and dim my spirit while we were together; he had to ensure that my chances of realizing my dreams were extinguished. The cruelty of such individuals is truly difficult to comprehend…
The experience has made you wiser. Trust yourself to see the signs and believe in your own worth. There is surely somebody waiting for you, too.
Thank you for this. It is so hard to deal with the thoughts that come up unexpectedly. My big one is the waste of time, the amount of love I poured out, and it meant nothing. And the no closure part, I hate carrying it around
Same
I grieve what could have been. But it takes 2 to make a healthy relationship and I have to accept that they didn’t want a healthy relationship. I am a senior now and it has taken me decades to get to the point I am at now. I will never understand why a person would CHOOSE toxicity over love, but that is a choice they made. My choice was to leave and it was the healthier choice.
Same here. He obviously chose healthy for a time but it was short lived.
I cannot process that, but I won’t stand by and watch him damage his adult children. We were abandoned when we went to him.
You are the ultimate empathic professional cuz this video so hits home. Literally! The narc mother I blocked from my life a couple decades ago passed away recently. I have to grieve again. I actually lost mom twice in life now. It does bring back the all too frequently miserable childhood I had. The confusion and the struggles I faced going out on my own and discovering that same personality type was out there pretty much everywhere in society hiding amongst the normal folks in the population. On one hand I say to myself just keep moving forward. On the other hand I ask myself how should I grieve. It’s an odd feeling and a brain drain. So I give it pause and thought. And then I go back to doing what I always did….I keep moving forward. Thx so much for your words today. It helps like you proly will never know.
Sometimes I share with my friends when I am feeling that grief hit again. And they are always like you said, “get over it” “youre better off” etc. It’s nice to hear the perspective that “yeah, this grief is going to happen to you” – I’m always helped by your videos.
Sometimes people who do not understand your story don’t know what to say. But a good friend would comfort you and validate your feelings.
Limerance needs to end codependency as you stop enabling narcissists & start healing from CPTSD 😉
The hardest thing I find to bare is the amnesia practised by him and his family , on the rare occasions when I have to speak to them they react as tho nothing what so ever has happened to me. There has never been an apology or even a recognition of the depth of his betrayal , the threat he was to me and the difficulty I went through to leave him. It’s like a memory mixer upper thingy was attached to all their heads and none of it ever happened.
My heart goes out to you. ❤️🩹
It’s brutal, you question, doubt, and lose trust in yourself.
We accept death as a natural part of life for the most part. Death is inevitable to happen to all of us. Abusive and toxic relationships shouldn’t though. Nor should what lost from them. It’s hard to get over and heal from those who intentionally harmed you and had no remorse
I go through this grief every day. Watching my rapist love a happy life with zero consequences for their actions while I rot in daily flashbacks just makes me feel endlessly empty.
OMG I’m sorry.
Yeah. All true. I was out for my walk a few weeks ago and I passed my most recent narcissist. No words were exchanged. But within a couple of days I felt physical pain. Part of me, the old part I need to change, wanted to call him and beg him to forgive me for things I didn’t even do. Anything to stop the pain.
But I didn’t make that call. Knowing what he is and that he will never change, and knowing what I’ve learned from this channel, stopped me. But God, it hurt.
It’s truly not about him because he never was what you wanted! Limerance as a result of CPTSD & codependency causes us to enable narcissists as we engage in magical thinking yet again 😉
Good for you!! Isn’t that real progress, just that you didn’t make that call👏
You do not just grieve what you lost with a narcissist. You grieve what you never had to begin with.
EXACTLY!!! I spent a weekend in bed crying about getting fooled by yet another narc, and mourning the future life that eas a total illusion from day one.
The entire relationship is always just trying in vain and desperation to make it happen….
I grieve that my life and potential were stolen and destroyed by a lifelong con artist/predator.
A palliative care intake psychologist interviewed my elderly mom. He spoke to her privately. She left the room and then he spoke to me. The first thing he said was, “Have you grieved the mother you never had?”
Yes.
Truth. Parents never lose the ability to hurt us, and narcissistic parents never stop trying; never ever, no matter how far away you get they cannot bear the thought of you drawing a breath without grief.
I finally came to an epiphany. My life was a seesaw. If I was happy, my family was unhappy. If I was unhappy, my family was happy. It was as if any happiness I had subtracted from theirs.
Yes, sadly so true.
I’m going through this grief at the moment. My narcissistic Mum and my son stopped speaking to me around 8 weeks ago after a family falling out. They knew how distressing it was for me but they did it anyway. For the first few weeks I begged and pleaded and called them asking to come back into their lives. I didn’t want to believe my son had become like her…where he would use the silent treatment as a punishment. But that final time we were all together… I saw her in him. How he talked, his arrogance, his disdain for me. His mannerisms, his lack of empathy. Then one day my friend said to me “what would you want to go back to that situation for?? For more abuse? No! Stop devaluing yourself. You have to move on without them”. She was right. It’s so tough and I cry for them every day but I think it’s the right thing to do. I hope.
I know exactly how you feel. The few times I talked to my nephew over the phone, I could hear the narcissists speaking. Keep in mind I rarely even saw my nephew, he lived in another state, but he was indoctrinated. I am in the process of writing my will. I emailed him to ask if he would like me to leave my house to him. I got no reply. I guess taking something from me would break the rules.
I’m in a similar situation. I have some money in a retirement account. Because “blood is thicker than water,” my mother expects me to leave any inheritance to my nieces and nephews. Thanks to family dysfunction, I don’t have a relationship with any of them. If there’s money left after I die, it will go to charity or the state. I will not be taken advantage of from the grave. My abusers will not benefit from my death.
@crazykitten I know exactly how you feel…my son was indoctrinated by my mother…absolutely save yourself…they wont change but you can…so sorry took me years but in the end tend your heart and soul there is no changing it …find the good people …its heartbreaking as a mother but in my case my mother was unable to poison my daughter so I am grateful for that…just know it is not you and actually may be saving you from further heartbreak down the road..sending a knowing hug
I am so so so sorry 😢 No one should have to go thru such devastating pain and heartbreak. But here we all are… 🫂
@@katydid594 agree
“There is no closure in narsissistic relationships”
Thats some heavy truth and radical acceptance to swallow
A decade of pain, over trying to figure out how to have closure
Yep!i thought if I could just be the mature kind person then they would understand and just honestly tell me why they did what they did to me,but no that’s not how their brain works.
Yes, good reminder. I thought getting them out of my house with a “move out immediately; don’t come back” restraining order was going to give me closure, but 3 weeks later they’re trying to come back and get stuff they left behind. There’s no allowance for that in the restraining order, so I am at a loss for how to handle this beyond just saying no, even tho my empathy nags at me to find a way to get their stuff to them. I can’t do that w/o compromising the order, giving them a foothold back in. The court gave me my closure, and my empathy wants to sabotage it. I can’t let that happen.
The grief of losing part of myself was the hardest to accept. It took me 10 years to look in the mirror and acknowledge that the person I see is not the person I want to be. That being treated with love and respect isn’t something unusual. My empathy got me into never-ending cycle of false hope and excuses. Wish I could talk with my past self and be brave sooner.
The grief is something I’ve never been able to express to trusted friends.
If you cannot express your feelings to a friend, maybe they are not a safe person for you?
Something interesting happened to me yesterday – grief related. My husband and I were cooking together and were joking around and at one point, I told him to put the pot on a fire and he said there is no fire, we have an electric stove. In that moment something hit me in my chest and I got very sad and upset. I felt hurt and stupid for some reason and then confused as to why did this sentence of his hurt me so much. I sat down and told him I am hurt by what he said and I don’t know why. He sat with me and reminded me when I was telling him that my narcissistic father was making me feel stupid and mocked me all throughout my childhood. I remembered and started crying and was crying for the whole hour. My husband held me and kept quiet as I asked him not to say anything. This was the first time I didn’t instantly got mad at my husband for saying something that would hurt me, but actually stopped and tried to figure out where is my pain actually coming from. I felt better after I finally stopped crying and I also felt good that my husband didn’t feel like he is to blame for my pain. I am happy as I am making slow progress towards my healing. Just wanted to share this little story as maybe someone can relate ❤
This is a great story! Thank you so much for sharing it. It’s hopeful.
I wanna just point out that this sounds like an incredibly healthy relationship. You felt fully comfortable sharing your feelings, even though you weren’t even sure where they were coming from. You stated that what he said hurt you without being accusatory him of anything, and he in turn took the time to listen, empathize, understand, and communicate his insight to you in a productive manner. The two of you took a potentially volatile situation and made it a bonding moment that was even actually helpful. Perfect 👌
I must agree that you seem to have a very healthy relationship with a loving and supportive partner.
Thanks for opening up with us, it’s beautiful to hear such a supportive couple dealing with generationl trauma together, instead of repeating the pattern.
May you grow old, grey, happy and healthy together ❤
Like you said, on the rare occasions that I see a healthy romantic relationship I feel so happy for them, but I also grieve that I never had one and never will.
Exactly
This was an incredible message. 😢 Dr. Ramani is an angel in disguise!