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21 | The Quiet Grief of "Wasted Years" · The Messy Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Messy Middle, the podcast for women navigating the raw, confusing, lonely aftermath of narcissistic abuse and emotional control.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Erica Leon, trauma-informed abuse recovery coach, mom of five, and creator of the six keys to unfuck withable.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you're picking up the pieces, questioning everything, and trying to remember who the fuck you were before you were so carefully erased, you're in the right place.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hello again and welcome to this episode of the Messy Middle Podcast.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Erica Leon.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this episode is about the quiet grief of wasted years.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something that comes up such a lot, and I have felt the rush of it myself many times until I picked it apart.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a kind of grief that almost every woman I work with carries at some point.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I would actually say that I have never worked with anyone who doesn't express this in some form.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a quiet kind of grief.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: People mention it in passing, but maybe I haven't seen much focus on it, to be honest, out there.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it doesn't get talked about very much.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it sits right under the surface.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's that moment when you look back at a relationship, and it's sometimes years, it's sometimes decades, it's sometimes a whole life.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this thought hits you that I've wasted my life, or I gave them the best years, or I should have left sooner, or how did I stay that long?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'd known then what I know now, and I hear these phrases constantly, and I totally understand this, and when women say it, there's usually a kind of shame wrapped around it too, like they're confessing something, like they failed some invisible exam.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing I always do in that moment is to slow everything down.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because before we really analyze anything, before we try to reframe anything, before we talk about moving forward, the grief itself deserves some space.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's true what they say about naming something, actually making it more real, giving it a name, it really does help.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the grief does deserve that.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So when you realize how much of your life was spent navigating someone else's volatility, their moods, their immaturity, their manipulation, their control, all the conditioning that we all seem to have collectively had, of course there is grief, and of course there's anger, and of course there's sadness, but nothing about that reaction is dramatic.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to understand that.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's just human.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I really don't go with the women are dramatic thing, in my opinion.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is not my findings.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But most survivors have a moment where the fog lifts and they describe that moment pretty accurately.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it happens while they're still in the relationship, and sometimes it happens after they leave.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it can also happen years later when they finally learn the language for what they've experienced, or they find somebody who treats them extremely well, and then it all comes crashing in.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen many different types of having that aha fog lifting moment, the gaslighting that people experience in these relationships, the coercive control, the manipulation, the emotional abuse.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Once you have that language, your brain starts replaying the past through a completely different lens.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I do see people change week to week on their understanding and then their integration of that knowledge, and then how they go back and view.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I very much encourage people to always treat it like a fresh page.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you know things and integrate them into your nervous system, your body, your mind, it definitely does make you see things more clearly.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: You get more clarity, more depth.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I love to watch that happening with people.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you have that language, it does start looking at the past and replaying it with that different lens.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Moments that felt confusing before may suddenly make sense.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And things you blamed yourself for because you were taught they were your doing might start to look very different.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when you usually make a little bit of space, even if it's unconsciously, and then that grief can really land.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because your brains start doing what brains love to do.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's time travel.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'd seen this sooner, if I'd left then, if I'd understood, and that kind of time travel can be brutal because you're holding your past self to knowledge that you only gained later.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot know what you do not know at the time.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't act on what you don't know yet either.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if I had a dime for every time in a day, I have to tell a woman in this position that she needs to give herself grace, or not just a woman, anyone I work with, I would be a lot wealthier than I am.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And something I do say all the time to them is that you cannot deal with something until you truly see it.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And even when you begin to see it, you may not have what you need yet to act on it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there are definitely these tipping points in life.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Moments when things finally align enough for change to happen, and you get that feeling in you, like everything in you is saying, Do this, make this move.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's divine or whether it's your mind, and frankly, I don't care.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's both, but you will know it when you feel it.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of us are searching for what to do next.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, do nothing until that feeling appears.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You will know.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm always very boringly repeating to every person I ever work with to trust themselves with decisions because I know that is hard after abusive relationships and mantra to themselves when the time is right, I will know what to do.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is so important.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's so important to give yourself that the trust of I will know.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: When it gets here, I'll know.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, I don't know.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be borne out by everybody who's ever hiked themselves up and left in the middle of the night, left an abusive relationship, left an abusive any kind of situation.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't think you could do it, and then suddenly you can't not do it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's the truth.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Trust yourself, you will know.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are these moments when things finally align enough for change to happen.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that alignment might be resources, or sometimes it's support, or encouragement, or somebody who sees and believes in you, or sometimes it's maturity.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes your nervous system just finally reaches a point where it cannot tolerate one more day of what's happening.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's a danger instinct kicking in, your self-preservation, and sometimes it's just the truth that becomes impossible to ignore.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: But until those things line up, people aren't often capable of making the move they later wish they'd made earlier.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something so many survivors realize in hindsight.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: They look back and think, if I had tried to leave then, I wasn't ready, or I didn't have the money, or I didn't have the support, or my kids were too young, or my nervous system was still completely tangled in the situation.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you start to see that timing wasn't random.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Things were unfolding in ways you couldn't fully see at the time.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's never gonna be easy, obviously.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: All of this fucking sucks, and I'm so pissed in general that the way abuse is, the way it's treated, the way it's well, not treated, the lack of perpetrator accountability.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't even get me started.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I could rant for days.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: But every single day of my life, I see amazing people leaving this shit and carving out their own lives on their own terms.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I love what I do so fucking much.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And also, let's talk about empathy, the empathy trap, really, because that's another piece of this puzzle.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So many of the women who end up in manipulative or controlling relationships are deeply empathetic people, and that is the same for my male clients and people who don't identify as either.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is always that is consistent between everyone.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're perceptive, they're thoughtful, they're kind, they're the kind of people that everybody says they they're so warm and they light up a room.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: They can see nuance, they can see potential in others.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in a healthy environment, those qualities are obviously beautiful.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I never want any of you to lose that, by the way.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is what makes you the fab little you that you are, but it does call for some discernment.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: In an abusive system, however, those same qualities get turned against you.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: When someone hurts you and you're empathetic, your instinct isn't immediately, this is unacceptable.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Fuck that.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Your instinct is what's going on with them?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they acting this way?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they're really struggling.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I can help.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they just need an extra XYZ from me.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe they didn't mean it.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you start explaining their behavior instead of evaluating it with very cold and clinical eyes, which is ideally what would happen.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Your empathy becomes then the door which the manipulation walks in through.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because you're weak.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Please hear me.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I know I say it every single episode, and I say it all the time to people in general.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's because you're human.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's because you were conditioned to be that way.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And also empathetic people have usually been through it.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: I really I see a correlation in that all the time.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's undeniable.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we, as just as a side note, women particularly, it's what we grow up being taught that women have intuition, that we are the softer people, that we have empathy, that we're natural mothers, and blah blah blah.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think all of that is bullshit, actually.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But empathy does not exist in a vacuum.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Women are raised inside a culture that reinforces certain messages over and over.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Be patient, be understanding, relationship take work, don't give up on people.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Love means sacrifice, keep the peace, all of that nonsense.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not taught to be selfish like the men are.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: We aren't.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, but we're not.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're taught to get what they want, and if something isn't served, then moving along, not really thinking about the consequences.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is very different.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: I can't speak for being a youngster right now.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have several in my brood of five boys, and I learn a lot from them.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm the old as shit, obviously, but I believe that we're still not fully there to where we're not conditioned this way.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: I can say as a 50 plus person, I certainly and these ideas they are woven through everything, through religion, family systems, media, social expectations.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when something in a relationship starts to feel wrong, most women don't jump to this dynamic is harmful, I'm off.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: They jump to, oh, how do I fix this?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make it better?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: What do I need to do differently?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: How can I help this person out and not hurt their feelings?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that conditioning runs so deep.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I did not realize how deep until I had to peel off layers of calcified patriarchal bullshit, frankly, in my 40s.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when you combine it with coercive control, where the abuser is slowly teaching you the price of your resistance, it becomes extremely difficult to see clearly from inside that relationship.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: You learn to manage them, you learn to anticipate their moods, what triggers their conflict or their abuse or their anger or their shaming of you, their guilting of you, and you learn how to just smooth things over.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because it makes you feel powerful, it's because it's the path of least harm.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And your nervous system is literally designed to keep you safe and keep you alive.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So of course it's going to do that.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it pisses me off so much when I hear people talking about reactive abuse, which doesn't fucking exist, by the way.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's just your nervous system trying to protect you in an abusive situation.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that feeds the wasted years, grief, I think, is comparison.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: When you look around at other people's lives and think, oh, look how they've moved forward, they've built families, they've figured it out, they've built careers, and suddenly you feel like you're starting from scratch in midlife like a fucking loser.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that comparison is deceptive, I promise.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're comparing your internal story with someone else's external presentation.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we all know that is very different.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know what compromises they've made, you don't know what dynamics they tolerate, you don't know what their private reality really looks like.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: None of us do.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, life doesn't follow one neat timeline.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's all over the place shit show.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And something interesting often happens after survivors move through this grief.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's an awareness of lost time.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't only bring sadness, it also creates a really strong desire to live differently.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that makes me really just in awe every time, honestly.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I always have an inkling of what my clients are going to do when they emerge the other side, you know, just how they're gonna be, how their energy is gonna feel, how they're gonna be different.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And every time it surpasses even my expectations.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I love it so much.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: People are incredible.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to drift anymore.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: They want to, they don't want to sleep, walk through their days, they don't want to organize their lives around someone else's fucking and there is this hunger to squeeze the juice out of life, to make choices consciously and for themselves, by the way, and to get to know themselves on an intimate level of everything they have might have repressed, everything they might not have thought they could access.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: They want to protect their time, they want to protect their peace, they want to have discernment and apply that discernment to everything in their life.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like the marry condo thing, where if it doesn't spark joy, get it the fuck away.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a bad motive for life.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so that same grief that it once felt like proof that life was wasted, it ends up becoming more like the fuel, the reason they refuse to waste another moment.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And also, let's talk about the system.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because another shift that really helps survivors relieve some of release some of that shame is understanding the system they were inside.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: You will never find me not talking about this on a daily basis.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ask anyone that knows me, they will tell you, even my kids, this they take make fun of me all the time because I am constantly talking about this.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Coercive control is not random.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Manipulation follows patterns.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Patriarchal conditioning shapes relationship expectations in ways many women never examine until something breaks, or they see something that's now emerging on social media, which I'm glad about.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're having these conversations out loud now.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start seeing those systems clearly, something definitely changes inside.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always reminding people of this because our go-to as empathetic people is what's wrong with me?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: We always ask, what's wrong with me?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: What did I do?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you start asking, what was I navigating instead?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't erase the grief, of course, but it does remove that layer of self-blame that so many of us carry.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: What was I navigating?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: What systems was I immersed in to where I did not see that this was wholly unfair, wholly horrific for me and all my kids.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we have enough of the self-blame and the blame put on us for things that it seems a very perpetrator-centered world.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So any guilt you could strip from yourself would be lovely.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: When you look back at your past self, you're looking with new knowledge, I hope.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you have gone through this and you've got to the stage that we're talking about here, you have like a new language, you have a new clarity, and your past self just didn't have that yet.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So she was navigating that system in real time with limited information, severely under-resourced in it right there, inside a dynamic designed to keep her confused.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: She deserves compassion, not punishment.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: She survived something that was so difficult to see clearly from the inside, and still she eventually got out.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: What a fucking badass.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And if you find yourself grieving the years you spent in a relationship that drains you, I want you to take a breath right now.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because those years mattered.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: They are not wasted.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: They shaped you.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: You literally couldn't have known anything you know now without them.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: They taught you things you might not have learned any other way.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry that we live in this world where it seems pain is the biggest teacher.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I gather, if you're an enlightened society like the Toltex, that's not the way.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: But right now, that's how we are.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And everything brought you to the moment where you finally saw clearly.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: So in my mind, there are no wasted years in the sense people often think of them as.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would say actually probably better in the long run, more high definition because of the depth of understanding you now have.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to take heed of this or just to give you a little inspiration if you're still in that yucky phase, at some point you will emerge and you will understand that this next bit is where it gets to be amazing.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna leave it there.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: But as always, if you want to ask me a question and have me make an episode answering your question about your personal situation or any general questions, I love to do that.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be getting back in there.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got some life updates for you too in future episodes.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you're all doing well, and I'm sending you loads of love.