Survivor Insights: The Grief After Abuse No One Talks About
The Survivor Insights series brings you the voices of survivors themselves. These words come from many who have shared their experiences openly, often for the first time, across my social media pages.
When someone finally leaves an abusive relationship, the people around them often expect them to feel free. What many survivors feel instead is grief, and nobody tells them that is coming. It is layered and complicated, and it can feel disorienting even to the person going through it. It can sit alongside relief. It can be present even when you know leaving was the right decision.
This grief is about what was believed, what was hoped for, and what was lost along the way. People expect grief to mean you miss someone who was good to you, and that is rarely how survivors describe this. The grief arrives for a relationship that caused harm, for a person who may never have been who you believed them to be, and for a future that was never truly possible.
These are the voices of survivors who describe what that grief really feels like.
Grieving What Should Have Been
For many, the deepest grief is for the life they believed they were building, the future they had planned, the relationship they thought they were in.
“It’s only when you’re finally apart from them that you grieve the loss of what should have been. All the hopes and dreams you once had, destroyed by an entity who never cared for you, however many years you wasted with them.”
“It’s common for people to believe that when you leave an abusive relationship, you feel nothing but relief. It’s not true. I know I am not on my own in saying that all I felt initially was overwhelming grief. I grieved the relationship I never really had, the dreams that were never fulfilled, the love that was never real.”
“I grieved what I had hoped my marriage would be and for my children who wouldn’t have the family they deserved.”
“It felt like losing a future, not just a person.”
“I missed the life I thought we were building, even though I knew it was never going to happen.”
“I didn’t just lose him, I lost the version of my life where everything finally worked out.”
“I had planned my whole future around us. Letting go of him meant letting go of all of it.”
“It was a strange, complicated grief that made me feel like I was going backwards when really, I was moving forward.”
This grief is rarely understood by people on the outside. It can look like you are mourning something that was not real, but you lived inside it. You built your decisions, your identity, and your sense of the future around it. Leaving means letting go of an entire hoped-for life, and that is a real and significant loss.
