Heal Within with Dr. Evette Rose

When the Abuser Dies: Grief, Anger, and Release + Meditation

• Dr. Evette Rose • Season 15 • Episode 7

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⚠️ Trigger Warning: This episode discusses parental abuse, emotional trauma, and the death of an abusive parent. Please take care while listening.

How do you mourn a parent who was never safe? How do you grieve someone who caused you harm?

Six years ago, when my father passed away, I faced a loss layered with trauma. My father was a clinically diagnosed sociopath, an abusive alcoholic, and a man who weaponized religion. He left wounds instead of warm memories, yet when I was called to make his end-of-life decisions, I had to meet him where he was—not by abandoning my boundaries, but by finding a language that could bridge our broken connection.

Psychologists call this ambiguous grief—grieving not the person themselves, but the relationship that never truly existed. It’s a complicated, isolating experience rarely acknowledged in our cultural conversations about loss. Neuroscience shows that our brains stay tethered to the hope of repair, which explains why so many adult children of abusive parents keep seeking resolution—even when they know it won’t come.

In this episode, I share what liberation looked like for me. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t understanding. It was the quiet power of releasing the lifelong fantasy that one day he would apologize, one day he would change. His death closed the door on that waiting, and with it, I discovered a new kind of sovereignty: compassion with boundaries.

This conversation is for anyone navigating complicated grief: whether you’re mourning an abuser, an addict, a narcissist, or simply someone who couldn’t love you the way you needed. Your grief is valid. Your healing belongs to you. And peace doesn’t depend on anyone else’s transformation.

✨ Inside this episode:

  • What “ambiguous grief” really means—and why it’s rarely talked about
  • How unresolved childhood trauma rewires the nervous system and complicates grief
  • Why compassion with boundaries is a radical act of self-liberation
  • A guided meditation to support your own healing journey

Have you experienced this kind of grief? Share your story or reach out—I’d love to hear from you. You are not alone in this journey toward emotional freedom.

Support the show

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Heal Within, here with me, Dr. Evette Rose, trauma therapist and also creator of Metaphysical Anatomy Technique, and this podcast is going to be your safe place to explore emotional healing, nervous system repair and as well as a deep inner transformation. And if you are ready to go deeper and you would like to be supported in your journey, you can, of course, always book a one-on-one session with me or with any of my certified metapsychology coaching practitioners, and also you can join one of our upcoming live healing events and workshops or retreats at metaphysicalanatomycom. Now let's begin your journey back to wholeness and also one breath, one breakthrough at a time. And today we walk into a topic that's raw, complex and really rarely spoken about with honesty. And really rarely spoken about with honesty how do you grieve someone who hurt you? How do you grieve a parent that was never safe? This episode is for those who have lived through the ache of a very complicated goodbye, and it's for those also who have reckoned with the death of someone who maybe didn't love you in the way that you need it, or who actively hurt you, and yet you still find yourself unraveling that grief. But it's a different kind of grief, or is it? You see, it's that space between pain and attachment and it's also where trauma psychology meets real life. And I'm also going to be talking with you here today about my story, because there are stories that we live through that never really truly make it into the light, not because we necessarily want to hide them, but because of the complexity of truth, and often it doesn't fit into these clean lines that people would expect us to tell our story. And it's one of those stories for me.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I lost my father years ago. I wouldn't even say years, I mean it's quite recent, it was about five. Father years ago, I wouldn't even say years, it's quite. I mean, it's quite recent, it's about five, six years ago. And I grieved. I absolutely grieved, yes, but not in the way that most people would imagine a daughter would grieve her father.

Speaker 1:

You see, my father was not a safe man and he was a clinically diagnosed sociopath on top of that. Now, thank God, I didn't have a lot of exposure with him. He was always in the pubs and the clubs and drinking. If I did see him, it was very short bursts and moments of interaction because his priority was out in the pubs, always somewhere wherever there's alcohol. You see, he was a very volatile and emotionally and mentally abusive person, a very abusive alcoholic and self-medicated drug addict, and he weaponized religion. And he weaponized religion, really toting the Bible like in one hand while using the other to inflict violence on people who trusted him the most.

Speaker 1:

You see, as for most of my life, love and pain were literally weaved together in a way that left a lot of deep wounds, a lot of deep wounds, and especially in my nervous system, and for years I kept my distance, holding my boundaries that were necessary for my survival and also for my healing, and he hated my work. You know, when I started to share my voice, publicly, writing, teaching, standing for holistic healing, he clapped back. He sent very abusive emails to my staff, attacking me on social media, and he really tried to undermine my credibility, insulting the very essence of what I stood for. But, what was interesting, he never attacked my truth, and especially my truth when I spoke of him. It's interesting how he attacked videos and comments about, maybe, religion or God, but he didn't touch the ones where I talked about my childhood. Now, despite that, it's going to be a conversation for another day. I mean, that's a whole nother episode, probably, but despite all of that, the rejection, it ran deep. It ran so deep so when the hospital called me six months before he passed, asking me if I would take over you know the person who would sign and make decisions on his behalf, because I was the only person that he listed on his next of kin, no one else, no one else. He was, even at that point, kicked out of a church and he was not allowed. They had a restraining order. You know from the priest I mean he was, he was quite a force to be reckoned with.

Speaker 1:

And I froze, I froze. My first instinct was no, no, why me? Why now, after all these years of silence, no contact, why now, after everything? Why can it just be someone else? There has to be someone else that can take care of all of this. But for some reason, something in me just paused and I took a deep breath. And I took a deep breath, a really long, painful breath, and I heard this whisper, and of course that was my inner voice, and it said be fix the past, not to force forgiveness but to be at peace with who I was becoming. Because until that phone call came, I realized I wasn't fully at peace. I thought I was but I wasn't.

Speaker 1:

And I want to share now with you what I learned from that journey. You know what I learned from those final months? Because my father was never going to step into my world. He couldn't going to step into my world, he couldn't. His trauma, his neurological wiring, his perception of life, it all kept him locked inside of this framework that I couldn't get him out of and I couldn't talk him out of it.

Speaker 1:

But I had the capacity to stretch just enough to meet him where he was, and that didn't mean betraying myself. It didn't mean matching him, not in his chaos, not in the pain, but in language, in reference points that made sense to him. You see, he was Christian, I was raised Christian, and he carried the Bible everywhere he went and even if he never truly embodied the message which he didn't he knew the verses. I knew the verses because I had to read that Bible for hours on end as punishment, so I knew the rhythm of the scripture, I knew it and so I started to speak to him through that lens. I started to share Bible verses with him. We talked about redemption, we spoke about grace, not the feel-good kind, but the kind that survives war zones of the soul.

Speaker 1:

And something remarkable happened. I'll never forget this. This is a permanent timestamp in my past. For the first time in my life, my father listened, he softened, he even responded with something other than rage and that toxic dismissal, with insults, like saying really bad words to me. This was the first real conversation I'd ever had with him. No yelling, no threats, no manipulation. No yelling, no threats, no manipulation. Just two human beings standing on this destruction and this ruins of basically a broken relationship. It's almost like trying to reach across to each other, trying to connect. And for a brief moment, we did. We did.

Speaker 1:

You see, people often ask me how did you find peace with a man like that? And the truth is I didn't look for it, I didn't wait for it, I chose it. And I mean I forecasted the future and I asked myself what do I want to live with? And I saw a version of myself that no longer was carrying the weight of resentment, and I envisioned a life where my inner child didn't have to keep chasing the weight of resentment, and I envisioned a life where my inner child didn't have to keep chasing the ghost of a father that she never really had.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to be able to say that I did everything that I could within integrity to heal, and that meant showing up in the present moment differently. I had to let go of waiting for that apology that was never going to come. I had to stop making peace conditional on his transformation or his capacity to transform. I had to stop telling myself that meeting him halfway meant abandoning who I was, because it didn't. It actually meant stepping into a higher version of myself. It meant choosing clarity over pride. It meant embracing wisdom over righteousness.

Speaker 1:

And so many people resist connection, even compassion, out of fear that it will cost them their power. But let me tell you, when it's done with discernment, with boundaries, with intention, matching someone in that way is not a weakness. It became my strength. It's the kind of empowerment that comes from being grounded in your truth, while still creating space for someone else's humanity, however broken it may be. And this wasn't about compromise, it was about sovereignty. And sometimes the most powerful healing is found in that well, at least for me, in that quiet decision to show up differently, not because they deserve it, but because you do.

Speaker 1:

You see, when my father did come to pass, I grieved, but it's not the type of grief that I was expecting. I didn't grieve for the man that he was. I didn't grieve the memories of love or safety or warmth, because those things never existed between us. But what I did grieve was the father that I never got to have. I grieved the fantasy of who he could have been. I grieved the loss of hope that, now that he's passed, the chance at least for him to change has now passed as well. I agree for that little girl in me who didn't have everything after all of this and I held on to that last, last, last thread of hope that just maybe I, maybe one day he will change.

Speaker 1:

And for anyone else listening today, if you had an abusive parent, or you still have, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm very sure that this will bring true for you, because that one day that he would, you know, just look me in the eyes and just say I'm sorry. You know that day that he would say that I'm proud of you. It never came and now it's gone. So when he died, it wasn't just a life that ended, but it was a real, true final closing door that I kept open my whole life and I didn't realize it until the day that he passed, and for me it felt like the death of potential, the death of hope and that more that for me that that was how can I say it's like more than the loss of his physical presence, right, and that is what really hit me and it hit me hard.

Speaker 1:

You see, when we look at also the psychology of this, this is known as um, they call it. What is it? Ambiguous grief, there it is. It's like a type of grief that doesn't stem from mourning someone who gave us love and security, but more from mourning the relationship that we should have had. It's the pain of what never was. It's the pain of what never was. And because there is no real, true shared narrative around this kind of grief, it often goes unacknowledged. And if I should say this, maybe this is too much, maybe this is too raw, and then the other side of me is like, well, yvette, this is all about being real, it's about being human, it's about normalizing pain that we went through in the past. Many of you probably know my work, but no, I stand very strong in that and I took a deep breath and I made this episode because I'm not the only person going through this Because if you're, for example, maybe grieving someone who caused you harm and your heart still breaks in ways that logic and words just cannot explain, I mean this kind of grief is compounded by what trauma experts also call.

Speaker 1:

It's called, like that, chronic invalidation. It's that prolonged absence of attuned connection, emotional safety and unconditional love. Because when a parent consistently fails to show up in ways that meet the child's emotional needs, it creates that attachment theory that refers to the insecure or the disorganized attachment. And in this state a child doesn't learn to trust the world or themselves. They often become, you know, hypervigilant, anxious or emotionally numb, and patterns that are carried into adulthood and neuroscience it confirms this Children raised in emotionally abusive and neglectful environments.

Speaker 1:

They show lasting changes in brain structure and function. The amygdala, that brain's threat detector, becomes overactive, keeping the nervous system on constant high alert. Prefrontal cortex this helps to regulate emotions and make sense of experiences. This is struggling to override those survival-based reactions. The anterior cingulate cortex that's associated with empathy and error detection. That can become greatly dysregulated, making it so much harder to trust, connect and also self-soothe. But perhaps also most painfully is the reward system of the brain, particularly the nucleus accumbens.

Speaker 1:

This remains tied to the hope of that relational repair. This is why so many adult children of abusive parents keep reaching out, even years after mistreatment, even years after mistreatment. You see, the brain is wired for attachment and it's going to keep searching for that resolution, for a corrective experience, for a version of love that never fully arrives. And it's because of that part of the biology it keeps looking for that attachment. That's why I made the decision to connect with him, but not according to my values and beliefs, but in a way that I knew I would get through to him.

Speaker 1:

You see so, when my father passed, my nervous system experienced not just that loss but this long-held wired emotions, memories, all of this collapse with that long-held expectation and that inner child who had waited decades for that validation, suddenly had nowhere to go. There was nowhere to anchor in and attach that hope to. And that, more than anything, it broke me wide open, not his death, but the realization that he would never come, will become at least that father that I always needed, and that the healing that I longed for is not going to come from him, it was going to come from me. And yet, even acknowledging this, you know grieving not just the man, but the myth. It really became such an important part of my healing journey that you know I had to grieve this with eyes wide open.

Speaker 1:

I had to feel the depth of that abandonment so that I could stop trying to rewrite the past, so that I can start choosing a future that's not bound by it anymore, so that I can start connecting and choosing people that are healthier for me and not going to be, hopefully, the mirror of that perfect father that I never had. And this is what it means to grieve what never was. It is the grief that also liberates us, not because it brings closure, but because it clears space for something new Self-parenting, inner safety and a peace that is no longer dependent on someone else, finally changing. And that, let me tell you, while that was painful, it was also the beginning of emotional freedom, the kind of freedom where I can take a deep breath, where my chest and my lungs feel open and peaceful and not constricted.

Speaker 1:

And what I know now is that I can absolutely tell you if you've lost someone who hurt you, if you're maybe in the middle, or it's in the past, of grieving an abuser, an addict, a narcissist, a parent who simply just couldn't love you well. Know this your grief is valid, even if it's a mess, even if it feels like more relief than sorrow, even if you're grieving the dream and not the person. And if you feel that you are faced with a choice to show up in the final stretch of their life, do it for you, not to fix them, not to prove anything, not hoping for something, because if you do, that final moment is going to be a thousand times more painful. Because you deserve a life where you are free. And I can see that now with crystal clarity, standing now on the other side of it. And if you're not standing on the other side of it, and if you're not standing on the other side of it yet, let me tell you it's worth it To be free from that regret, from that rage, from the change of what could have been matching someone you know, meeting them on their terms through their lenses.

Speaker 1:

It's not a weakness For me, personally speaking. It was a strategy. It was a strategy to find a way for both of us to connect. It's compassion with boundaries, Passion with boundaries. It's also turning towards peace, without judgment, without demanding that others join you there, especially demanding that from someone who don't have that capacity, and I don't know if my father found peace I don't, but I did, and that is something that I really truly can say, that not even him can ever take from me again. And this was a final moment where I painfully and silently called my power back. And so, for those of you who are still here with me, I actually would love to do a powerful healing meditation for you.

Speaker 1:

And if this touched you, if you're really feeling this, stay with me in this meditation, because it's going to be so healing. When you are ready, take a nice deep breath, finding yourself just noticing as you're exhaling, finding yourself gently coming into the body. I invite you to know that this is also your safe place, your sacred space to grieve, and grieve honestly, gently, in your own way. And if you have lost someone who hurt you, if the person who passed was also the person who caused you pain, or they maybe are about to, or you know that they will soon, this meditation is for you. I invite yourself now to be comfortable. You can sit up, lie down, whatever you feel most comfortable with, finding yourself gently, closing your eyes and, as you do, feeling yourself really going within and taking a nice deep breath in and exhale completely, inhale deeply Again, breathe in and exhale. Exhale Feeling your shoulders dropping, feeling your body fully held and supported by the surface beneath you. That's safe support Fully held right now and feeling that you are safe. Right now, you are no longer in the past, you're no longer in survival mode. You are now in present mode, right here, right now.

Speaker 1:

I invite you now Gently bringing your awareness to your heart space, to the center of your chest. You may feel warmth, tightness and even numbness. Whatever is here, allow it to be. I invite you now To speak to that part of you that never got what you needed, that little one inside of you that longed for a parent's love or safety or tenderness. Breathe into that space and allow these next words, these affirmations, to land gently and softly. I grieve not just the person, but the promise that was never fulfilled. That was never fulfilled. I honor the little one inside of me who waited and hoped and tried. Instead of silencing that inner child, embrace that part of you. I release the hope that they will never become who I needed them to be. I invite you to imagine that this pressure, the weight of that, is just releasing from your feet down, down, down, down, down, down, down to the core of the earth being neutralized and healed.

Speaker 1:

I choose peace and self-compassion now I'm allowed to feel pain and relief. My feelings are valid, even if they don't make sense to others. I give all that love that I longed for now to myself. I am reparenting my heart with compassion and grace. My grief is valid, my healing is sacred and I'm free to move forward. Now I invite you to take a nice deep breath in and exhale all that heaviness out. Exhale it out, out, out out, remembering there's nothing wrong with you. There's no timeline for grief, especially grief that has no name. I invite you now to bring one hand and place it on your heart and the other hand on your stomach. Feel the warmth of your own touch. You are here, you are present, you are alive and your story, it's still being written. Allowing yourself to take a few more breaths, breathing in peace.

Speaker 1:

Allowing yourself to take a few more breaths, breathing in peace, breathing out expectations, letting your body know that it's now safe to rest, really, truly rest, and I invite you now, as you are there, to imagine your future, wiser self coming into that space, there where you are yourself coming into that space, there, where you are Seeing that part of you who is healed, who has mastered all these emotions, that part of you that's standing there, walks, solid, strong, and noticing how that part of you is also comforting you, supporting you right now, and seeing this moment as confirmation and validation that you are supported, that you are a powerful ally and source of love and support for yourself as well. It's a part of you that you can always go back to when you feel vulnerable, when you have questions, maybe when you feel stressed or upset. This is your place. It's a powerful place to be in. Your place. It's a powerful place to be in. And now I invite you to hear, feel, see or sense a beautiful white light flowing from your head down your whole body, your future. There with you, feeling this healing light, soothing every part of your body, soothing any of that old grief that might be there, resolving and dissolving that grief, resolving and dissolving, resolving and dissolving that grave, resolving and dissolving, resolving and dissolving. Very good. And while that white healing light is flowing over you, and while that white healing light is flowing over you, let's now also do a little bit of breath work and we'll gently be breathing in the mouth, out the nose, 13 times the last breath. You'll hold as long as you feel comfortable and feel how your nervous system is gently going to reset. And taking note also, perhaps by the seventh to the eighth breath you might start to feel a little bit dizzy. That's perfectly normal. And when we are ready, I invite you, when you start to breathe which I will count for you breathe into the area where you feel the sadness the most and then, from that area, exhale that sadness. Let's start.

Speaker 1:

Nice deep breath in the mouth, out the nose, in the mouth, out the nose. Breathe in the mouth, out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth, out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose. Breathe in the mouth and out the nose, out the nose. Breathe in the mouth, nice deep breath and hold your breath as long as you feel comfortable, just dropping into that dizziness but at the same time feeling this wave of peace and stillness coming over you and just allowing yourself to be with that just a little bit longer.

Speaker 1:

Just be with it Very good very good and just notice in that moment how you're also feeling the surface beneath your body, feeling fully supported by that surface, fully present in the here and now, fully present in your safe place and space Very good. And when you are ready, knowing now, when you open your eyes, you will look at the world through the eyes of someone who's healing, who is strong and who's grieving in a different way, and it's perfectly okay. When you're ready, who's grieving in a different way, and it's perfectly okay. When you're ready, giving yourself a nice big stretch and gently opening your eyes and welcome back. And when you are ready, give yourself a nice big hug, just a nice big hug. Well done, well done for being here with me until the very end, and also our affirmation for today. I love myself enough to let go and if you know a friend or someone who might benefit from this hearing this, maybe they will find a moment of healing as well, or aha moment, please do share it with them and I look forward to seeing you in my next episode. I love you and until then, be the light that you are. Bye everyone.

Speaker 1:

This was probably the most emotional and difficult podcast episode that I have ever made, and this is a trigger warning I do talk about the death of my father and also speaking for those who lost a loved one who was an abuser. How do we grieve someone that's done nothing but hurt you? This is a different type of grief, and if this is you, or maybe you know a loved one that's going through this, it might be a good idea to join me for this episode, to learn and understand. What does the other side of grief look like?