Two Santa Clarita grief counseling experts are talking about the grief that comes from being abused by others, with one of the women sharing her personal journey with physical, verbal and sexual abuse as a child.

Sharon Brubaker, a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist and host of “The Grief Recovery Hour” on KHTS, invited her mentor and fellow Certified Grief Recovery Specialist Sandi Atmore to the show to discuss the connection between abuse and grief in a very personal way.

“I think a lot of times in society, we don’t attach the word ‘grief’ with abuse,” Brubaker said. “We know as Grief Recovery Specialists, you can grieve someone who is living or deceased and any situation in life.”

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Atmore seconded this, adding, “When we hear the words abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, we think of the word trauma and we think of somebody being traumatized, which is true. What we don’t then equate to it is that there is grief in trauma. I’ve lost something, right? Grief means I am responding to a loss of any kind.”

Growing up, Atmore was physically, verbally and sexually abused by a number of male family members, with her main abuser being her father. Despite what she described as the “chaos and pain” all around her, she noted that the rest of her family pretended nothing was wrong.

“I really took that and internalized it, and then I went out into my own life and I really perpetuated a lot more self destruction,” she said.

For Atmore, this meant using alcohol and drugs to mask her pain, which culminated with a nearly four-year addiction to methamphetamine.

“In 2005, I walked away from meth, which is miraculous,” she said. “But even though I had walked away and I wasn’t using anymore, and there’s a miracle in that, my heart was still broken. You see, even though I had not experienced death … I had experienced so many losses. I grew up and I lost safety and trust and purity and innocence and control and identity. I didn’t know who I was, and I had stuffed all those things and blocked them out and pretended like they didn’t happen, and I had just lost me in all of it.”

Because meth had been a way of coping with the pain from her childhood, this pain resurfaced when Atmore stopped using, and she said she didn’t know what to do with it — until a friend suggested the Grief Recovery program.

“I went into the process of Grief Recovery being one of those people that was so disconnected and so not able to connect to my life, and just not even able to really make sense of what I was feeling. I just knew I was in a lot of pain,” Atmore recalled. “I went in just thinking, it’s not going to help me. But then I ended up going through the process and on the other side, I felt like boulders just got lifted off my shoulders, and so it was the start of a very different life for me.”

Though Atmore started out thinking the majority of her recovery would be centered around working through pain associated with her abusive relationship with her father, she realized she had a lot of unresolved pain related to her mother as well.   

“My mother never laid a hand on me. I don’t really remember her raising her voice, and if she did, it was nonthreatening,” Atmore said. “But my mother didn’t protect me. There were all these horrible things that happened that my mother just pretended as if they weren’t happening. I had a lot of pain in that relationship, a lot of conflict because I loved my mother and I looked at her as this really generous, amazing person. And yet this person who I was much more attached to than my father had completely failed me.”

Atmore started her recovery process addressing her pain related to this relationship, and went on to “complete” many other relationships over the next few years.

“When people interact with me and see me, they can’t believe what I have walked through. They cannot believe that I was a meth addict,” she said. “I believe a large part of that is because somebody saw that there was unresolved grief in my heart. I think otherwise, I would have been left kind of half healed.”

Atmore concluded, “(Grief Recovery) completely changed my world.”

Santa Clarita grief counseling expert Sharon Brubaker has over 11 years of experience as a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist. The grief counseling expert specializes in the Grief Recovery Method in Santa Clarita, and offers an 8-week education program that she teaches in person, utilizing her free eBook titled “Grief Recovery.” As a grief counseling expert, Santa Clarita residents dealing with loss or other unfinished business who desire a lasting change can be guided on their journey of pain to find healing in their lives.

Sharon Brubaker

Certified Grief Recovery Specialist

27772 Avenue Scott

Valencia, CA 91355

661-212-0720

Sharon Brubaker, Valencia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdg7EkW3aII

Grief, Santa Clarita Grief Counseling, Grief Counseling, Grief Recovery, Recovery, Sharon Brubaker, Dealing with Loss, Unfinished Business