Why Couples Need to Grieve and Mourn to Facilitate Betrayal Trauma Healing & Addiction Recovery w/ Jake Porter

Narrator: This is Pathway to Recovery, an SA Lifeline Foundation podcast featuring hosts Tara McCausland, who is the SA Lifeline Executive Director, and Justin B., a sex addict living in long-term recovery. We have conversations with experts and individuals who understand the pathway to healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma because we believe that recovering individuals leads to the healing of families.

Tara McCausland: Hey friends, before we get started, a couple of things. First, I'm so excited about our upcoming 2024 SA Lifeline Conference. This is a fully virtual event. It will take place from September 26th to the 28th via this platform called Whova. And over these 3 days, we'll focus on healing from unwanted sexual behavior, betrayal trauma, and also focus on healing couples and families. So there will be 15 qualified speakers. You'll have a chance to participate on community boards, ask questions before and during live Q&As, download worksheets and slides, fill out surveys, join in polls.

It, it will be awesome. This isn't just an educational event, it's an interactive experience. It's designed to build a supportive community, And really help propel you in your healing journey. So we hope you will go and register at salifeline.org. There you can see the full agenda along with the speakers and their presentation topics. And we hope to see you there. What's exciting is our guest expert today is actually going to be one of our headliner speakers.

His name is Jake Porter. And Dr. Jake Porter is a board-certified counselor. He's also a certified sex addiction therapist supervisor. Certified Multiple Addiction Therapist, APSAT Certified Clinical Partner Specialist, and Certified Daring Way Facilitator. He is also the creator of a couple-centered recovery model for treating attachment wounds of couples experiencing the trauma of betrayal. He's worked with couples from around the world who have traveled to Houston for treatment of severe attachment injuries and relational trauma. Jake lives in Houston with his wife, Kristen, and daughters Magnolia Jane, And Lottie Jo.

Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery Podcast. I am your host, Tara McCausland, and I'm really very excited to have here with me Dr. Jake Porter. Thank you so much, Jake, for coming on.

Jake Porter: Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Really glad to be here.

Tara McCausland: I'm fangirling a little bit. I don't want to make it— I've listened to a lot of Jake's stuff and really grateful for the excellent work that you're doing in this field, especially for betrayed partners.

Jake Porter: Oh, thank you. It's great to be here and just get to give back as well. So thank you.

Tara McCausland: Well, you're very involved with APSATS, and we're big fans of APSATS here at SA Lifeline. Do you want to just tell our listeners what is APSATS? How— what is the— what does that stand for?

Jake Porter: Yeah, that long acronym. APSATS is the Association for Partners of Sex Addict Trauma Specialists. It's a nonprofit that was formed back in, I want to say, '08 or '09. And yeah, I get to host the APSATS podcast, Betrayal Recovery Radio, and I'm on the board of APSATS and just a big supporter and promoter as well.

Tara McCausland: And actually, Barbara Steffens, who was the founder of, right? She was one of our early guests and kind of a fun side note, has the most downloads of all time on the Pathway to Recovery podcast. Her episode is very popular and What we'll be discussing today goes right along the lines of what we have been discussing in a previous episode, which was when we've discovered betrayal, the first thing we want to do is establish safety and stabilization.

That's part of the APSATS model. If you don't mind sharing, what are the stages or phases of healing for the betrayed partner?

Jake Porter: Yeah, so there are 3 phases of healing in the APSATS model. So APSATS calls its model the Multidimensional Partner Trauma Model. It was, it was born from the research of Dr. Barb Steffens and, and is based on a wider frame used for trauma of various sorts, first articulated, I think, by Judith Herman. So the 3 phases are first safety and stability. So like you were just saying, beginning there, getting safety and stability. Once that is in place, the second phase is grief and mourning.

And And then the final phase is really about renewal. Looking forward, it's really that phase where post-traumatic growth begins to flourish. Yeah.

Tara McCausland: Awesome. And so what I wanted Jake to tell us a little bit more about today was this, the second stage or phase, grief and mourning. And I actually had another APSATS fellow on, Dan Drake, on a previous episode. And he said that this is a stage that we often either pass over, like just skip entirely, regularly, or we just don't spend enough time there. Yeah. And I thought that was an interesting remark. And I was curious from your experience, why, why is grief and mourning so important in our healing?

And, and what are maybe some of the consequences for not addressing this stage?

Jake Porter: Yeah, well, I think it is so critical. The way I say it often, so people who have listened to me before, they're gonna Sad. This is going to sound really familiar, is that grief is where the healing happens. So the reason why it's critical is because it is the process whereby we are healing. To try to circumvent that or to, to rush it is to try to circumvent or rush the actual healing process itself, which is not going to pay off in the end.

Clinically, Grief is where we are basically reformulating something that, that's called our assumptive reality or our assumptive world. Okay. The world as we assume it to be. That is a really difficult process. You know, we think about grief normally, we think about like losing, losing someone, right? Losing a loved one, a mother, a grandparent, a father, whatever, a child. Yeah. God forbid. And, you know, I, like, a few years ago, I lost my grandmother, who I was very, very close to.

And it was, it was so difficult in the couple of months after her, her loss for us to go through the holidays because it was like, how do we even do this? How do we do Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas and New Year's without grandmother, right? Who's gonna, who's gonna make the crab rolls and who's gonna make the pumpkin, you know, pie and who, right? And it's, it's not about the food. It's that for my whole life, she played such a, such a part of that process.

It was hard to imagine it without her. Right. And, and so for someone who's been betrayed, what's been lost is my history, the storyline that I knew, the, the story of us as I understood it to be, my sense of security with you, my place with you. And now I— grief is going to mean I now need to actually figure out what is this world in light of this loss. I can't heal. I can't get to the other side of healing if I don't go through that process.

Tara McCausland: I know you've likened, like, experiencing betrayal to a death, to a bereavement. And something I was listening to, to prepare for this episode, you talked about something that I find very striking. When we grieve a real loss, like the death of a loved one, or when we're dealing with a major hardship, like going through cancer, we have the benefit of being able to share with those closest to us and with our community, right, what we're going through.

But betrayal is one of the most difficult things to go through because we often do it so isolated. Yes. Talk a little bit about that as a part of the grief stage, the challenges associated with that.

Jake Porter: Right. So I'm from the Houston area. Okay. Southeast Texas, down in the South in the Bible Belt. Right. And there is a very clear, very well-known, what we would call cultural script for when someone loses a loved one. Okay, I was, I was a pastor for 13 years and did a lot of funerals, right? Attended a lot of funerals down, down here in this part of the country, this neck of the woods, as we would say. You know, there's a, there's a clear cultural script for that, okay?

The person dies, within 3 to 5 days, usually the night, there's going to be a visitation, we call it down here. It's usually in one evening. The next day is usually A funeral service, right? Followed by a graveside service, followed by a meal, potluck meal back in the fellowship hall of the church. It's something that we take for granted. It really is. But it's something that's so important because it's like during this time where the loved ones are in shock, they're in bereavement, right?

Yeah. the grief has struck them, they don't have to decide what to do. Right. There's a cultural script that carries them along in community and moves them forward. And it carries all kinds of messages with it, all kinds of implications with it. And what it does is it really does initiate this grief process at that point. Well, there is no cultural script for the discovery of hidden betrayal, and and there's actually a term for this. It's called disenfranchised grief, right?

So disenfranchised grief is is grief where there is no place for the public mourning process. When there's a lot of reasons for that, from shame and fear to ignorance. There's just, there's so many reasons. Sometimes betrayed partners disenfranchise themselves because if this comes out, my husband might lose his job. If this comes out, we might lose our friends in our faith community, right? It's a huge complicating factor because the grief is still real, even if those cultural scripts are not in place to help.

Tara McCausland: That makes perfect sense. In recognizing that that's one of the challenges associated with betrayal. Hopefully, if the couple is choosing to stay together, the person that did the betraying, I hope that there's even where they're at as they're trying to work through their addiction, if there can be some empathy and an acceptance of my partner needs support and allowing them to go and find that support system in family members, safe family members, in groups, 12-step, etc.

But maybe before we go on, in fact, could you give some context for the betraying partner in all of this? Because if they're working on staying together in the relationship, how does a betraying partner take part in or support this stage of healing? Because they're the one that inflicted the wound. Right? Right. What does that look like?

Jake Porter: Yeah. So that's a great question. I want to, I want to answer that from 2 different angles, kind of looking at this through 2 different facets, if that's okay. The first one is really about, you know, looking at it just from the, the grief of the betrayed partner, okay, in which now the betraying partner is kind of on the outside. How can they come along? Well, I do think everything you just mentioned is important. Support them in finding community, support them in getting a care— a therapist, a coach, a a 12-step group, a partner support group, whatever that is, rather than that reactive, self-protective, don't tell because it's going to embarrass me.

I don't want my dirty laundry out there. This is my story to tell, not yours, which is baloney. And we can, we can get into that if we want to, but it's very much the story of the betrayed partner as well. And, and so yes, supporting that by by being open and then finding that community, but they can also be that support themselves. Even though they cause the hurting, they can participate in the healing. And in fact, there might be even a way in which they can participate in the healing that only they can fill.

We could do a whole episode just on this question, but a few things that come up there around that is number one, they have to be able to be present with their partner's pain without it triggering their shame and then going into their own shame. They have to be able to stay regulated. They have to be open and curious and not argumentative about their partner's perspective. They have to be able to show compassion and empathy. Right.

And I know that these things are difficult and I'm rattling it off like it's nothing. I don't— not trying to imply that it's easy by any means, because it's not. I know it's not. But it's possible. It's possible. But I said I wanted to answer this from 2 different angles or facets. The second facet is, I want to, want to almost challenge the premise of the question a little bit, because it's the— it's suggesting that she— I'm saying she as if she's the betrayed partner— is the one that's grieving.

And he is there to support her grief process. And the reality is, the betraying partner has their own process of grief. Yeah. Their assumptive world has also changed. Their reality has also changed. They too have to figure out, how do I live in this world in light of this loss? And it may be a loss that they welcome. They may find great relief sometimes in the fact that they've been found out or, or they've gotten through disclosure and they feel such like a sense of integrity that maybe they've never felt before in their entire lives because they're not holding any secrets like they have for decades and decades.

And that's great. They still have their own grief process. I'm really the couples guy on, on this scene in a lot of ways. And so as the couples guy, what I wanna say is like, it's not just her grief, it's his as well, and their shared grief. And if he can use her experience of grief to inform his awareness of his own, and I'll give an example. of this. I see this happen in my office all the time when I'm working with couples.

You know, she writes an emotionally focused impact letter and we help him stay grounded and present and really hear it and open himself to receive her words and to hear what she's saying. Suddenly he begins to recognize the depth of what his actions have done. And in that, he actually begins to feel empathy and he expresses, we help him actually express that empathy for her. And the empathy helps. It doesn't take it all away. It doesn't magically heal it forever, but it helps.

And he now has the felt experience of emotional connection and empathy in such a way that it supports his wife. And that feels so good for him. And now guess what wells up next? Wow, this is what I've been missing out on this whole time. And so it's his grief as well. Right. It's not just hers. I mean, I don't want to— I don't want to say it's exactly the same because he has wronged her. I want to be super clear.

There's been an injustice here. There's been a violation in, in one direction, from the betrayer to the betrayed. Okay. So that is true, but it is also true that he has his own grief to deal with, and they as a couple have a shared grief to deal with. What has this cost them together?

Tara McCausland: Yeah, I love that. And, you know, you're spot on. I mean, not that I'm surprised by that, Jake. But I think often we assume that the pain is of the trauma and the discovery is all being held by the betrayed partner. But in reality, we know that people who are suffering from addictive behaviors, that comes from a long history of likely trauma and other issues that are deep. And so there's so much pain on both sides.

And so I really appreciate you speaking to that so clearly. And, and I think it's good for the betrayed partner to recognize that as well. I mean, early on, it, it's hard to be able to acknowledge that the pain for him. But as you said, that as we can see each other's pain, that can inform the whole process and really expedite, I would imagine, the healing process for both. Yeah. So if, if we can go a little bit more into some of the important, like, terms and concepts to understand around grief and mourning, because I think we kind of culturally understand the, the concept of grief around, like, death or what it looks like when we're, we're suffering a great loss.

But put that in the context of, of betrayal and addiction for us and help us understand again the why behind Why we need to mourn and grieve this.

Jake Porter: Yeah, for sure. So there are several different terms that we can, we can get into here. One place that I like to start is distinguishing between grief and bereavement. Okay, so bereavement is the objective act of the loss itself. It is the death itself. Right? It is the discovery moment in which the story is lost, for example, right? It's an objective act. Grief then becomes the process whereby we are reacting to the bereavement. Okay? The bereavement is the loss itself.

So that moment of discovery when my timeline, my history, crumbles. And then I enter into grief as I begin to think that through and try to recognize what does that mean? Now, mourning is a third term that's important. And here we have that cultural response to grief and bereavement. And these are those rituals and these processes for coping, which we already mentioned earlier, disenfranchised grief, right? So disenfranchised grief is where that mourning process isn't available for whatever reason.

It either doesn't exist, or it would be too dangerous to engage, or some combination of that. But the reason why I think it's helpful to understand that the distinction between those things is because when a couple is going through this and they're, they're in this messy middle second phase of the healing process of grief and mourning, to begin to have terms and labels acts as like containers. Okay? So one thing I might do with a partner who's been betrayed or the one who's, who had committed the betrayal is let's actually itemize the bereavements, plural, that have been encountered here.

What, what are the objective acts? the objective losses that, that have occurred and start naming those things, right? And just being able to put a label to that, have a concept, have it— write that down, put a list to it— it begins to take this swirling chaos that's happening in this experience and, and bring a little order to it, right? Okay. And then, then with grief, all right, if I know that grief is a process, then it's not something I'm trying to like do right now today.

Like, okay, I need to grieve. All right, check 1, check 2, check 3, you know, here it is, and, and I'm gonna be done with it. But to understand I'm going to be in this for a while, I'm going to wander for a while. And then mourning, you know, one of the things that I do with couples around this concept of mourning, because there aren't a lot of cultural scripts for for grief around betrayal is create your own. If you can't find a community that has these scripts, and they do exist, there are good professionals out there, and there are some groups out there and programs out there that have thought this through.

But if you can't find one, and even if you do find one, you may still want to create your own. What would be a meaningful process for you? Is it, is it writing letters and burning it? Is it an art project? Is it finding a place? You know, I had one couple who would visit a graveyard. They've— it was a graveyard where, you know, no, no one they knew was buried there or anything like that. It just became a symbolic place where they would go and they would have certain conversations around what's been lost, right?

But creating these scripts, creating these rituals, okay, to help you cope and move along in the grief process can be a powerful way to continue moving forward in grief.

Tara McCausland: So as a therapist, I'm curious if you, if you think— I know you'll be biased here, but do you think that people can do this well without the instruction and direction of a therapist?

Jake Porter: This might surprise you. I actually do think some people probably can. Okay, some can. I don't think that's the norm. Okay, and there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that, to my knowledge, there aren't those cultural— like, who was taught how to deal with this? I wasn't, right? I was taught how to grieve and deal— I mean, somewhat. I was taught how to grieve and deal with the, you know, like, the loss of someone I loved.

I'm not saying someone sat me down and said, here's what you do, but I observed it, right? I, I Seen others do it. There's a bit of a, like, common knowledge of it, I guess, you know. But those things don't exist in, in this realm of grieving betrayal. So that's one reason why. The other reason why I think often people need support with this is because betrayal trauma is real. Okay. And this is, this is a soapbox I've been finding myself on for probably the last 8 to 10 months is it's, you know, Okay, people are starting to catch on that betrayal is traumatic.

Okay, this is more than, you know, a hard thing. This is trauma. Okay, well, if we're gonna call it trauma, trauma is a real thing, like actually doing damage to the brain. Like there's a real physical neurobiological correlate to this. So this isn't just some, some convenient concept, some convenient psychological this or that, whatever, right? It's, it's not. It's a real injury to the brain. If that's the case, then you probably need a qualified mental health worker coming alongside you for treatment.

Again, I'm not going to say 100% of the time that's the case, or that it's impossible to heal without it, because some people can and do. just because you can and do doesn't mean you don't deserve it, because we might at least be able to help you, you know, get through it, you know, in less time with fewer errors.

Tara McCausland: Well, great response there. And at Essay Lifeline, we're huge advocates of qualified therapy. And sometimes people are like, well, how do you qualify a therapist? What is a qualified therapist? And I like to remind people, if you go to our website, essaylifeline.org, we have a series of questions that you can download to ask a therapist so you can make sure that they have some specialized training in this. And we often like to tell people, you know, there are people, APSATs, CSATs, that we, that we would recommend you, you start with them.

Yeah. But yes, I agree that I think we tend to want to do things on our own for whatever reason, whether the reason be financial or we're just independent or we want to keep to ourselves and not spread our dirty laundry. But I think, I think you're right. I can't imagine this being done well without the guidance of someone who understands trauma.

Jake Porter: Right? Right. Right.

Tara McCausland: And I don't want to go off the beaten path here. But are you, are you seeing that we're backpedaling a little bit on an acceptance of betrayal trauma? And I, and how is that perhaps impacting how we're able to serve this population?

Jake Porter: I'm going to take one step back from that. This is really a matter of justice because by and large, this is not the case. And there are always exceptions, right? But by and large, if you look at the treatment that occurs after the discovery of betrayal, most of the resources, most of the time, and most of the attention go toward the one who is a sex addict or the one who committed the betrayal. Okay, so I mean there are dozens and dozens of programs now for chronic betrayers or sex addicts.

Dozens, right? Intensives and inpatient and residential and online programs and you know groups. I mean so so many. And though the number of programs available for betrayal trauma is increasing, it it still pales in comparison and still. Still, the default automatic reaction is whatever this man or woman needs to recover from their addiction and whatever they need to recover from, you know, these characterological issues that cause chronic betrayal, throw that there. And what's left over, we'll put that toward, uh, what the betrayed partner can do.

Here's my experience is that That actually ends up not being good for anybody because number one, and here my bias is going to come out real, real strong. And, you know, some of my colleagues aren't going to like what I'm about to say, but that's okay. They can, they can. That's okay. That's okay. Unfortunately, many of these programs for sex addicts or chronic betrayers, though they will now include a unit on betrayal trauma, or they will say, yeah, we're not going to Pathologize the partner, all this, and they may not in a direct way, but they're still going to instill a recovery paradigm that is a my side of the street, your side of the street way of viewing the recovery process.

And what what can happen then is now they've spent you know twenty thousand, thirty thousand, sixty thousand dollars. On helping someone get sober, which is great, but also getting them entrenched in a model that actually is going to leave the betrayed partner isolated on her own on the outside of his recovery process. Okay, because it's his, not hers. They're gonna say, and she needs to do her own work and all of this. Well, guess what? They just dropped sixty k over here.

What's left for her to do her own work? Okay, so. I don't think that's very helpful. And and so now, and I see it. I see this so often. So here's a guy who who's done good recovery work. He's done everything almost that he's been asked to do, and and he's sober and has pretty solid recovery. But it was of that paradigm of this is my individual recovery. And now the betrayed partners over there were still reeling, still psychologically bleeding out, still in trauma.

They have very few resources left. And guess what? Her distress continues, it goes up and up and up. What does that do for his, his recovery? Yeah, right.

Tara McCausland: Of course, it's gonna spiral.

Jake Porter: Yeah, it's gonna spiral, and he's gonna feel stressed. And now who's the problem? She seems like she's the problem. Well, guess what? If we believe betrayal trauma is real, she hasn't gotten the treatment she deserves. It's a matter of justice. It's the right thing to do. This is an ethical issue. As well as a biological issue, if trauma is real and it is affecting the brain. So all of that to say that, why can't, why can't it be dollar for dollar, day for day?

I mean, if, if he's going away for 2 weeks, can't she? You know, if he's— Amen. If he's dropping away, you know, dropping $20K, can't she? Or whatever. And I know I'm throwing out high numbers, but this happens on any scale. Right. And so I'm just, I'm a fierce advocate that betrayed partners deserve a quality of clinical care that is comparable to that of those with sex addiction or chronic betrayal issues. Yeah. Well, sorry, I got a little passionate there.

Tara McCausland: No, you're great. You're great. And honestly, I love that, that passionate advocacy. We need more of that because the, the coupleship certainly won't heal unless they both get the care and treatment that they need. So yeah. I'm with you, brother. So with the few minutes that we have left, I wanted to talk a little bit about, because there are actually stages or phases of grief work that we need to do in order to really move through this process.

So that would be my first question. And then when are we ready to start even doing grief work? I don't know if you want to start with that.

Jake Porter: Let's start with that question. When, when are you ready to do grief work? Well, you cannot do grief work So long as safety and stabilization is not in place. I mean, there's, there is a reason why it's phase 2 and not phase 1. And I won't, I won't go into the, the depths of this, but basically, you know, grief, the way I say it is grief is a luxury for the brain that knows it's safe. If my brain is in threat mode, the parts of the brain required to actually engage grief work.

Mm-hmm. are not even online. The metaphor I use is if I'm a soldier out on the battlefield and I've charged the enemy lines and my buddy, my best buddy right next to me gets shot, I don't kneel down and grieve him while there are bullets flying by my head and bombs going off around me. That's so safety and stabilization first to bring the betrayed partner out of the hypervigilance, out of the trauma, the constant trauma reactions out of that threat so that their whole brain brain can be online and actually engage the grief process is necessary.

A lot of times partners are like, okay, that sounds really great, Jake, but you know, what does that actually mean? What am I looking for here? So what you look for is you look for a shift in the balance between trauma triggers and grief waves. And here's how I distinguish the two. Okay. A trauma trigger is where you are reliving the threat. It is a, it is about safety. It is about threat right here, right now.

It is. And it usually takes us out of our body. It makes us hypervigilant, hyper-aware. We're looking around, very externalizing, right? And so that is a trauma trigger out of nowhere. A grief wave also comes out of nowhere, but it's very body-based. It's a wave of anger or a wave of pain or a wave of sadness, loss. A wave of— could be fear, but it's that more deeper, long-term fear. Will this ever end? Will I ever be better?

It's not that, am I safe right here, right now thing. Mm-hmm. And so, so that grief wave comes up, it's in the body, it's felt in the body. And those grief waves, they can start day one of discovery, but the— on balance, most of the time, betrayed partners early on, they're gonna experience a whole lot more trauma triggers than grief waves. But as safety and stability increases, because safety and stability, it's not an all or nothing.

It's not like, you know, once you cross this line, you go from 0 to 100 safety and stability. But as it increases, the balance will begin to shift such that eventually there are more grief waves than trauma triggers. When that seems to be the case, let's do grief work. That's generally what I would say. Now, the, the diff— you know, the one exception would be if you're doing like an intensive and you're, you're in a laboratory setting, which is what I call my office.

It's like a laboratory setting and you got a professional there and they're gonna, you know, I might, I might move someone into some grief work earlier than I would suggest them do it if they were on their own at their house. Okay. So that's the exception there. So that's, that's what I would say as far as how, you know, you're ready to start doing grief work. Okay. But then you, you mentioned phases of grief and, and there are phases.

And so within this second phase of the overall recovery, there's sort of like 3 subphases of, of the second phase. And I put it like this: what's dead, what's new, what's next? Which I know that's kind of crude and rough, but, but the reality is that every grief involves a death. So what is dead here? That's phase 1, getting really clear what What is gone? The old marriage is gone. The old storyline of our marriage is gone. Trust.

So, I mean, I could keep going, but getting clear on that. And that's where a really good emotional impact letter process can help. And there are other tools as well out there and exercises that can help people begin to name what What has been lost here? And, and then the next question is, what's new? Because if, if there is a vacuum, something will fill it. Right. So, so what's new? What, what is now present? Well, and it's not all good or bad.

And I, I would even try to suggest don't think in terms of good or bad here. It just is. So, so some examples. What's new? Well, maybe there's a level of public humiliation that's new. That's new, right? Yeah. So there's a loss of reputation. That's a loss. That's what's dead. My reputation is dead. What has filled that void? Some humiliation. Okay, what else is new? Ah, maybe truth. Maybe truth is new. And so what's been lost?

The lies, the false story. What's filled that void? Well, now I know the truth, painful as it is. So working through and getting clear on what is new here— and this is— you can't sit down and, you know, knock this out on a Sunday afternoon. This is a weeks and months long process. What's dead? What's new? What's gone? What's in its place now? Right? And then, and then the third question is, what's next? So here's where I'm looking at the the delta, the change, the gap, right, between what's dead and what's new.

And I'm looking at it and I go, okay, in light of this shift that's happened in my life, what's possible? My hope is at this point people find a place of empowerment to make choices to direct what will be next. And that's the difference of getting good therapy, good support, good coaching, or or, or not. Because what I often see is we get a lot of hard cases at Daring Ventures and people who've been in this process for a really, really long time and just stalled out or not found the healing they wanted.

And a lot of times what's happened is they— look, your brain is going to go through the grief process. It has to. It will go through that. If you, if you don't have the right help and the right internal resources to do it, You, you might find yourself moving in a, in a new trajectory that is not where you wanna go. And so the what's new, the answer to that question, what's, what's new here in this next chapter might be really unpleasant, unwanted.

Yeah. That's where we have to help people to be empowered to make choices to set that trajectory for themselves. You can't go back and make it as if this didn't happen. But given the reality of what's lost and what's new, I can now make choices from a place of reality about what's next.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, that makes sense. So good, Jake, and very informative. I think this will be really helpful for a lot of our listeners and just recognizing, I think sometimes we really want to move through this process quickly. And I have to say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to be very patient with this, this process and with grief and mourning, and not to bypass it, recognizing that there will be consequences if we try. Absolutely.

Well, we need to close up here. But my final question that I always ask our guests is, this is a hard process, and it can be long and exhausting. What, what might you tell a newcomer and maybe On the flip side, what would you tell somebody that's been walking this path for a while?

Jake Porter: I think to the newcomer, I would say you are not alone, which sounds so trite, right? Like, oh, you're not alone. But, but I really mean it because I think that's one of the biggest lies we can believe. One of the biggest sort of false cognitions that we can believe is no one else is going through this. No one else would understand it. No one else will, you know, could, could possibly Help me with this or understand this.

And, and my goodness, it's just not true. If you can be brave enough to find that community of support and do it early on in this process, that will save you mountains of misery along the way. You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to figure it out alone. You don't have to navigate all the questions and the unknowns by yourself. People— there are people, they, they don't just know about it, they've been through it, they've, they've made it to the other side, they're passionate about it, they're trained, they're devoting their lives to it.

And you deserve to find those people and not do it alone. So that's what I would say to the person who's new to this. And to the person who's been at it a really, really long time, I— you know what comes up for me right now around that is If you've been doing all the right things, if you, if you've been doing everything you've been told to do, okay, and not getting where you want to go— I'm not— so, so what that means is if you've been told what to do and you're not doing it, well, that's on you.

But if you're doing everything you're told to do and you're not getting where you want to go, maybe you're not getting good help. And you have the right to get good help. You know, if, if following the instructions of whoever you've been working with isn't getting you the results you want, then it doesn't mean that they're a bad person or that they're— they failed or, you know, they're wrong. But maybe it's just not a fit for you.

I mean, I, I say— I said this recently to clients of mine: we're not getting the results you want. Maybe, maybe someone else will serve you better. Okay, so I'm not above it. You deserve to, to find someone to help you that can help you, help you because you're an individual and your needs may be different than others. So if you're engaged in the process, you're doing everything you're told to do and you're not getting what you want, try something different.

Shake it up.

Tara McCausland: Wonderful. Great counsel. Well, this has been so fun. I've enjoyed this so much.

Jake Porter: Thank you, Tara. Thank you.

Tara McCausland: And if our listeners want to find you, do they just go to your website? Is that the best place to contact you?

Jake Porter: Absolutely. drjakeporter.com, daringventures.com. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook at, well, Dr. Jake Porter. Yeah. So you can find me any of those ways.

Tara McCausland: Awesome. And we'll put that info in the show notes. But thank you again so much for your time. Really appreciate you, Dr. Jake.

Jake Porter: Thank you for having me.

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