Particularly if the relationship was abusive, then understanding the abuse, trying to overcome the traces that have been left, can seem a lot like alpha-widowhood, but it is not.
E.g. I grew up without father. Since we were moving a lot and also since my mom only had two boyfriends in my childhood, whom I both have only met once, I grew up without any kind of male presence in my life. However I was fed the fables of my mom about all men being assholes, that only want sex, and the feminists BS of the 70ies, 80ies and 90ies. That were the books I was reading, that were the stories that I was told. So for me it was kind of expected that men would be disappointing, hurting and absent. The important part is that due to this I had created some dark male archetype representation and since my father is quite explosive and we had a lot of arguments over the time, he just confirmed this male archetype, just like all the other BS about abusive relationships and narcissism and so on did and what I thought I could observe in my circle of friends and what I also had experienced myself.
I could never believe in the narrative that humans are generally bad. I could see the suffering in my dad when we had argument, I could see the love that even cheating husbands had towards their wives.
I was always seeking for the good in all of them and tried to act on that and this has led me to remain in situations that were unhealthy to me. Somehow I tried to address the good in the other, while on the other hand I could just see how the consequences of some actions have been bad for others.
And I could also see in my circle of friends how caring and loving men can be. And even though I tried to be a better person, become more stable and independent, it sometimes seemed as if it were true that difficult childhood means that one is doomed to have bad relationships and generally that even the nicest man if left alone, would anyway always turn out to be an asshole.
So this is why TRP has been healing to me. Here I learned that the caring and loving aspect in men is general and not just a singularity that one or two individuals have, but that it is built into them in the same way as other things are built into all of us. Moreover I understood that due to the narrative of men being evil I acted on fear and mistrust from the beginning in all of my relationships instead of acting on trust, I simply didn't have any positive projection. When I tried to argue that people - men and women - are inherently good, everyone disagreed and pointed out the many atrocities humans perpetrate. So as funny as it might seem to people who don't understand TRP. TRP to me is nothing but the undeniable proof that men are inherently good. The love, they care and the suffer if the have a bad wife.
At RP I could understand the way in which I myself have contributed to the unhappiness and conflicts in my own relationships, e.g. with my father, who despite being a really difficult person, did never stop being loyal with my sister and me, even though unintentionally we have violated his values in probably almost every aspect one can think of. He wouldn't have been a good captain, because he acts uncontrolled and is not in control of his rage and anger. I also think that my mom and my dad could have never been happy with each other, because my father is too authoritarian and my mom doesn't respect authority. So they would have hurt themselves even more with the power struggles between them.
But RP made me realize that love and respect and trust are more important than misunderstandings. Particularly trust.
So, yes, sometimes it might seem like alpha-widowhood, even though it is not, because it is just part of a process where one thinks one has to dissect every aspect in order to be able to resolve something.
If our world were feeding more truths about humans than lies, then people would have a much easier time to create coherence with intuition, feelings and narratives. Since we are fed lies, we act on the wrong assumptions and therefore create hell. Without being unplugged it is next to impossible to get out of the hamster wheel oneself.
So it is this hamster-wheel where women spin between the contradiction of good vs. evil that creates the obsession. They are trapped between the assumption that either they are good and valuable, but then he would not left or acted the way he did, would he? And thus they assume that if they are good and valuable and he still has left acted "bad", then he must be an asshole or not loving or whatever. The other side of the coin is that they idealize him and devalue themselves. It is this trap that creates alpha-widowhood. But it can only exist on the basis of lies and a wrong perception of reality and the nature of human beings. Without these lies one would just adopt a sense of humility towards life and the ways nature is without us understanding the details of it. That by giving up religion we also have given up faith and trust in something that is beyond our comprehension but neither good nor bad is what enables all our negotiations and mental arguments with destiny. So restoring trust in oneself and life is probably key here as well. It can be done rationally, it can be a long path and one always has to consciously remind oneself because it is easy to fall into suffering again, however it solely depend on the interpretation on what happened. The more pain something caused, the less of a positive male representation a woman has in her mind e.g. due to an absent father, or even more abuse that really happened, the more difficult it is to unattach from the pain, the more she might want to undo it. This is why trauma might resemble alpha-widowhood, but only is until the woman has learned to accept the trauma, and has learned that having it have happened once doesn't imply that it has to happen again. NAMALT ;)