Do you feel like you should be over it by now? Seriously, I should be over this. Why am I still struggling? I asked myself that question so many times. The only time we want to really talk about grief is when we are grieving. Then the topic is forefront on our minds. ALL consuming. When there is an ending, grief is what leads to healing and eventually a new beginning.
GRIEF
True grief is clean. Often there are many other emotions going on at the same time that cause us to struggle. Anger, blame, and guilt to name a few. To truly grieve, you have to accept the ending for what it is. Eventually you can accept that it was meant to happen, but that won’t happen right away. We can wrap up guilt (I should’ve done something different) or just argue with reality (it shouldn’t have ended, they shouldn’t have been that way). That is not grief, it is unnecessary suffering. It doesn’t solve anything. That’s where coaching is so beneficial, we learn to see our thought errors, like arguing with reality. In the end, that arguing prevents us from healing. When we can begin to understand that things shouldn’t be different than they are, we can release the suffering. Grief is what it is and we get to make it better or worse with our thinking. We are afraid that if we accept the world as it is, we are agreeing with it, but that’s not the case. If we accept it, we are then able to figure out what we CAN do. The future is where your power is. Dirty pain (guilt, blame, anger) closes you down, true grief will open you up.
TIME HEALS
For some of us, the divorce/breakup is instant agony. In the beginning it was NOT helpful to be told that this happened for a reason or you’re better off, or it was a long time coming or worse yet, time heals. None of those words were comforting and would usually make me angry. I would hear those things, but I wasn’t ready for those thoughts. It was only later when I started the coaching process and was able to begin healing that I started to believe in the potential of those words. Eventually, I realized these thoughts were all options for me, I could choose to believe in any of them.
PAIN
We often try to find evidence for how the breakup is good to get us out of pain faster. I certainly did this and it worked to minimize the pain for a time, but not long term. Breaking up is usually painful, it should be. Sometimes we criticize the other person to make our pain go away. I know when I hated him, it was so much easier to not feel pain. When the hate dissipated, I was left in misery. In the end, I always ended up criticizing myself. Why did I stay for so long? How could I be so stupid? Where was your dignity? On and on, I intermingled anger and blame with grief. That only made it worse and kept me stuck.
LOSS
Part of my grief came from the change in my identity. I was a wife, and then all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I was always proud of being a wife. Now I had to grieve that loss. I had to grieve the loss of our family unit. Who was I now? I had no idea I would feel this broken. When I was told that I was grieving the death of a marriage, it helped me feel normal, that I wasn’t crazy to feel so empty. Sometimes we just need to feel NORMAL. For so many people, they are also grieving the loss of all of their hopes that were wrapped up in the relationship and the future they thought they would have. For me, I always thought it was going to get better. It had to. I now know that hoping for that was easier than accepting what the relationship had become. I was angry and incredibly sad. Sadness, anger, and failure all wrapped up in grief.
RELIEF
On the flip side, some people may feel relief, they have been anticipating the worst for so long that when it happens it is almost a relief to not be dreading the inevitable any longer. There may be an overwhelming feeling of peace and that is ok. Don’t judge yourself for how you handle the end of your relationship. There might be guilt because you ended it and your partner still struggles. It is your job to just take care of yourself, you can’t control whether they heal or stay stuck. That is their journey and quite honestly, their business.
JUDGEMENT
There is this idea that there’s a right way to grieve, some sort of structure to it and there has to be stages. You have to follow them exactly and there should probably be crying involved, maybe even some yelling. When there is an expectation of how to grieve, it can leave us feeling like we’re doing it wrong. I would often get so mad at myself when I felt like I was back sliding. I was JUST doing so well, how could I be so sad again? But that is a normal part of the process. Instead of just allowing it to be what it is, we just heap all of this judgment and unnecessary pain on top of ourselves and turn that pain into suffering.
EXPECTATIONS
Our society is quick to compare our grief with someone else’s. In the end, we just need to be where we are on our own journey and our own experiences. It’s unique to each circumstance and we can’t put a timeline on it or expectations on how it should be. We all grieve differently based on the situation and most importantly, on our own thinking. Each person has their own grief story and that is part of the human experience.
Part 2 of this blog will delve a little deeper in to how to heal, stay tuned!
