Grief Stage 3

ANGER, BARGAINING AND GUILT
This is a time for the release of bottled up emotion as
frustration gives way to anger – I never really bottled up emotions, so in this stage I never really was angry.
I was upset and I was hurt, but I never ever hated HIM.
It’s not that Dr Anger never tried to make appointments for a visit every now and then, but hatred is not my nature anymore.
It’s long gone through other transformations and so Dr Anger came only for one day.
“Invite your enemies, sit down, make them coffee and let them speak. “
You don’t reason with them, you just let them talk and once they’ve finished talking, they are so exhausted, and so they might as well just leave again and never come back.
Hehe, like someone who tries to sell you central heating for your beach hut in the Caribbean!
One might rail against fate, questioning "Why me?" One might also try to bargain in vain for a way out of the despair.
Most of all, out of my sadness I tried to bargain for another chance to keep up this relationship.
I think, that sadness is quite an egoistic emotion. It seems to spring from the reaction of my ego that is not getting what it wants. My vain and ego driven bargains led me deep into guilt and left me even more confused about reality and myself.
Oh, one cannot imagine how guilty I felt and by searching for answers I reflected on me, putting myself even further down the line and taking all the blame for the break-up onto my shoulders.
It went that far, that even though HE let me down, I believed that I myself had let HIM down.
That although HE had never been honest with me, I was convinced that it was ME who had planted all these lies and fears into our relationship.
I ended up twisting the reality in my head and in my memory that much, that I lost absolute awareness of what was really going on.
Through apologizing and self-reproach I was trying to bargain for a second chance. Bargaining to get what I wanted, no matter what I had to pay for – even if it meant devalueing myself even further than I had done already! I found millions of ways and reasons what I shouldn’t have done, couldn’t have done, should HAVE done and been like, just to avoid the outcome of the break-up! I took all the responsibility for everything that had ever happened.
I was well prepared, but when I wanted to hand in the bargain in, when I finally faced HIM, there did happen something really strange.
My ego out of a sudden had vanished and within this very moment, there was me accepting the whole truth. The whole truth and deep down inside of me there was this warm feeling, knowing that this break-up will be the best one I will ever have.
This didn’t make sense to my mind at all, I can tell you that and HE probably was even more confused about the fact that there wasn’t me trying to bargain.
What happened? The guilt I was usually prone to carry around for everyone (hey, there is a hurricane in Tahiti, oh, must’ve been me being naughty again!) had just vanished, disappeared into nothing and there was nothing I wanted to bargain for.
I don’t know why or what, not yet, but I am sure I will find out.
There was nothing I wanted back at that very moment, although my life situation was in deep shit (excuse my French!).
This stage was a short stage, as I think it is a stage that touches our Ego, our Pride and our Vanity.
I had no anger and hatred to release. Neither against him, nor against myself, and my ego by now had shrunk into the size of a raisin. This stage was a matter of 3 days, but I didn’t know when Depression finally hit me, this would take much longer.

Grief Stage 2

PAIN and more Denial

As the shock wears off, it is replaced with the suffering of unbelievable, emotional pain. Well, this descriptions sounds like I am going through the second world war but to be honest, it sometimes feels like that.

If I had known that, I would have tried to stay in shock for a little longer.

Shock state was nice and cosy, Pain stage was a mere battlefield.

I was all over the place and I had all spectrums of negative human emotions one could ever have. And of course not one after another, no, mostly all at once.

The realisation of what happened stroke hard and the pain about the loss felt excruciating.

I went from denial: “This is not happening to me!” to the realisation: “Gosh, this is truly happening to me!” and I was constantly hoping to wake up from a nightmare.

Realisation about loss is a harsh thing and leaves us feeling like dying. It makes us feel as if we are disappearing as the bond we felt had broken and we find ourselves in open waters.

It feels inside, like the world should stop and allow us to adjust, but it doesn’t. Still, while we are numb and trying to figure out the whole impact of the loss we feel, time is just blasting forward and drags us with it – opening the chasms between now and the time we had before.

Now, with all this whirlwind of emotions and pain, the easiest way I found was to escape.

As the pain was unbearable and I couldn’t even sleep at nights, I tried to drown it in alcohol when on nights out and socialising with people. I couldn’t bear to be alone! I was seeking distractions, no matter which.

The downside of this was devastating, as the plan didn’t quite work out. Getting rid of these painful emotions was not as easy as I thought.

Can you believe, every single morning I peeled myself out of bed, there was Mrs Realisation again greeting me at the front door and she even had a key! She just came back into my life every morning to drop her kids off named Mr Pain and Ms Guilt so I would take care of them. As soon as them both came into the house I had to sit down with them and have breakfast! This didn’t go down well and I found myself caught up in a vicious, unhealthy circle.

Hiding, avoiding or escaping through alcohol, parties and social gatherings seemed to make things worse, seemed to prolong everything and it seemed to feed my suffering rather than eliminating it.

And let me tell you here, even Perfume Parties don’t help J

Reality was very scary, as one doesn’t know what’s really happening because our emotions are in turmoil. Nothing makes sense to the logic mind, all seems out of place, and we feel we don’t belong to this world anymore.

Life feels scary and chaotic during this phase.

There were moments I couldn’t talk about anything at all, and then there were those when all just came spluttering out.

Sometimes, I would just break down and cry and weep in pain… pain of what? I didn’t know, it didn’t matter.

Fear was one of the biggest emotions I had to face. If one loses everything, not just a loved one but all other aspects we have based our life on, it leaves us with existential fear; the fear to disappear and the helplessness about the situation.

I was scared about falling asleep and had bad dreams; during the day a deep fatigue overcame me but I had a severe incapability to relax, as everything seemed to come up as soon as I rested.

When socialising, I had difficulty to concentrate on any conversation and I felt detached from the whole world.

The profound sadness about the whole loss left me with emptiness, despair and deep loneliness. I would just weep out of a sudden, but other days I couldn’t squeeze any tear out of my eyes due to numbness.

I thought this would never end. I felt like my life was over and there was nothing left. The pain seemed to never go away… but it did cease very slowly and my emotions started to settle and I started to see things a bit more clearly. Like when mist settles after a rain shower, or natural apple juice in a glass that settles throughout a morning.

In these times, it is really important to go THROUGH all these emotions without running away but by merely facing them.

Good friends are important, people who catch us, that allow us to feel and do whatever feels right for us at that very moment. People who don’t tell us how to feel and who don’t say: “Get over it.” But who encourage us to talk and to feel anything that comes to us.

People who believe in us and give us the security we need to let go and to allow ourselves to fall.

I was very, very lucky, as though I felt let down by friends I thought I could rely on, others turned up and gave me the space, the safety boat, I needed in order to walk THROUGH this process, rather than making me avoiding it or taking the short way around.

Wise people who had learned that it’s better to face an ugly truth than living a life of dark lies.

It took me time to actually picture what impact the end of my relationship had on my whole life and this scared me even more.

It got that far, that I had a severe loss of appetite and I ended up feeling nauseous whenever I ate.

I lost a lot of weight and it weakened my body even further.

No sleep, tiredness, no energy and an ever-shrinking self-esteem were all I did harvest from this painful stage of Grief.

So I packed it up into a little suitcase and stepped on board of a train, which was supposed to carry me towards a different stage of grief.

Grief Stage 1

If any of you have read my prelude to Grief you will find, that the fact that we don’t find any instructions about how to grief is leaving us with mere hopelessness and fear.

Because grieving is so painful and confusing, we seek help. We seek a way out of it quickly or just a few single instructions about what to do and how to do it the right way.

I tell you now, here, I have the feeling there is no.

I have never ever been grieving in my life; I am 32 years old and didn’t expect any of this to happen at all!

Although at this very stage I am feeling numb about what is happening in my life at the very moment, my heart tells me there is no way out and no one to look for guidance.

This is why I want to share with you my own experiences about my grieving. About the big loss I feel and about the confusing stages I find myself in.

Maybe it does seem familiar to you, maybe it all seems absolutely wrong, but most of all, I just seek to share something to open up everyone’s mind about losses, attachments and painful mourning.

To me, it sometimes just helps knowing that there are people who experience the same, instead of seeking instructions of how to get out.

Sometimes it’s more helpful to share and to listen than to be told what to do.

With the following Blog Series about Grief I want to share my own experiences with you, so I hope you will have fun in reading it.

My first stage was the stage of:

SHOCK & DENIAL

It wasn’t that there was shock at first and then there was denial. Oh no, done properly, one gets both at the same time and it is very hard to write about it.

Not because it was painful, but because one cannot function properly on any levels.

One was in shock, so what was there to write about?

Being in shock felt like there was no connection to the real world.

It’s like living in a bubble and everything out there seems so unreal. Like watching a movie, which has got not at all to do with YOUR own life!

The weird thing about Shock is also, that one can’t even FEEL anything. There is nothing to be felt; no sadness, no anger, no fear and no happiness either… there is nothing but space.

Feeling overwhelmed by the break-up of a relationship, was not a matter of the unexpected but because it has finally really happened.

Nothing of this touched me, at all. It was happening somewhere else to someone else but not in my own world.

I think the worst thing about being in shock is the absolute detachment from everything that exists. Nothing felt worth caring about, there was this mere numbness that paralysed all my emotional and physical functions to react properly.

All felt surreal, nothing was there to feel and I couldn’t even think straight. Sometimes one would be able to feel the rejection, sometimes one could feel overwhelmed but one wouldn’t know by what or why.

And when a voice comes through and we realise that we didn’t want any of this to happen, we believe it will all be ok when we wake up the next morning.

Most times, we can’t even talk and the worst thing of all would occur if one had no place to go.

We believe everything is ok and all went the right way, but reality, outside of our little bubble, keeps telling us different.

When in shock, we don’t know anything.

The only thing I myself knew was, I had to get out and away from rejection, as quick as possible.

I had to get away and when I realised that there was nowhere to go, my world finally came crashing down and from Shock I was catapulted with a 360 back flip straight into Pain and more Denial.

The End Of Something

The End of Something

26^th oct.

14.50h

Wow, what to say….sitting in COSTA and having my last vanilla latte in Yorkshire. And if the vanilla latte could talk, I’d shut it up as now in my very situation, everything that needed to be said had been said.

I have arrived at a stage of my life, where there is no way back but only one single option forward.

Although I am hurt that all broke down, I have the feeling its probably the best thing that could’ve happened to me.

Now I am free to follow my own dreams and do what I believe in, as now I know, its always been the right way!

How I do know my way was the right one? It was, as it was never founded on fear but on courage to face my fears and based on love.

I gotta admit, I never been that broke in my life and it scares me a lot.

But I will have to go with the flow now, and hopefully it gets me back on track.

I have no money left and the place I am going to I have never been before. And also, I only know 1 single person out there.

Life came crashing down on me this whole year and because I didn’t deal with things the right way by believing in myself and respecting my self-value I now am at a point where I have to reap what I sowed.

I am standing here, picking up the withered crops of my harvest and I am sad, wondering how it even got that far.

But thinking too much about this doesn’t help, I would never know if all had gone different had I done things the other way.

Past is past, nothing will change it and it wont come back.

What I had lost was the deep love for myself, respecting my needs, respecting who I am and who I was. Therefore I ended up in a destructive and malnourished environment. I tried to accept those situations out of love, but I forgot the love for myself.

If I look back, in all the last 9 months nearly NOTHING was nurturing me. But it was ME nurturing everything and everyone else.

Time will tell now, what good things will spring from the last 9 months. I deeply believe, not all was bad but now that everything of it seems like a total lie, I need the dust to settle and after that take a look beyond the lies to find the truth.

Now with this moment, I finally start off into my own life again, going my own way and him going his.

Although my direction now doesn’t quite lead me where I want to be, I am sure that it will be better than the life of lies I had found myself in until 3 weeks ago.

Anyone else out there that just lost everything and recently trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered dreams?

I will keep you updated how it goes at my end and although things don’t seem to make sense to me at the moment, I am sure soon they will…they always do.