Midlife Crisis: Support for Left Behind Spouses
Archives => Archived Topics => Topic started by: Treasur on August 30, 2019, 06:47:06 AM
-
I'd like to start a chat about grief.
Selfish reasons bc post-PTSD has unearthed some unfinished business for me.
Trying to find out how to tackle it actively for myself has left me with some questions about how to do that. And the part that grief plays for some LBS.
I'm hoping that putting words to thoughts will help me do my own work.
I'm hoping that for anyone here who feels the same pull to work with/on their grief, the discussion might help. I understand that this topic might not be relevant for everyone and that people will be at different stages and have different experiences of it.
A lot of info available says some version of 'well, do this' (but doesn't often tell you HOW you might do it.) It talks about seeing a process with some common normal stages and reassures you that you are normal. And it talks about a lot of things we talk about here as LBS.
My sense is that grief is part of the LBS process for many.
But it can be difficult to pin down. So quite difficult to navigate through purposefully. And the concept of 'grief work' isn't always very clear about what you should be trying to do other than a general sense of feeling better I suppose.
Complicated/compound grief is about multiple losses that can feed into each other, and can leave us stuck for longer. And I am not the only person here to have lost more than a spouse and a marriage I know.
Disenfranchised grief is the kind of loss that is not recognised or validated by others as more 'normal' loss might be.
Seems to me that many LBS might have both?
The other idea is that loss includes both primary and secondary losses. The world tends to see the first but working through grief after the first shock is often about the secondary losses that others may not see. And sometimes we may not see, or see and not know what to do with. Or be surprised to find the secondary losses coming up to bite hard much later. (Which is what is going on for me, I suspect)
What do you think? Did you see grief as part of your own LBS process? Was it a priority or not?
And if so, did you actively do things to try to tackle different bits or was it more about surviving it and letting time do its work?
And was there a difference in how you experienced or dealt with the primary and secondary losses?
-
I think grief is part of all of our processes from BD. I have come to see the stages of grief play out for me, but I wasn't always aware of that at the time. I had to reach some level of acceptance before I could reflect on the bargaining and denial phases that were so long. The marital grief has been different than the secondary processes, I believe because most I accepted those things immediately. For example, bankruptcy. It has a far bigger emotional impact than you expect, yet I never resisted any part of the process. I let myself feel the pain and still experience consequences, but without avoidance. The marital grief was certainly different.
As a fixer there's always that part of me that looked for logical ways to get grief done and dusted. But grief showed me that that's not how she works. ;)
-
Treasur,
This is an awesome subject! I am using online EFT classes to deal with emotions as the come up. That’s been the most helpful. But also just giving myself a little time away to grieve, cry, or rage.
Prayer helps too. And I have some people I can vent too.
Exercise is great for anger and rage and often when I’m angry I’ll go work out just to move enough to work out the anger.
I find separating out the individual issues I’m grieving over and giving each one its own time and thought works better than just the overwhelming sum of it all.
Also I find naming the emotion helps as well.
-
For me grief has been the toughest part to deal with.
I am okay financially, I have a place to live, we did not have kids together but I grieve.
I grieve the loss of the love of my life, I grieve the loss of my life as I knew it, I grieve the woman that I used to be, I grieve for the future we might not have, I grieve for the man he was.
There's not much out there in terms of what helps and working through this grief, so I love that you started the discussion and I am hoping to get some ideas and suggestions on how to move through this grief and come out on the other side.
-
Throughout this process I have learned so much about myself and my grief.
I didn't realize I was in victim mode, I didn't even realize what that was. I am a man as I think with most men we don't understand this hurt and dealing with it even less.
I think I grieved normally at BD when she asked for a divorce. I was upset but normal, what ever that is. Then when I found out about the betrayal that was different, I was hurt and very angry. Beyond what would or should be considered acceptable.
Now I grieve a little different, it is still there. I miss my wife, my friend , my partner. I feel like I am outcast at some events because I am single and couples don't necessarily invite me to get together's as often.
As a man I would have trouble talking to other men about it without crying. This added a whole new wrinkle to it. The same added with all of it was a lot to deal with.
Here I was a grown man who's wife just cheated on him crying to another man. I can't think of anything more pathetic, I really have a hard time looking at myself about this.
I am stronger now, I have grown so much. But I still grieve I still have hope. I guess that is where it is for me now at the moment.
-
Great topic Treasur. I find I am dealing with grief now a lot more than I did in the early days. The more I rope drop, the more the grief rolls in it seems.
I'm in the final stages of there being nothing left of my old life or the ties that bound us. Our house will be sold soon, then the next step is to sell the rental house. I thought I wanted to live there but I've since decided that won't be a fresh enough start. There are still many ghosts in that rental house too, since we lived there years ago.
By spring, I expect there to be no ties of any kind and no reason on this earth why we should contact each other again. This has been my goal for about the last year. The complete and total dropping of the rope. Yet as that day comes closer, my grief grows in leaps and bounds.
It's almost as if,,, while still connected either financially, legally, or emotionally,,, I was able to delay feeling grief. I was able to put it off. Anger helps with that too. It allows me to stay connected albeit in a negative way. But now when all the legal and financial matters are close to being finalized,,, and my loss fully realized,,, the grief is almost overwhelming. I cried everyday during the first year since BD,, then rarely in the second year,, now back to crying daily in the 3rd year. I am finally allowing myself to feel the full horror of what happened and begin the slow work to get through it.
-
Wow, super deep topic T.......
Going to be following and reading this thread.... so much to learn :)
-SS
-
SS - not a topic for everyone but maybe really important for some of us
Anon - yup, me too. Which felt a bit odd hence my starting this collective chat. I wonder if some of the loss isn't real while we are still on the MLC battlefield in some way. Or perhaps it is just a different kind of grief or grieving something different.
Father - it is hard for many men to talk to other men isn't it? Often men talk about the tough vulnerable things with their wives...but when your w is the subject, where do you go? Funnily enough though I wonder if both love and grief are fuelled by a kind of hope actually.
66 - you've put your finger right on it. The grief can be about so much more than just the loss of a person...no wonder it can take a long time eh? But let's try and figure it out together I hope
Courage - i agree..grief seems to start out like a big tangled ball...takes a while to pull the strands out and name them. But if we can start to do that for ourselves, I think we might be able to do more than just try to outlast it.
Ready - there is something about almost making friends with our grief for a while isn't there? And seeing the balance between the more cognitive bits and the bits that are more intuitive or instinctive almost. People talk about stages and grief does seem to have a kind of flow and rhythm of its own, but with different flavours maybe? I have been a champion of avoidance ha ha (although to be fair PTSD saved me as well as stalled me for a while)...so sounds like I could learn a bit from your experience :)
-
Grief is the primary issue for me and it’s definitely complicated — both in the diagnostic sense and by recurrent contact with MLC.
I think we’ve both mentioned EMDR before and I’m about to target original grief for a new track of sessions. But this past bad year re: h and ow2, and the loss of our good dog, helped me differentiate between the levels of grief. For me there finally is a hierarchy. Father loss first, oldest and deepest. Then h to MLC. Then the good dog. Other grief beyond those three is far lighter and less substantial, less impactful, and is easier to reconcile or cope with in the moment, and to move all the way through. So for anyone for whom grief IS a topic, I think it is important for us to dial in on what grief really came first, and is it resolved. And I would recommend EMDR as a first and gentle means of “getting there”, because your own mind and body in that setting (in my experience) can be trusted to bring you expediently to the original memories and safely out again with just the parts that you need to carry forward for later reprocessing.
This year has been a lot of grief work for me and some of it had to be active. Going to places that held those facts, seeing the facts with my own eyes, exercising/exorcising something of it immediately after facing it, and then going for the paper data — the facts as they are written formally on record.
Feeling it is gruesome, horrible, beautiful, and overwhelming. And then things click and maybe something of it is distilled or honed fine and the rest of it falls away. HB has said that mid life as a time of processing so many things and learning so many lessons and that once a lesson is truly learned it never has to be learned again. I have to say I have found that to be absolutely true this year, and I am so glad and feel much relieved and lighter. Stronger. Still fragile right now but clear that ultimately it’s going to be simpler and better as I keep moving through.
Acting for or through or toward it, where action can be taken, has also been really important. A means of visibly making progress.
I’m glad you started this discussion. It’s definitely important here.
-
I’m not sure what I can contribute, but I’m for sure reading along. This grief process seems to be long and in layers.
-
Anon's post resonated with me also; I have been experiencing a lot of unexpected grief this summer (the start of the the 4th year since BD) for many reasons -- some of which a lot of us share at this stage.
About 18 months ago I also lost my mother, which is a separate sorrow, but has also complicated and deepened the grief I feel for my marriage and family.
I found a book, "Resilient Grieving" helped a lot.
It is almost as though the grief seeps in now that the shock and disbelief have finally worn off.
At least for me anyway, I cannot speak for anyone else.
-
Terra, yes you and me have both found EMDR helpful I think. Interested in what you say about 'active' grief work...can you say a bit more about what that has entailed for you?
Have others found other kinds of therapy useful for grief?
I am so sorry, Steel, that you lost your mother. Is the new grief seeping in a different kind of grief? Do you cope with it differently?
I don't know if this 'grief return' is a bit disheartening for others, but it does seem to be not uncommon and tbh I find that reassuring to know I am not alone with that. Mine seems deeper and also lighter to carry if that is not an oxymoron. There was a time when grief felt like fear to me, as if I had no skin and everything hurt. As if I was in it and all I could do was be...but I was desparate for escape. This new type of grief now feels like more of a doing thing, as if it is slightly out of reach but important to look at and touch somehow. Hmm, words are difficult to find...not sure, but it feels different than before.
Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?
-
Grief... where to start... At first I don't think I even knew about grief. Mr J left, my dad died seven days afterwards. I was too ill, depressed and already diving into my own MLC to be able to understand part of what I was dealing with was grief. Around Christmas, two days before my birthday my favourite maternal great aunt died. I didn't come home for Christmas that year, I spend it alone. The only year I ever spend Christmas alone.
I had family in the capital, as, of course, here, but the thought of dealing with questions about why Mr J wasn't coming was too much for me to handle. I said I had to work. I enjoyed spending 2006 Christmas on my onw. Mr J was still in his at times normal, at times monster and he was worried that I had stayed, so keep checking on me.
Things carried on, my Replay, Mr J's Replay getting worst and worst, then moving back home, then starting looking after grandmother.
I didn't deal with grief while having my Replay phase. Or I did in "all the wrong ways" that may had been the right ways. There wasn't much time to process, if any. First it was my own MLC, then it was looking after grandmother. Having a super clinger MLCer doesn't help, nor does it help when the super clinger I cut off for peace of mind kept doing nasty, hurtful things that keep reminding me of his existence for years on end.
Grief was dealt slowly, years after BD, when I had some time for myself. It may only had been fully sorted after grandmother died in late 2016. Interestingly, it was far easier to deal with grief from grandmother's death. She was suffering, very elderly and her death was expected. As her caregiver I was relieved she was finally in peace.
BD? MLC? The death and break of a life plan, because a marriage/relationship is a life plan, an idea for a joint future. That is another type of beast and one I don't want to face again.
Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?
As mentioned above, I lost my dad 7 days after BD and my favourite maternal great aunt two months afterwards. Since Mr J's MLC started I also lost my paternal aunt, one of my uncles (by marriege), my favourite paternal great aunt, my younger maternal great aunt, my maternal great uncles that were still alive in 2006, and my beloved maternal grandmother. And many friends, including several 10 or more years younger than myself.
And my aunt scared the hell out of us with cancer and a stroke in the last few years. My paternal grandmother has Alzheimer's. BD/MLC I also meant I lost my home, my social circle and life as I knew it.
On the other hand, I gained a nephew and a niece (that I hardly ever see because she lives in another country) and a few second counsins, of which I only tend to regularly see one. One of my brothers and one of my cousins moved abroad, so the family that is around is shrinking. My younger brother and his girlfriend may be moving early next year.
Family is important to me, so, this has been a bit peculiar.
Early on, after I come back home, I saw my friend who is a psychiatrist and got a GP here. I can't say the doctors in the capital were of much help. They meant well, but they didn't seem to understand what I was going throught. And, of course, Aside from my paternal grandmother, I told nothing to my family until February 2007 when my younger sister said she was going to come by our flat in the capital. ::)
I think I am a little better telling people about things, but not sure. I think most of my grief and pain come from the fact that I didn't dealt with BD/OW/divorce right away as I should, that is in a practical, logical manner. Becoming emotional didn't serve me well and caused much pain, damage and loss.
-
Mine seems deeper and also lighter to carry if that is not an oxymoron. There was a time when grief felt like fear to me, as if I had no skin and everything hurt. As if I was in it and all I could do was be...but I was desparate for escape. This new type of grief now feels like more of a doing thing, as if it is slightly out of reach but important to look at and touch somehow. Hmm, words are difficult to find...not sure, but it feels different than before.
Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?
I can relate so well. The grief in the 1st year was like fear. Fear that this wouldn’t be temporary. Fear that he wouldn’t ever be back. Fear that his new life would stick and I’d be shut out of his life forever.
The grief I feel now is the full realization that this is permanent for me, he’s never coming back because I’m done and will not let him come back, and very soon there will be no reason for contact and I will shut him out of my life completely.
I feel this grief as painfully as I felt the grief in the early days. What’s different is I am dealing with it differently. Not trying to hang on for dear life in the midst of overwhelming grief until my old life was restored but accepting my past life is over. My grief is more about permanent closure than hanging on through the temporary storm.
The grief from the early days did lessen in intensity over time and I managed to live a pretty decent life. But,,,I still had one foot in my old life by not making the difficult decision the fully let go and wrap up our joint affairs. Now,,,selling the houses, closing joint accounts, getting rid of possessions. By spring I expect to be living in a different locale, in my own house, with absolutely no reason for contact with h. It really is good-bye and it hurts. Boy does it hurt 😔
I suspect it will take awhile to get through to the other side where one day I’ve completed the closure in the same way we reach closure when a loved one dies.
To answer your other question ,,, my mother passed away 2 months before BD. The year prior I was travelling frequently to visit her while she declined. It was another crazy 3 weeks preparing and arranging for her memorial service. I felt like an orphan. All my immediate family was gone. Grieving for her loss really hit after her memorial service. I was BD’d 6 weeks later.
-
In my head I think of it as fresh grief and old grief....and they feel quite different to me.
I am so sorry, Anon, for the loss of your mother followed by BD. It must have been unimaginably hard to cope with both in a healthy way. Do you think BD affected how you coped with your mother's death? Or vice versa?
I had three big losses within 6 months; my father, then my husband, then my mother.
Only the loss of my father felt like a 'normal' kind of grief.
Looking back, I can see the 'phases' of a more traditional - albeit awful - grieving. The kind of denial that goes with the treatment of a terminal illness. The first punch of reality when I accepted he was about to die which didn't hit me until the last two days. The numb functioning. The role his funeral played and the significance of listening to others talk about him with love and the stories they told. Back to a kind of numb lost feeling for about three months followed by a kind of drip drip of acceptance. With sharp bursts of pain and yearning often triggered by small things that underpinned his absence. Probably took me about six months or so to reach a place where he sort of became my father again in my head rather than a source of grief if that makes sense. I missed him, I miss him now but there was nothing abnormal or damaging in the process of grieving. No unfinished business, no guilt...only love and good memories and the ability to carry him with me as a kind of legacy I suppose.
My husband and my mother were/are more complicated and more ambiguous to grieve. It was a much crazier and much more flaying and confusing kind of grief. Both of them are still physically alive but unrecognisable. Both are absent from my everyday life. Neither of them feel or behave towards me as they did, and I can't feel or behave towards them as I did...my h's depression/MLC and my m's dementia.
Having those three kinds of losses has often made me compare and contrast them. Tbh sometimes I have wondered if one was supposed to teach me something about another.... I read somewhere that loss is really about four things; safety, love, confidence and control. Losing my father was about the first two and perhaps that is part of why it wasn't the kind of grief that broke me. It wounded me but it didn't break me. But the circumstances with my h and my mother were both a 4/4 in different ways. Times 2. And the pain was so unbearable and so overwhelming that I think my brain knew I had two choices; to avoid it by suicide or to avoid it by PTSD. Fortunately for me, my brain and fate chose the latter. I suppose I see PTSD as being like a kind of five star avoidance strategy....that my system shut down to escape what I could not cope with. Which sucked on one level, but makes good sense now.
I have wondered sometimes - and no criticism to any stander here - whether some part of standing is also a kind of necessary denial for a little while. That it prevents us having to jump into divorce paperwork and selling houses and all the real stuff of severing those links you describe Anon until we are strong enough to do it. But it maybe delays a deeper kind of acceptance perhaps. Maybe some of those things are the equivalent of a funeral idk? Albeit a funeral without fellow mourners saying nice things lol. Maybe there is a denial kind of standing which is then replaced with a different kind of standing as reality and acceptance bite? A choice rather than a defence? Idk. For me, I think standing was a kind of grief reaction bc I didn't know what else to do...so I felt delayed grief when I let go. Actually that is probably what flipped me from 'normal' anxiety into PTSD perhaps.
And now post PTSD, and when the practical links are severed, as you say there is a different kind of grief bc there is a different kind of permanence. Just as you say. But, on a positive note although the return of grief has surprised me, it does feel like something I can work through as opposed to just hunkering down in a storm and hoping to survive. Again though, in my case, I have those two strange kinds of losses to work on simultaneously...my h and my mother.
What I feel...and it is a bit uncomfortable to say, but it is real so I'll say it....is that it has left me in a place where I am not yet committed to life. I am not suicidal; that's quite a different feeling. But I am uncommitted to living. Which is why I can't decide what to do about say getting a cat or whether I should move my mother to a facility nearer to me. I wrote on my own thread about Not Wants and Wants and I couldn't figure out what was stopping me seeing the Wants. I knew something was but I didn't know what. And this morning I realised it isbc I have not yet consciously decided to live. I chose to survive and to exist...but my jury is out on the living thing. Which is why I think my unfinished grief work is important.
I have never been a fan of the traditional Kubler-Ross DABDA thing. Partly bc it was based on people who were dying not those grieving for them. Mostly bc I think those emotions are more symptoms than stages. Flavours of grief. Fresh grief seems like a storm just as you describe, Anon. Older more complicated messier grief feels like it needs more than acknowledging the storm. So that is where I am at today. The good thing is that I am nervous but not afraid of it as I was :)
-
And in case it is useful to anyone else
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-part-2/
https://whatsyourgrief.com/avoidance-in-grief/
-
Ready - there is something about almost making friends with our grief for a while isn't there? And seeing the balance between the more cognitive bits and the bits that are more intuitive or instinctive almost. People talk about stages and grief does seem to have a kind of flow and rhythm of its own, but with different flavours maybe? I have been a champion of avoidance ha ha (although to be fair PTSD saved me as well as stalled me for a while)...so sounds like I could learn a bit from your experience :)
I am humbled by that, but rest assured, I am still very much a work in progress! I will be learning just as much from your experience. The beauty of a good support group is no one is really ahead of anyone else, so long as we are on our own paths.
My father lost his parents in '77 and '78, rounding out a ten year span of the worst events of his life. He had some army-related issues and lost two best friends and a son at the beginning of it, and I was born smack in the middle. So I grew up seeing one damaged person, who I loved very much but that I understood was not like other dads. When my parents divorced I got to see a freer, happier person, but he was still finding himself. His second marriage and divorce brought out another different person, and I believe he had a crisis after that. Just a big breakdown that was years in the making. Then xH drama, who was like the son he lost to him. Just now he's admitting that his entire adult life has been about finding how to navigate the grief. It's been booze at times, it's been anger, it's been a bit of dissociation. But mainly it's been about the loss of his mother and the inability to reconcile it. And that, my friends, is now over 40 years deep. He says he wished counseling had been a thing more people were encouraged to do, like they are now. Dealing with it on his own has altered so much. But I don't know that there ever would have been a way for it to be "fixed" upfront. I think this is just how it is. I try to not make myself something that is not fluid because of that, because I have seen that ebb and flow up close. I honestly don't think there's a "fix" for my xH either, or that he'll just roll back into an identity he had before. I know this has also changed me into a different person where this will always have happened. I just have to use my dad's example to not let it be the captain of the ship. It's something I'm still learning to navigate, but feels like it's at least easier than it was.
-
We all grieve differently, for one thing. We all have past experiences that color our grief and how we grieve. And I also believe that grief is not a one and done. Everytime we see something tha reminds us of our lost loved one, we grieve again: that we will never experience that particular thing with them again. People don't really understand how those bittersweet memories contain grief.
My mother recently died, and mine is definitely not the standard grief. It's grief for what wasn't what can now never be. I also grieve for my sister who does miss our mother, and my niece who was practically raised by her, and for my other nephews and niece who were left out of the will and they have no understanding of why they weren't "good enough". We grieve for our children's loss of innocence when the MLCER leaves, even if they still have a relationship with their children, moreso, I think, if they don't . Pets, included suffer, and we grieve for the emotional hurt they feel that we cannot explain to them.
Grief is not one dimensional, nor are any of the stages. The more people involved, the more likely there are more layers to the grief. Is it any wonder some might have a harder time sorting it and working through?
-
I apologise in advance if some of the questions I throw into the discussion don't 'fit' bc of course they are spinning out from where my head is right now.
Last night I found myself crying for my mother. A really deep sense of loss. I just wanted my mum. And I haven't felt that or done that since she disappeared into dementia. I have cried but more about her than about me if that makes sense. I think I have been afraid to look closely at what I have lost, at who my mother was before the shell she is now. I think that's bc my father's death was something I could grieve in a more normal way. And the loss of my h and all the hideous reality that went with that was so overwhelming it left no space for more grief.
I feel a need to DO something with some of my grief that I hadn't felt before. Can't explain it, not quite sure what I will do but it feels as if I have unfinished business. As if I needed to run from it or hunker down initially and now it feels like I need to turn around and look it in the eye. That it is necessary to be able to live after it all.
Which makes me wonder....is there a difference between grief and mourning?
Is grief the feeling and mourning the things we do to recover a life after grief? Is grief the thing we felt as LBS while things were unravelling and the need to mourn the thing we feel much later when we can see the permanence of what has been unravelled? Is grief more about 'them' and mourning more about ourself?
And how does that affect those who choose to stand? Or those who don't?
And how do we know or measure when we are 'better'?
-
Last night I found myself crying for my mother.
I'm so sorry, Treasur. I haven't lost my mum to Alzheimer's, but my paternal grandmother's one is getting worst. My mum has vascular dementia. Difference sources, but what we see is similar. Mum is not as bad, but who knows how things will go.
I want my paternal grandmother. I can't talk to her as I used to, I can't go out with her, we no longer can go for a coffee or to the hairdresser. I can't say she has dissappeared into herself. At least I don't see it that way. More like she is living in the past and I get to know things I didn't knew. I wrote a little about it in my thread.
Which makes me wonder....is there a difference between grief and mourning?
In Portuguese there is. We say mourning for a marriage/relationship "fazer o luto" that is the same as mourning "fazer o luto" for a dead person or a person that has dememtia. Psychiatrists, psychologist, GP's etc. use "fazer o luto" = mourning.
Grief translates as sorrow, sadness, pain, heartache. It is more a feeling of sadness that doing something to aknowledge the end of a marriage/relationship, the death of a loved one or the loss of a loved the one to dementia. Fazer o luto is coming to terms with what happenned/is.
Fazer o luto (mourning) involves sadness, sorrow, hurt, pain, but it is an active thing towards healing.
And how do we know or measure when we are 'better'?
When we no long mourn/feel grief. It will be different for each of us.
-
I am sorry you are so sad for the loss of your mother. That is even harder than MLC, IMO, because it's not like your mom had any kind of choice at all.
In my world, Grief is what you feel, mourning is how you express it. So it could be that a person expressions of "mourning" may seem off to someone else. Some might mourn by crying, some by helping another, some by fixing something up, some by creating an alter for the loved one. Sometimes the mourning runs to something different as you heal, I think.
It may be that the LBS also has a change around the 3-4 year mark. I remember for the first year I was stalled. Could not do much of anything, which is why I drove off road. No choice but to engage. But I couldn't read, could not clean, could not create, didn't care. About the beginning of third year, I put up the first fake tree in the bedroom and it made me feel so much better. But then in standard life style, other stressors came into my life, one after the other. Honestly, if a lot of us looked at the last years we've endured with everything being in there, we've probably hit most of the major life stressors, and for myself it's no wonder my body rebelled and my brain shut down. For myself there was Death of a close family member, Marital separation, Divorce, Personal injury or illness (X2), then Death of a close family member again in less than four years. Add to that Change in health of family member,Change in financial state,Change in number of arguments with spouse, gaining a mortgage, having to go back to work after being not too employed for 20 + years, children leaving for college, paying for college, Spouse lost his job, spouse wrecked his car, changes in sleeping habits, changes in diet...I could go on and so could most everyone else here.
Then at some point, we get a new normal. I know recently I've certainly stepped up my game. It's now easier to let things go, I mean material things and emotional things. Grief paralyzed me for a while. Then I didn't know what to do with it because I just kept getting hit again and again, it's like I couldn't even come up for air. Complaining about it didn't help, I'm a doer, not a whiner. (That fixer tendency rears it's head). But feeling the grief, and then thinking "How can I honor this feeling?" has started to work. How can I honor the sadness that the children are no longer living here? Make this my sanctuary and a lovely place they want to come visit. How do I honor the grief over the death of my marriage? Create scrapbooks of the visual proof that we had a fabulous life and that even if he doesn't remember it, I do. And the children will, too, because I will have documented it. How do I honor my mother and her efforts (because she did the best she could dysfunctional as it was)? By doing better with my own children, which sometimes includes pinging them upside the head and letting them ping me upside the head.
Anyway, those are my own random thoughts. I should probably go to bed. Tomorrow I load up three cars of quality belongings to go to the second hand store. I WILL have new garage doors, and if I want them, I have to get the quality belongings everyone else left behind out of the way. Those surfboards may end up a table after all.
Stressful events listed at this site.
https://paindoctor.com/top-10-stressful-life-events-holmes-rahe-stress-scale/ (https://paindoctor.com/top-10-stressful-life-events-holmes-rahe-stress-scale/)
Death of a spouse (or child*): 100
Divorce: 73
Marital separation: 65
Imprisonment: 63
Death of a close family member: 63
Personal injury or illness: 53
Marriage: 50
Dismissal from work: 47
Marital reconciliation: 45
Retirement: 45
80% likelihood of illness for scores over 300
50% likelihood of illness for scores between 150-299
30% likelihood of illness for scores less than 150
-
That's exactly it, OR....how can I honour what I feel? And their presence in my life now that they are absent.
First year, overwhelmed. Second year, numb avoidance, hit and hit again. Third year, trying to fight my way through and flailing around trying to escape it. Fourth year now....really wanting to do what I need to move forward and the unfinished bits of grief come back with that. Read somewhere it is called Regrief and apparently very normal. Apart from RL folks who haven't experienced big loss and major life renovation :)....hate to think how many points I would have scored on the stressor test!
Yes, it feels like a need to honour my lost people and the old me even. Partly bc I don't want to forget things about them now that I am the only one left to remember some of these things. Partly as a way of saying a kind of thank you and goodbye which feels like a last bit of accepting the reality of their loss. And the permanence of it, that this is the new normal now. With my father, i got to say goodbye. I got to bury him. I got to give a eulogy. I got to listen to other people's memories. I got to mourn and to hold on to the bits of him in me. I didn't have the chance to do that with everything and everyone else.
So I've started a little memory book and when things pop up that I want to remember about any of them, I can write them down. Like a scrapbook too, some photos and little mementos. Lots of tears as I do it but good tears. Definitely more mourning than grief though as you say. Feels more constructive somehow.
-
Terra, yes you and me have both found EMDR helpful I think. Interested in what you say about 'active' grief work...can you say a bit more about what that has entailed for you?
Have others found other kinds of therapy useful for grief?
[...]
Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?
Treasur, it took a long time to isolate my father loss as the deepest and core grief. When he died, I was not permitted to express any of it. Even forty years later, I’m punished and shut out for speaking my feelings about my dad.
That’s been cruel and ridiculous for decades. What do you do when it’s your own mother and family ostracizing you — for having legitimate feelings, and legitimate need to express the anguish, fear, bewilderment, etc. and to receive support or comfort for that?
I received the total opposite. So made a choice to end all relationship to my mother and others in the family. That was the first work: finding a way to end a really unhealthy dynamic.
The second work was to sit with the father loss grief and really feel it, for the first time in my life, now that I’d carved a protected space for it. And I was ready to defend and protect that new space at all costs, no matter what anyone thought or said. Between h’s moveaway BD and the various destructive events with my FOO that same year, I was not going to survive another year if I didn’t at least get clear on the father loss grief.
This year was the first time I could even think “I miss my dad” without some kind of external recrimination. The next step was to feel that, both the missing him and the new safety of being able to think it without any of the usual players seeing it on my face and knocking me around about it.
And after sitting with these feelings a while, I carefully said it out loud, to myself: “I miss my dad.”
I really miss my dad.
Saying it out loud, finally, was a real game changer. That was the third work, actively pronouncing those syllables and doing so until it was clear the truth is mine to say out loud and to say with authority every time I feel the need to express that pain. Maybe that’s silly, or minor to someone else. But it was important to get to the actual saying of it, and repeating it, because for decades it was trapped and stuck and externally disallowed.
This exercise resulted in a lot of very clear anger at those who blocked my grief expression over the years. H is one of them, but as with my grief hierarchy, there is an anger hierarchy. The bulk of my anger is at my mother. She took pleasure in punishing the father loss grief and still did, decades later. The last punishing was the last straw. As a mother myself, I can’t see any scenario in which I would ever cause my own daughter this level of derangement even once. It is very specifically about my father loss and now that I’ve said my fact aloud and finally own it, it won’t be silenced or shut down or disallowed ever again. It shouldn’t have been in the first place. And a mother should not have done it.
Maybe the anger placement was fourth active work. But beyond that, I lose count.
The next work was to revisit the agent of my father’s death. That required review of old files and narrowing down a search until I located that person. I am satisfied with the result but had to sit with that a long while also. And then it was time for collecting records.
The records collection task has been multi-layered and involves a few locales and streams of information that I have to parse and then write and present. Sometimes out of area, so, planning trips and itineraries and readying myself for those formal arenas. And that maybe doesn’t sound like grief work. Most people outside those systems or tasks think it’s much smaller or easier than it is. It occurred to me recently that these people probably don’t have experience with that specific loss topic (yet) or with the systems I need to work with to get answers or resolution or to move forward. So another grief task is identifying how much to even say to anyone, how to say it, and how to identify who is safe to say it to.
Most of the active grief work is sitting with the feelings and really feeling them. Noticing whether they are articulate, or non-verbal, and when it’s non-verbal, why is that different? And is there a physical gesture or action that might express the feelings that don’t have words? And if there is a physical gesture or action that might express a non-verbal feeling, make the gesture or take that action. The grief has to be expressed and let out. It can’t be locked and stuck anymore.
All of that can take a long time, and I have given myself carte blanche this whole year to just grieve. Have forfeited paid employment to do so, and have no regrets about that at all.
Most of my FOO and also h and maybe really anyone would consider this all “navel gazing” or melodramatic, or victim behavior, and highly irresponsible of me. I know exactly what it is and this year I won’t be spoken against. It’s my right to grieve and no one is going to hinder it. I won’t survive functionally if I don’t complete this work.
One last or crucial part of the active work is to seek and secure support people who can help, hold place, companion you, and/or comfort you as you move through your grief experiences, actions, and expression. Grief is NOT something we have to do alone.
Where you asked about other helpful therapies, it can be helpful to look at your total body of grief and at the timeline of losses in your overall life, age 0 to present. A genogram and a 1:1 track with “grief recovery method” specialist helped me winnow out what deserved my especial attention and what did not, and why.
I will tell you, key people in my life all HATE that I feel it is important to attend my own grief. My siblings, D15, and two or three friends are the only ones supporting it.
Your memory books sound so soothing and valuable beyond words. I love that you have found that action and are doing the work this way. I hope I can get to that point; in the meantime, I seem to be in movement a lot so am taking photos and collecting bits of moments, so that when the time comes, I can put something together visually for myself, the whole picture.
-
Strangely terra I said out loud too for the first time since Jan 2016 'I miss my mum'....it sounds small as you say but it was a big deal to me. Even though there was no one to hear me. But just saying it feels like taking a plug out of a sink....almost giving myself permission to mourn for the mum I had bc I reallly do miss her.
Disenfranchised grief, grief that isn't 'allowed' or 'acerptable', can keep us stuck I think bc it stops us mourning. That's a challenge probably for a lot of LBS. Plus the ambiguity of losing a loved one who is here but not in some way or who left without a certain end or left mentally even if they are there physically...the uncertainty can keep us stuck too probably.
-
Just catching up Treasur.... There is a lot of 'stuff' in this thread. I am up to my neck with my "Must Do" list otherwise I would post more frequently.
I am reading along but time is limited for posting. A few brief comments for now.
From Treasur:
I am so sorry, Anon, for the loss of your mother followed by BD. It must have been unimaginably hard to cope with both in a healthy way. Do you think BD affected how you coped with your mother's death? Or vice versa?
For most of her life my mother was very difficult not just with her family but with almost everyone. Having her as a parent was hard. I saw her mean side pretty much every day and her soft loving side maybe,,, once a week or less. She was just so difficult to get along with. We all figured she had some kind of personality disorder - Narcissism or BPD? Both? Around 85 yrs she showed the first signs of dementia. Things got much worse dealing with her for the next few years. It didn't surprise anyone really. Me and the rest of the family became outcasts in her life. A few years of this then she was admitted to long term care. It was there she was given medication to ease the dementia symptoms. They worked somewhat but an unexpected benefit from those meds was this. Her soft and loving side came out and stayed out. Her sourness disappeared. She was alert and eager for some mother/daughter conversation. She was wonderful. We had real conversations for the first time I can remember. I was able to confide in her and share with her my life and she loved every minute of our time together. It was the most incredible gift to have this side of my mother for the last 6 months or her life. Prior to that, my experience with her my entire life was caustic, acrimonious, and I had a tough time visiting her for more than 3 days at a time. One day the nurse referred to her as the most lovely soul and they all loved her. I completely agreed she was lovely but I did say she hadn't been this way prior to coming to the care centre and described the decades long difficulty we all had with her. The nurse told me that very often people go for years with untreated mental illness and what I saw with my mother wasn't all that unusual. The dementia medication likely altered her brain chemistry enough to suppress whatever it was that made her so difficult over the years. Whatever it was I was grateful for these last 6 months with her. She passed away unexpectedly although at her age this often happens.
After my mother passed away, I was busy for several weeks preparing for her memorial service. It was beautiful and was a real honor to her. Many of her friends told me they would love if their family did a similar memorial when it was there time. I grieved of course but not fully. I had too much to do until after the service.
Then I got BD'd 6 weeks later and my grieving, mourning, honoring my mother was completely sidelined and shelved. In an instant my grieving, mourning came to an abrupt halt while I dealt with my crisis as a LBS. I know I am not done grieving her but I am also not ready to bring that down from the shelf and resume it. My grief for the loss of my life as I knew it has overshadowed pretty much everything. I am much better but I am also still seriously affected by the horror of what happened to me. How long I wonder before I can feel again the other things I need to feel. I just feel numb for now about her passing,,, as if I don't have the energy to process the grief work of my blown up life and her passing at the same time. I'm sure it will come one day though. Before MLC I smiled when thinking of my mother in those last 6 months. I had 6 weeks of that before MLC hit and took that pleasure away from me. I cry thinking about it and I feel horrible that the MLC bomb derailed the grieving for my mother. I also resent my h for the insensitivity and cruelty to do that to me in those early weeks after her passing. I was already suffering her loss and he intentionally piled on top of that the horror of MLC. I think back to those early days after BD and like most of us I wonder how on earth I managed to survive. The loss was just so enormous.
Okay,, ,that took longer to type out than I thought - and my To Do list in not just calling me but hollering. Thanks Treasur for opening up this topic. It really helped to consider that there is still more grieving to come where my mother is concerned.
-
I'm glad that the universe gave you those last few months of a different kind of connection with your mother, Anon. I had something similar with mine at Christmas last and it felt like a real gift.
I think you are not alone here in having the grieving process curtailed or shelved by the impact of BD and the ensuing WTF stuff. We only have so much emotional bandwidth don't we? And that it is healthy to accept that there may be mourning yet to do when you are ready to do it.
And yes it is tremendously cruel to be devalued and discarded when we are bereaved. Or indeed seriously ill. Both seem to be not uncommon for LBS. I cycle between disbelief and anger that my xh was capable of that and acknowledgement that whatever happened to him simply made everything and everyone else irrelevant to him. Including my parents who loved him and who he had loved for years. The people in his new life of course don't expect anything else, don't see it as important or a red flag in any way...they should of course bc the ability to treat others that way after years of connection is not a good sign is it? But he/they will learn that for themselves I guess. Or not.
Can't understand it....but it was brutal to experience when I was already so vulnerable. And looking back, my bereavement undoubtedly affected my ability to cope with what happened. I think it delayed my capacity to face the hard facts as I would have done had my situation been different...if only actually bc I would have had a support steam that I did not have. I can't change that. And it is the hardest thing to even try to forgive tbh...I may never be able to do so and accepting the cruelty of it did force me to see my then h with a different lens, to respect him less as a person tbh, almost to be disgusted.. Probably just one more reason why NC was a good choice for my healing.
But I think grief time...bc it seems to work differently doesn't it?...does stretch until we can find a way to accept and make peace with the hard realities. I have found that I accepted reality to a point but there was/is a bit of me that simply did not want to. I could accept the loss I suppose but wasn't quite ready to say some kind of final goodbye bc I really didn't want to do that. Passive acceptance felt do-able; active embracing felt impossible. Choosing to say Goodbye to my people but also to that bit of my life and the bit of me that was a much-loved daughter and a wife who had not experienced what I have now experienced.
I have just given mego the equivalent of a wet fish slap to the head about the need to face real facts in order to move forward. Much as we don't want to accept them. Probably a waste of time and words. But it is no less true for where I am and where many of us reach after the storm eases.
-
Two books I highly recommend are The Grief Recovery Handbook, James and Friedman, and Eve Wood's, The Gift of Betrayal. Somewhat off-topic, but helpful is Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach, and Giving the Love that Heals, by Harvill Hendrix and his wife.
Ten years later, I STILL keep these in my nightstand and go back over certain sections when I need to. I think if it's easy to stop grieving a loss, you never really valued what you had... Most "normal" grief subsides because you can treasure fond memories. Losing parents, and other loved ones, moving away from friends, and old co-workers, those are all normal grief. The grief that comes with having the person you most love and trust rip away EVERYTHING you thought you knew is different. When you can't trust than any of your recollections are real or valid, all you can do is grieve, and, hopefully, forgive, and not your wayward spouse, but yourself. You have to grieve the loss of the person you were, the naive and trusting one, and if you have children, the loss of their innocence and the family you were supposed to have, forever. And you have to forgive, really, truly forgive yourself for even thinking any of it was your fault, that you should have, could have, would have know better, done differently.
It's that endless cycle, but it does get better and easier. The pain gets less acute, but there will be times when it still stabs you in the heart. Some of them are obvious--weddings, funerals, graduations. But others will be weird and unexpected. So, it helps to have some mantra, or something to help you through. That is why I love Tara Brach so much. Now I can recognize when the grief or fear are coming and I know to breathe, acknowledge the feelings, and let them go, fully respecting myself and everyone else in the process, and knowing that I still get to decide to make a new past that I can celebrate in place of the grief.
Love and light, ll
-
For me when I think of Grief it is the status /feeling - being struck down by the horror of it all, the shock, the denial, the curling up into a ball screaming, the not being able to bear it. When I think of Mourning I think of acceptance the loss and moving through the mine field of feelings trying to find my way out.
Treasure - you hit a nerve when you said that you haven't decided decided on "Living' yet - that is exactly what I feel. I am not suicidal and have good days, but I do not have the 'joy de vivre' -- I just couldn't put it in words as well as you. I have not recommitted myself to life. Strangely it feels good just saying that out loud. That's what's still missing....I have not recommitted myself.
I also belief that we must mourn each loss in our life or it will come back trifold later on. My father left us when I was 14 and completely cut us out of his life. My mother then turned to alcohol, so she was absent for most of my teen years as well. I never thought to actually mourn either one of those losses. I thought I was fine and it was just life and move on sister.
Only after BD and trying to wrap my head around why a man leaving me devastated me the way it did, did I realize and admit to myself that those were losses and I never mourned them.
So, then I had to now grieve the loss of the three most important people in my life.
Slowly but surely I am dissecting each loss and trying to work through it.
-
A rather lovely conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper about the reality of how grief changes you https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQ
-
Oh, wow. That one is well worth the time to watch and listen.
That is probably the most intelligent discussion of grief I have ever heard.
Treasur, thank you. This one comes at exactly the right time for me.
-
And this https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/09/rev-richard-coles-on-losing-his-partner-davidmy-life-is-not-over-but-it-feels-like-it-is-sometimes
Particularly for any newbie here in the first year or so post BD, maybe a bit longer.
Please honour that part of what you are feeling is grief. And that grief makes us all a bit bonkers in some strange ways for a little while, just as the article describes so well
-
I'm not sure this is necessarily going to be a very popular POV - and maybe it isn't true for everyone here on HS - but a few recent posts I have read have confirmed my honest belief that part of the LBS process is to accept that you have lost things. Sometimes a lot of things. And that some of those losses are big enough to be permanent.
Doesn't mean that you can't find a way to live well after those losses, but it will be different regardless of what happens in the future. I wish it weren't so but for many of us, it just is how it is.
I don't know how anyone recovers from loss without grieving. And I don't know how anyone grieves without first eventually accepting the reality of the loss.
But grieving is truly awful and we human beings have a lot of little ways that our head and heart tries to avoid having to do it. Anger. Denial. Magical 'if x then y' thinking. Distractions. Numbing our emotions. Avoidance. Hanging our hats on unlikely outcomes or beliefs with poor odds but a comforting sense of hope or control. In a way, you have to admire how creative we humans can be right?
I think most of us go through a period of time post BD when we simply cannot bear to look at the reality of what we have lost. Maybe for a while it is too early to even see all of our real losses. We do that in different ways and for different periods of time. But the losses are still real and still there, so eventually most of us run out of road and grief finds us anyway.
The danger it seems to me is that some of our beliefs about MLC and standing and reconnection can also morph into ways of avoiding grieving. And the reality that, even for those who reconnect or rebuild their marriages, there are still losses to grieve. Some small, some great. Clocks that can't be turned back. Time that can't be retrieved. Events that can't be unhappened. Outcomes that can't be undone. I don't think I have seen one LBS who has reconnected or reconciled, no matter how worthwhile they think it has been, who does not acknowledge that there have been losses also. Or one story of a recovered LBS who has rebuilt a good life without their spouse that they feel happy with who would not also say the same. Maybe not all of those losses were directly a function of your spouse's behaviour even, some might be consequences of your own or just the unfolding of events. Still losses though.
Some of our HS 'mantra' words like let go, detach, acceptance etc and 2x4s given and resisted are imho a function of people being at different stages in their perspective on loss and their readiness to grieve for those losses. Whatever path people choose - standing or not - I honestly believe that we can't begin to recover until we can look honestly at our losses and let grief do its' work. And it is entirely understandable why people sometimes really want to do almost anything they can to avoid that. Jmo.
-
Treasur: what a great thread and posts. So spot on imho.
I am all for the fact that we have a process. And that no one should be pushed into anything they are not ready for. But I also think to mislead by saying “all is well, take any amount of time staying in pain and delusion” is not great. We tend to have a fear of change, any change. Good or bad. So if we don’t give change a value like “loss” or “gain” at least we can all begin by understanding that once MLC hits our loved ones THINGS HAVE CHANGED. To try to avoid this reality is a little bit like sliding down a icy slide but trying to stop it by digging your fingernails in. Nothing changes except more pain and damage.
And grieving is an important and interesting process. We all know the stages of grieving. If we don’t fight it our minds will allow the bits in as we can deal with it. So yes denial is a very important part of grieving. It is protective before we can deal with it. Also the swinging between excepting what has happened and then falling into thinking nothing has changed is also a coping mechanism. But if we are not fighting the change, if we are not stuck our trajectory will tell us. Its not about how fast we get there, or whether or not we take steps back, but is our overall trajectory towards realizing change, grieving and healing.
I always use the rigidity test. The more rigid someone is, the tighter then hold on to beliefs, the more they repeat and argue the more it indicates they are not coping. Generally healing, grieving and coping are quiet, flexible and calm in a strange way. They are the opposite of fighting something.
Change is the only constant in life.
-
Treasur, I understand what you're saying but I think the problem with grieving an MLC loss is that it's a different type of loss and, I believe, a more difficult one to grieve and recover from. What may look like avoidance or an extended period of denial is due to the ambiguous nature of the loss. Here's a pretty good article about ambiguous grief.
"In contrast to anticipatory grief, there are times in life when someone we love becomes someone we barely recognize. The person is still physically with us, but psychologically they are gone. There are a range of reasons this can happen. Some of the most common are things like addiction, dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and mental illness. If you have never lived through loving someone in such a situation, this can be hard to understand. The person you love is still there, sometimes they ‘look’ sick, sometimes they don’t. But regardless of how they look, they do things they would never have done, they say things they would never have said, treat you in ways they never would have treated you, and they are not there for you in ways they previously were. This is sometimes referred to as “ambiguous grief” or “ambiguous loss”."
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/ (https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/)
-
I would absolutely agree, Brain, and I'm sorry if i implied otherwise.
Tbh I have found that there are different losses and different kinds of grief as I have stumbled along, lots of layers. And multiple losses and multiple kinds of grieving all jumbled up together.
My point I suppose was really twofold.
One is that grieving is hard, intensely personal and messy, so no wonder it seems to take much longer than we think.
Two is that you can't grieve without a certain amount of looking at the reality of what is lost, and that it is normal to get stuck in ways that avoid that sometimes.
Finding the courage to grieve is not easy but imho it is part of the LBS process which we reach in our own time.
-
IMO, part of the difficulty with grieving the loss of your marriage, best friend, half your financials, what have you is that in the case of MLC, the rest of the norm look at it as "just a divorce". When did getting a divorce become not a big deal? And yet, that seems to be the case.
With alzheimer's, alcoholism, any mental illness, othet people have sympathy or empathy. It's why we flock here, imo. Grieving can be done on one's own, but grieving with the validation of someone who gets WHY you are grieving quickens the grieving process. If you burst out crying over your situation in a group of friends, and everyone around you looks like you have lost your mind, do you feel your grief had been acknowledged or judged? And if judged, then do you have a right to grieve? And if you have no right to grieve, how will it ever get processed?
So often, we (the generic we) justify that our loss is not so bad, it could have been worse, blah,blah,blah. We've either been conditioned to suck it up and trudge on through, or to minimize our own feelings. For some of us, we go through life like emotional zombies. We know we feel bad, feel a loss, but maybe it's kind of a familiar feeling. Do we grieve something that seems so familiar? Do we grieve that we have no feeling to grieve if that should end up the case? Do we grieve that we don't have the emotional intelligence to know we were supposed to grieve? It piles on at times, so much so that a person might become numb and be unable to grieve at that time, even if loss is recognized.
So many losses are intangible. The feeling of safety. Knowing someone has your back. The expectation of a "How's your day going?" text. Looking at relationships differently. The fact that you can no longer retire. Trying to identify them is often like grasping at will-o the wisps.
Life, the world and everything is messy. If only 42 could be the answer.
-
IMO, part of the difficulty with grieving the loss of your marriage, best friend, half your financials, what have you is that in the case of MLC, the rest of the norm look at it as "just a divorce". When did getting a divorce become not a big deal? And yet, that seems to be the case.
With alzheimer's, alcoholism, any mental illness, othet people have sympathy or empathy. It's why we flock here, imo. Grieving can be done on one's own, but grieving with the validation of someone who gets WHY you are grieving quickens the grieving process. If you burst out crying over your situation in a group of friends, and everyone around you looks like you have lost your mind, do you feel your grief had been acknowledged or judged? And if judged, then do you have a right to grieve? And if you have no right to grieve, how will it ever get processed?
So often, we (the generic we) justify that our loss is not so bad, it could have been worse, blah,blah,blah. We've either been conditioned to suck it up and trudge on through, or to minimize our own feelings. For some of us, we go through life like emotional zombies. We know we feel bad, feel a loss, but maybe it's kind of a familiar feeling. Do we grieve something that seems so familiar? Do we grieve that we have no feeling to grieve if that should end up the case? Do we grieve that we don't have the emotional intelligence to know we were supposed to grieve? It piles on at times, so much so that a person might become numb and be unable to grieve at that time, even if loss is recognized.
So many losses are intangible. The feeling of safety. Knowing someone has your back. The expectation of a "How's your day going?" text. Looking at relationships differently. The fact that you can no longer retire. Trying to identify them is often like grasping at will-o the wisps.
Life, the world and everything is messy. If only 42 could be the answer.
Yes! Thank you for putting this into words. I have a work friend whose husband tragically died recently. Every day she posts a memory on FB and shares stories of their life together. She mourns the loss of her H openly and publicly. People accept that she is grieving and that she will for a long time. If I did the same I would be viewed as a nutter. For some reason if you are betrayed you are expected to be able to ‘get over it’ all very quickly. It’s quite bizarre when you think about it.