[Treasur]

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

[Treasur]

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.

[marvin4242]

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.

[MyBrainIsBroken]

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/

[Treasur]

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.

[OffRoad]

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.

[Evermore]

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.