I feel like this sentiment, and especially recognizing and riding the "ebbing and flowing nature of feelings" is what gets me through every day in my own experience, more than any other piece of advice or any other factor.
Whoever "Karen" is... thanks for writing this, and I hope my repost helps someone else along the way too.
Karen Says [in response to the blog post at http://mightygirl.com/2012/06/26/divorce-and-grief/]:
Lots of good insights here and I don’t know if I can add anything brilliant, but I will join the chorus anyway!
I’m on my third marriage, so I know this song far too well. I married far too young and divorced within a year. I felt sad and ashamed, but the relationship was too brief (for me anyway) to feel that much loss. My second relationship cratered 2 years into the marriage, ending 7 years after we started, and to this day it was the darkest two years of my entire life. I felt like I was losing everything, and in a way I was – just like so many people here, what I lost was my entire mental and emotional understanding of who I was and how my life worked. This is absolutely a death, if not a physical death – the loss of identity that comes with the dissolution of a major relationship is a death that is unlike any other.
Not more or worse, obviously – I’m sorry that people misunderstood your comparison there, because it was certainly clear to me. There are all kinds of deaths, we all go through them all the time, and it’s an accurate term. The concept of death isn’t remotely limited to the physical death of a person. For most of us, that is the worst form of death, but not for everyone, so I will join the ranks of those respectfully suggesting that we each own our experience and not try to impose our definitions on other people.
Again, many others have hit on this – the death is of identity and expectations, which cuts deeper than most of us ever expect. Very few people really understand how much their expectations of the future shape them, and the loss of the entire landscape of your life when your expectations explode is terrifying in a way that’s very hard to put into words. You literally don’t know who you are anymore – that’s how our identity as a partner (particularly a spouse) is woven through our being. That thread gets pulled and suddenly we’re just a collection of parts, falling to the ground, nothing connecting to anything else like it used to. Who knew all that was bound together by that thread, that word?
There’s always more there than we think at first, and usually the new entity that arises when the parts grow back together is a better one, but she’s indisputably different, and it’s a process that never truly “finishes”. I agree with everyone else that a separation of this magnitude diminishes over time but may not ever go away entirely – I think it’s a “long tail” type of thing, and that seems to be consistent with all major loss. I’m not sure it’s fair to ever expect anyone to “be over” something in the sense that it never hurts ever again in any way, for the rest of your life.
That being said, others have pointed out the real danger in nursing our wounds, too. I don’t get the impression (from this distant vantage point anyway) that you’re prone to that, but a lot of us do hang on to the hurt a long time past when it’s beneficial.
I think of our emotions as the tides of our oceanic beings, but our culture doesn’t support the “ebbing and flowing” nature of feelings (as someone else commented). We’re supposed to “manage” our emotions and keep them linear and organized, they’re supposed to be good servants to our busy little minds, and they must above all never be inconvenient.
I have never known this to work for anyone.
Letting those surges come up, and then fall back again, in their own time and to their own height, as much as possible seems to be a key element to healing. Clearly there are times we can’t just let our emotions do as they will, but those times are rarer than most of us believe. It’s also important to keep enough of a “watcher mind” to insure that you’re not getting into genuinely dangerous territory – if the ebbs get deeper and deeper, or start to outnumber the flows by an increasing amount, it’s important to change course and get help. If you’re basically functional, though, make as much room in yourself as you can to just let those tides come and go. You don’t need to do anything in response, almost always, and not blocking them, judging them, or trying to escape from them lets the emotions actually move through less destructively.
Beyond that, caring for ourselves in whatever positive ways we can is essential, but that’s so personal it’s hard to advise – each of us finds comfort and fortitude in such different things. The common elements of really understanding the magnitude of the loss and disorientation helps to give us permission to take as long as we need to take, and letting the emotions come up without fighting them, judging them, or needing to react to them is like emotional cleansing. Get feedback to make sure we’re not stuck in the hurt, comfort and tend to ourselves in whatever way works for us, and that’s about all any of us can do, I think.
Well, one more thing – we can share our own stories if we’re able, so that we can share the pain and share the fact that it always does get better. I’ll quote one of my favorite writers, Spider Robinson, who based his life and writing on the belief that “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy increased.” May that always be true for all of us.
