Here are the stages of grief; I'll leave it to you to decide which stage you're in:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
It's not a simple linear process; you can move in and out of the various stages, or up and down the ladder.
When you arrive at acceptance, you've finished your grieving.
"Your ability to take action, be effective, influence your own life, and assume responsibility for your behavior are important elements in what you bring to a relationship. This sense of agency is essential for you to feel in control of your life: to believe in your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks or situations. Having a sense of agency influences your stability as a separate person; it is your capacity to be ps
Rebound relationships are fuelled by a desperate attempt to escape the pain caused by loss.
"Smallness, dependence, separateness, feeling you have injured your good object, are all fairly obvious to the eye and not easily denied if one is facing reality. But reality is pretty painful much of the time in childhood, even when you have an intact family that is living harmoniously. Most children naturally gravitate to wishful ideas, the most fundamental of all being the idea that there is magic,
A lot of what we have inside us - what we feel, what resonates for us, doesn't seem to make sense when forced into these little packages called words and dropped into the consensus reality. That doesn't mean that they are untrue or nonsensical. It just means that they can't survive the descent into language undiminished.
You have to set them free:
"I release you to live your life the way you want to. You're free. I'm not holding you."
You don't say that out loud.
You say it on the inside.
You have to mean it.
Most of them are very vulnerable people, with a deep, and long-standing emotional fragility.
The fragility doesn't get mentioned, but its easy to see.
That is what most OM home in on and exploit.
They value it.
After my one and only painful breakup, I cried every day for six months. Not snuffly little sobs, but crying that involved my whole body almost convulsing. I felt like a ghost, disconnected from everything and everyone. I wasn't sure that I even wanted to get better.
After about 8 months, the crying became less frequent. I found a good therapist and decided I wanted to live, even though I wasn't sure if enough of me could be scraped together to build a functioning person from.
Kept going
There's an awful lot to be said for stoic acceptance:
"This is not what I want. It is the opposite of what I want, but I will accept it, and endure the pain which comes with it."
Easier said than done, but the act of desperately trying to evade the pain only brings more pain.
1. You're still in the crisis phase - you are very hurt, disappointed and angry, but the intensity of your feelings will reduce.
2. Don't suppress your feelings, or tell yourself that you shouldn't be feeling what you're feeling - that never helps.
3. Externalise your feelings by writing them down, talking to a trustworthy person, or using any other mode of expression that feels right.
4. Remind yourself frequently that you can and will have a good life without this person.
5. Tell y
We see what we see because of who we are.
What is seen depends on who is looking, why they are looking, and what they are looking for.
And then we become what we see.
*Don't try to avoid your thoughts and feelings. That resistance just creates conflict and tension inside of you.
Allow your thoughts to come and go naturally, and do the same with your feelings.
You will find that there are nuggets of understanding and realisation in there which will help with your recovery.
If you block the painful feelings, you are at the same time blocking any good feelings which are being formed.
What you resist, persists.
"Always and everywhere, remember yourself."
Pay attention to yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your needs, things that make you feel good, your hopes, your fears, your dreams.
You are the centre of your world, not anybody else.
Be there, with yourself, at the centre.
This is not selfishness.
This is self-awareness.
Peace.
If you feel bad and look at the past, the past looks bad.
If you feel good and look at the past, the past looks ok.
If you feel bad and imagine the future, the future looks bad.
If you feel good and imagine the future, the future looks ok.
Life is about how you feel now.
For some reason, when you were with her/him, you chose to have her/him as the exact centre of your universe.
You were in orbit around her/him.
Then he/she was gone, and you had nothing to orbit.
Now you have to place the centre of your universe inside yourself.
Once you have done that, the empty place inside you will no longer be empty, and you will begin to enjoy life again.
No relationship is older than one day.
They need to be refreshed every day with a new investment of love, commitment, and passion.
If they aren't, they either die, or become stunted from a lack of feeding.
Sometimes people just forget to invest.
All that any of us can do is to keep pouring the best of ourselves into our relationships, day after day.
At first that sounds like a tall order, but it isn't really, because all we have to deal with is one day.
"Our search for such [moral] principles can start with . . . the unconditional imperative to acknowledge every person as a person. If we ask for the contents given by this absolute, we find, first, something negative—the command not to treat a person as a thing. This seems little, but it is much. It is the core of the principle of justice."
- Paul Tillich.
To part now and parting now,
Never to meet again;
To have done for ever; I and thou,
With joy, and so with pain.
It is too hard, too hard to meet
If we trust love no more;
Those other meetings were too sweet
That went before.
And I would have, now love is over,
An end to all, an end:
I cannot, having been your lover,
Stoop to become your friend.
— ARTHUR SYMONS.
