The Seven Stages of Grief--repulsemonkey gets personal Jan 04 '01    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Four weeks ago I split up with the love of my young life. The break-up was both amicable (at the time) and necessary… but that doesn’t make it any easier. A couple days afterward, I put a checklist up on my wall containing the seven stages of grief as I knew them: Shock, Denial, Bargaining, Fear, Anger, Despair, and Acceptance. I knew about these stages as an idea, but hadn’t studied them in depth; didn’t know the theory behind them; didn’t even know if I really believed in them. To me, at the time, hanging a checklist on my wall was a joke, a way to keep self-aware through a time I knew my body and mind would be reacting in ways that I didn’t know it could. During this time when I would be hurting in places I didn’t know existed within myself, knew I needed to keep my sense of humor. It became an obsession. I always knew where I was on the chart, and always talked about myself in terms of that stage. And, man, did I start to believe. I witnessed a friend at my work travel from Denial to Bargaining over the course of a day—that was my first clue into the power of these stages. She’d just ended a relationship with a guy she assumed she would marry and spend the rest of her life with. That morning, she showed up positive she didn’t need him in her life. By 3:00, she was calling him to try and get back together. And then I started feeling myself transforming as well, and I monitored my shifts from Fear to Anger to Despair and finally to Acceptance. Along the way, I not only learned about the stages, but about myself—the person I am; the person I want to be. Now, on perhaps the most difficult and joyous day I’ve had since the break-up, I woke up compelled to write out my journey. SHOCK I’ve got some bad news: It’s never a good time for a break-up. NEVER. You can never prepare yourself for grief, and attempting to do so only takes away from enjoying the moment itself. I spent the length of my relationship knowing I was going to get my heart broken. I made every attempt to protect myself, because I didn’t want to get hurt. Because I didn’t want her to have that power over me which too many women had before. So I spent a year, assured in the fact that I was not going to get hurt—but at the sacrifice of pleasure. I prevented myself from honestly communicating, from enjoying myself for fear that someday that joy would end, from treating her with the openness and vulnerability that she deserved. I refused to be affected by love, and chose instead to live outside of it. So when the break-up came, my body took a couple of days to absorb it. The anticipation that I’d been wallowing in for the past year only served me with feelings of "God, is this finally, really happening?" (Anxiety, folks, is NOT your friend.) I found myself paralyzed, unsure of what to do, where to go, who to talk to. I bumped into walls and furniture in my daze. I began to be unable to sleep. And the only thing that made the shock go away was Denial. DENIAL "I’m fine. Just fine. Everything’s fine." Wearing a genuine smile and ignoring the empty pit in your stomach. Denial is bliss. There needs to be a period in which your body refuses to accept the change. When you say to yourself, "This is great! I can kiss new girls! I can spend more time with my friends! I don’t have to be responsible for anyone besides myself!" and believe it because, at the time, your logic seems to make sense. The problem with Denial is this: You know that it will end, and it becomes a futile exercise in frantically attempting to milk every ounce of enjoyment out of those final moments before you plummet into the less blissful stages of grief. But all the while, you can feel the heartbreak coming, creeping at you like a fungus running along a brick wall—if you stare for long enough, you can watch it grow. And so the period of Denial remains one of polarities: bliss tempered with anxiety and self-awareness. BARGAINING I carried the misconception, as many do, that Bargaining consists only of begging the other person to come back. "I’ll never do that," I thought, "My pride’s too great. If she wants to leave, she wants to leave, there’s nothing I can do or say to make her want to come back if she doesn’t want to. I don’t want to be a pest. If she doesn’t want to come back, then she’s not good enough for me anyway, I’m not going to beg." No, Bargaining has nothing to do with the other person. Rather, Bargaining is the first true realization of the situation at hand, and your attempt to mold it and adapt the circumstances to the way you want them to be. The child who asks God for his dead parents back. The belief that, if I just wait by the phone long enough, she’ll call. These are the symptoms of Bargaining… FEAR …and when you realize that no amount of Bargaining will change the situation at hand, the seven stages of grief begin to get not so pretty. You lose faith in your ability to effect the world around you, and you shudder at the implications of that thought. "If she doesn’t want me, and I can’t do anything to get her to want me, how will anybody want me ever again?" Fear controls you. Fear dominates your actions, forces you out to the bars in hopes of meeting someone new right away, forces you into the arms of another because you can’t be alone. At the exact same time, it prevents you from making decisions as to what to do now, because you might make the wrong one. Fear, if you are not aware of it and pushing back at it with every ounce of energy you possess, will inhabit you and prevent you from acting. The acceptance that fear exists within you, and that you have the power to overcome it with enough work, is the only way to combat it. Coping with Fear requires the confidence to make the harder choice: resist using other people for self-satisfaction, allow yourself to experience new things and new feelings, allow things like Love to affect you, despite your fears—because if you don’t control them, they will control you. ANGER Fear gives way to blame. Always. Because it’s easier to lash out at the people and the world around you, than it is to take responsibility for your own actions. For me, it became all the other person’s fault. "How could she be so selfish as to leave me when I need her MOST? How could she do that?" It didn’t occur to me that she could be making the best choice for both of us, and I couldn’t understand my own participation in the relationship’s demise—but, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. She couldn’t lie to me without me choosing to accept the lie. I couldn’t protect myself without pushing her away. And we wouldn’t have broken up if both of us hadn’t needed to break-up, deep down—painful as it may be. Anger, and blame only prevent you from taking responsibility for your own actions, and there’s an amazing strength in accepting responsibility for your own actions. DESPAIR Despair hurts. There’s no getting around it. Despair found me curled up in my bed on a cold night with no covers in physical pain trembling in every part of my body. Nauseous. Unable to sleep. Unable to eat. Unable to move. Despair is dangerous because you run the greatest risk of hurting the people around you, because you’re in so much pain yourself. I said hurtful things in the name of "What’s best for me" because, at once, all the fear and anger catches up with you and, in one last attempt to dampen the pain for yourself, you feel the need to inflict pain on others. The key to pulling yourself out of Despair is finding a source of hope. I found mine in my friends—the people who loved me enough to both be honest with me about how I was acting and also cared enough to push me toward happiness. I imagine hope can be found elsewhere: family, work, art. But hope is the only thing that will pull you through the gut-wrenching insomnia that Despair brings. The beauty of it is: Despair drives you to learn an unimaginable amount about yourself. You’re an open wound, and it’s within your power to heal yourself, you just have to figure out how. In the process of figuring out how, you explore parts of yourself that Fear prevented you from even thinking about. This is how we mature. ACCEPTANCE Ah, Acceptance: The light at the end of the tunnel. I used to think that Acceptance was the end of the seven stages of grief, the point at which all the pain ends and you can move on with your life. I used to think that Acceptance would be the easiest phase. Now that I find myself in Acceptance, I know that it will be the hardest phase. Acceptance is the acknowledgement of the problem—without judgement, without blame, without Fear or Anger or Despair—and the willingness to work through the problem in a productive manner. My acceptance is this: "I still love Julie. But I have to move on. I can and will continue to love her for the rest of my life. And because of this love, I must acknowledge the fact that I cannot continue to be in a relationship with her. Nor her, me." Acceptance is so difficult because it requires the strength to allow the grief to effect you, to carry it with you and let it effect you every day in a positive way. The difficulty comes from wanting to protect yourself, wanting to not be affected by pain because you think it makes you stronger. This is something I have been very guilty of. But the sad truth is that if you do not allow yourself to be effected by pain, you cannot allow yourself to be effected by joy or love, for fear that it will only lead to pain. Acceptance is the courage to bare that pain, and know that it will only lead to joy and love in the future. I’m so lucky. Somehow, I traveled through these stages at an accelerated pace. So often have I seen my friends wallow in their Despair or become controlled by Fear. I, myself, have clutched onto Anger from a relationship I had back in high school, and, as a result, have never truly gotten over it. I think my mild obsession with the seven stages of grief gave me a path to travel down—one of self-discovery and self-improvement. I had something to work toward and will work toward for the rest of my life. There’s a sadness in the fact that I had to go through all of this to realize how in love I truly was. But, I know that I have finally let this love effect me, and I will carry it with me for the rest of my life. And, someday, I’ll be able to sleep again. And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

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