Without Acceptance You Cannot Process Grief
The death of a loved one, the end of a relationship or many other difficult situations that can arise, all have something in common: there will be grieving. However, sometimes we get stuck in that process. Because we forget that grieving is not possible without first accepting the grief and pain.
Each mourning process requires, by definition, determination, commitment, confidence, tools etc. On the other hand, the process is known. First, there is a stage where we deny what happened. Then we get angry and feel anger. Then our world falls apart and sadness becomes the dominant emotional feeling. Until we finally accept what happened. But we suffer during all these phases and sometimes that leads us to get stuck in a certain phase.
We can spend a long period of time denying a rift that has arisen: it hurts us to face the truth. It may be easier to get angry, to blame others or the world for what happened. That’s why we stay stuck there, not allowing ourselves to cry, to be sad, to let go of the bad feeling we feel inside.
You can’t deal with grief without pain
It may seem paradoxical, but you cannot process grief without pain. It is necessary to drown in the deep well of our feelings. We need to feel how we let ourselves go as we try to deny what happened. We have to get angry. And later we can release all the sadness that has accumulated inside us. It is in this penultimate phase that despair sets in and the situation becomes more and more critical, because of the risk that the process will be interrupted here.
Despair takes away all our desire. It invites us to feel victimized by the circumstances and it brings us the feeling of depression that we unconsciously instill in our actions. We think we have no strength to move forward and climb out of that pit we have plunged deeply into. A well that seems to have no exit.
However, everything is the result of our perspective, or at least a large part. Because we ourselves create a large part of the reality that we want to perceive in this way. If at that moment our pain is so deep that we think there is no hope for us, then somehow it will be. We have entered a dark room and have no strength to get out, at least for now.
It can take weeks, even months, for this feeling to hold us captive. Nevertheless, the pain we feed will eventually cease to exist and we will be tired of the situation we have ended up in. One day we will wake up and feel like climbing out of that pit of sorrow where we were drowning in our own tears.
The fear of feeling
While we know that no grief can heal without pain and acceptance, the next time we find ourselves in a similar situation, we will feel just as awkward as the first time. This is because we find it difficult to feel. And because when we feel we hear a little voice inside us saying that the emotions we feel will be forever. That is why we tend to flee.
When we have no choice but to face what we have experienced, we apply certain strategies to avoid pain. In this way we go through each stage of the grieving process, some more painful than others. All this in order not to reach the final stage. That last phase, which we avoid in this way, but which will eventually set us free.
The well is not really a well, but it is a tunnel! We have to go through it, we have to go in and out the other side. But in our fear of feeling, experiencing and accepting what we’ve been through, our lack of hope makes it seem like a pit where everything is meaningless.
For this reason, after the death of a family member or the breakup of a relationship, we think that we will never feel good again. That we will never be happy again and be able to move forward. We don’t think there will be any other things or adventures after this. We cling so tightly to these people and to the situations lived with them that we think there will be no other chance. However, this is not the case. But to understand that, you have to embrace, feel and finally accept the pain in order to move on.
