Healing Well And Living FreeSample

Day Five

The Essence of Loss

Scripture: Jeremiah 17:14

When you have told your story, broken the silence, and called it what it is (abuse), you will realize that this person is not likely to change, and the research validates this. According to the Family and Child Abuse Prevention Center, “Only one percent of abusers change.” The National Domestic Violence Hotline reiterates this finding, “There’s a very low percentage of abusers who truly do change their ways.”  The reason for this is that there’s too much an abuser relinquishes when power and control ceases. My personal experience, along with the experience of those I’ve worked with who have walked a similar path, is that this realization often leads to grief.

Grief, by definition, is a signal that something is over. It is the very essence of loss. It is a natural and normal response. Any attempt to avoid grief will impede the healing process, causing you to feel stuck. When I finally accepted my marriage to Ben was over, I cried constantly and in situations where doing so wasn’t appropriate, such as in the classroom in front of my peers. I would politely excuse myself, go sit in my car, and wait for the wave of emotion to pass. 

Grieving can be an incredibly lonely journey. In my private practice, I always encourage my grieving clients to resist the temptation to run from their grief. They need to allow themselves to feel their deep emotions in order to heal well. So do you. A myriad of emotions will flood you, sometimes multiple times in one day. Grief is often comprised of the following phases, though not necessarily in this order: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. 

The shock you feel when you realize the situation you are in often gives way to denial. You want to pretend that what you know to be true is not. Denial is best buddies with bargaining, in which you “if only” yourself to death. When bargaining doesn’t provide any real answers, you can find yourself steeped in depression. And the emotion that tends to blanket them all is anger. This anger can often feel like rage because the person who promised to love you “till death do us part” was the very person who broke your heart. This pain can leave you feeling so raw that the thought that your life can ever feel like living again seems like a sinister fantasy at best. 

Grief is rarely experienced in a nice, neat, linear way. Grieving is messy work. The good news—and there is good news—is that as you permit yourself to feel, then you allow yourself to heal. Grieving is the doorway through which you eventually find freedom . . . if you do not give up on the process. 

What indications of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, and/or depression do you see in your journey today? Are you allowing yourself to grieve or are you substituting true grieving with other distractions?