We become whole through relationships and through letting go of
relationships.
SIGMUND FREUD
"There seems to be no better way to learn what a relationship is really about than to see how it ends and how we are in the ending. All relationships end—some with separation, some with divorce, some with death. This means that in entering a relationship we implicitly accept that the other will leave us or we will leave him. Grieving is therefore included in what we sign on for. But grief is built into all of life because of life’s painful events, changes, transitions, and losses."
"The grief at the end of a relationship comes from no longer getting one’s needs met, especially the five A’s. We think we only feel it at the very end, but we have probably felt it during the relationship, too. At the end and afterward, we remember the grief we felt during the relationship not only the grief we felt at the end." "Ironically, the worse the relationship was, the worse our grief will be. This is because when we end a very difficult relationship, we are not only letting go of a partner but of all the hope and work we invested in trying to keep alive something that had expired long before."
"But we feel the pain most severely when we uselessly fight against a necessary ending. Holding on is the painful element of letting go. What do we let go of? What we thought the relationship was and found out it was not, what we tried to make it into and could not, what we hoped it would become and saw that it did not, what we believed was there and was not there at all. The most painful element of grief may be this last realization that what we expected was not there to be had."
Ending with Grace and Moving On
"On the first day, I sobbed and wept so uncontrollably, I could not go to work.
On the second day, I felt so depressed and cried so much I could not go to work.
On the third day, I wept and then worked half a day. Now I’m working overtime.
At first, I wailed, “She abandoned me!” Then I lamented, “She left me!” Today I said, “She no longer lives at this address.”
"When a relationship ends by separation or divorce, there are some practical suggestions that may be helpful. First, we need a space in which to grieve alone and let go. To avoid this by jumping into a new relationship contradicts the course of nature. Grief work gives us an impetus for growth by helping us advance to a higher level of consciousness."
"Therapy is crucial during this period; it can assist us in addressing, processing, and resolving issues/planning change. Since we are never mourning only the current issue, therapy will also help us work on buried issues from the past. Ask yourself: “Is this why losses happen? Is the universe giving me a chance at rising from my ancient tomb?”
"At the end of a relationship, we wonder about our lovability. “He didn’t really love me (I now realize),” therefore “I’m unlovable” (I blame myself)” or “He cannot love anybody” (I blame him).” But how about “I’m lovable; he can love; and he doesn’t love me.” Adults embrace this last, realistic view. Anyone can love. No one is unlovable. Not everyone will love me."
"It is common to feel compelled to tell your story to anyone who will listen. This is a normal phase of grief work. Repeating the traumatic details helps you absorb the shock and stress of what occurred. Someday, however, while telling the story of how right you were and how bad she was, you will bore yourself. That is the instinctive signal that the storytelling no longer serves a useful purpose. Then you will stop. With luck, you have enough friends that they are not all worn out from hearing the story again and again by the time you get to that liberating moment!"
"Someday the other person and the relationship and all that has happened will simply be information. That will signal that the grief has run its course and that you have moved on. It takes patience to get there, but you can build patience with practice. Then someone will offhandedly say, “You were both unhappy together and it had stopped working for you, and now that you are apart, you have a chance at happiness,” and the simple honesty of that statement will land inside you with the thud of truth."
"The desire for vengeance against the partner who hurt you will probably arise. This is the ego’s way of avoiding grief by substituting interaction for inner action—that is, personal work. Allow any feeling or thought, but refrain from acting on it. In the words of an old saying, any bird can fly over your head, but it is up to you whether it builds a nest in your hair.
This is from the letter of a close and admirable friend of mine during the time of his difficult divorce: “I feel I have become a kinder person, not wanting to hurt others. I do have cruel thoughts about how to deal with her, but I don’t act on them. She has no peace within herself, and someday she may wake up and change, but that is not my business.” This is the sound of an opening heart and a crumbling ego."
When Somebody Leaves You
"Selene is a psychiatrist in her mid-forties with what has so far been a well-nigh insuperable fear of engulfment. She has been in therapy off and on for years and avidly reads books like this one. Nonetheless, her fear gains ascendancy in direct proportion to the building of a relationship. Her distancing from her partner, Jesse, has made life painful for both of them. Jesse, an engineer in his early thirties, fears abandonment as strongly as Selene fears engulfment. He would not read a book like this. During their relationship, the more Selene demanded space, the more Jesse clung to her. And the more he clung, the more space she demanded.
After five years together, Jesse told Selene he had been involved with someone else for a while and was leaving Selene. Their relationship had not worked for either of them in a long time. Neither one had been a source of nurturance to the other, and neither could share feelings with the other. Selene had actually wanted a break, but now she suddenly wanted the relationship more than ever. Jesse’s name became a thousand times more dear to her once it became associated with abandonment. Her fear of engulfment became an intolerance of abandonment.
Selene has been in therapy now for five months, and here are some selections from the journal she is keeping. Some concern Jesse and some are addressed to him, but none have been sent to him because Selene knows these writings are really about her:
Jesse is no longer only Jesse but also the movie star of my inner drama. He is the latest man I came to, starving and desperate, for a nurturance he proved over and over that he could not give me. My powerful feelings of loyalty to this bond and my reactions to the loss of it cannot be accounted for by the literal Jesse. My actual relationship with Jesse was hurtful, and I know it was for the best that it was broken off. As long as I take him literally and not as a metaphor, I do not face my work. Could it be that once anyone is gone, he becomes simply a metaphor and no longer the literal person?
Jesse is the actor who can play Hamlet while others have only succeeded at playing Jack to my Jill. My story has an “abandonment by father” theme. Uncannily, Jesse has abandoned me for someone else. My intuitive inner wisdom must have known of this possibility from the very first kiss and brought me a partner with the precise flavor of my lost dad. When the literal Jesse leaves, the symbolic Jesse steps forward in my dreams and in my heart. I fail to realize the difference! I imagine there is only one Jesse for me. But there is an archaically elaborated Jesse inside me as well as the ordinary Jesse outside. The outside Jesse cannot account for this amount of pain. This loss is the loss of the illusion of him as the one in whom I finally found the love I was seeking all my life. In reality, though, I am only losing the chance to continue using him as the mannequin who can wear the garments of my unfulfilled wishes—this is the essence of my lifelong loneliness.
You and this grief allowed me to open, but you cannot meet the need you helped me to identify. You can open me but do not fill me. This is not your fault. It is about me.
Bereftness and longing have been in me all my life. I thought this partner could help me heal it. My work is to heal it myself and eventually find someone to join me in that enterprise. Now that this partner is gone, I generate the illusion that all would be well if only he were here. This is probably because he stumbled upon the sealed door in my psyche, and now I associate him with fulfillment since the relationship with him was a significant one. Actually, he was not the important person but the important trigger. Now he is the important image of the triggering.
How can I so easily forget that I was not safe from loneliness even with him? I enlisted him to defend me against my own feelings and to rescue me from ever falling into the ancient void of my childhood. Now, of course, he appears automatically in my mind whenever I feel desolate and alone. When I feel scared, I invest him with heroic powers rather than deputize myself to be the hero of my own story. I have to dismiss him and face the battle alone as an adult.
The Jesse I lost is everyone I ever loved and lost. I was never really loving only him. My net was cast much more broadly. I wanted all the love I ever missed. He offered the chance of that. He made all my hope and need to be loved seem fulfillable at last. When it was clear that he could not deliver, I projected the rest onto him, rooting him even more firmly in my life. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight!” (I just heard this line from the Christmas carol in my head. Now I see that I have known this concept since early in my childhood.)
I received a letter from the literal Jesse and had powerful feelings of hope and panic. I know I need time away as I heal from the wound of his leaving. Yet I miss him and want contact. I imagine I am missing only the physical Jesse, whom I am better off without. Actually, I am missing Dad and all the men who have left me—the emissary and personification of whom is the man who sent this letter. If I write back, I am taking this feeling literally, as if my feelings were about the physical Jesse. If I write to him in my journal and do not send him a letter, I am working profitably with the inner Jesse, my social worker in the struggle for self- location. I was a missing person until Jesse brought me home to myself. I came home when he left home.
I know I was inadequate for him, too. I promised him anything to get him back when he first left. But I can’t fool myself. I would not have been any better as a partner once the smoke cleared and our old routine recommenced.
How I deny all the previously unacceptable facts about him! I keep fooling myself by thinking he was perfect and I messed up the best thing I ever had. I embellish and inflate his virtues (perhaps as he inflates my vices). My grief begins with a denial that protects me from the full onslaught of the powerful loss. My denial suspends my ability to assess accurately. I then magnify, distort, and embellish the value of what I have lost. That is what keeps me wanting him back so desperately.
I am craving to the max what satisfies the least. Can I accept such contradiction, irrational neediness as an OK part of me? I am OK as long as I don’t act on my neediness by calling him for a fix. What makes me entertain that option? I am desperate for closeness. I am an addict, seeking what I need from someone who cannot give it to me. It is not that no one can, only that he cannot. I have to stay with myself now in this utterly ragged state. Witnessing the fragile waif within me may help me gain compassion for a self I have abandoned so many times. Could such compassion be an empowering way to get through this?
I recall the times I would hold you lovingly and listen to you and cuddle your little foibles. What I did for you is what I myself needed and longed for. I showed you how I wanted to be loved by loving you in that way. I did not notice that you did not return the favor. The part of me that wants you back is the scared, needy child who really needs a hearing and holding from me. The part of me that knows it is time to let go is the adult. The loving and powerful part of me lets you go and me go on.
My defenses are down, and I hear from others that I look more appealing. A fertile time for me: I can break old self-defeating and intimacy-sabotaging habits. How long before I slip back into the old patterns of fear?
Conversations in my head about things somehow working out between us in the future are part of the bargaining phase of grief. They also seem to help me get some semblance of my power back.
Jesse, how can you see me in this pain and not stop it? All you have to do is come back. I know I want the relationship back only to bring an end to my grief and not to recover something really valuable. I feel the sadness of the relationship itself and imagine I am feeling only the sadness of its ending.
I feel abandoned now that you are gone. But I was emotionally abandoned by you all through the relationship and never saw it that way. Even now, instead of admitting that fact, I am idealizing the past with you. Not that you are to blame; this is all about me and the fierceness with which I hold on to illusions. You are perfect as you are, Jesse.
I see through my magical belief in words: Letters or words to you to manipulate a response won’t be answered or work now. It is as if I am calling someone whose line is busy as he talks to someone else. I can no longer fool myself. I know my need to contact you is not purely to see you and hear your voice but rather to convince and manipulate you. My ego wants to win, and that is why I have to stay away. If I got you back in order to win, it would empower my defeated ego.
I would never have stepped out of this terrible relationship. You and your new partner intervened where I could not. You are ending what I was prolonging. I lament that you are gone and simultaneously that we let it go on that long.
Do I crave the old relationship with no future that had to go or the possible new relationship with a future that cannot begin until I let go of the old? Selene, don’t blow this chance to be free!
I feel like a child lamenting that my longtime friend is now playing with someone new and not me. This loss hits me right at the little- rejected-kid level of my psyche. My old unfulfilled need for nurturance accounts for the fierceness with which I am holding on at the end.
Sex was the best catalyst for my self-delusion. Sex is not a reliable indicator of a good relationship because it can be great even when we are utterly mismatched—as in our case. None of this is your fault, Jesse.
Jesse was not providing what I needed in a partner. But if I had let go of all my hope, I would have despaired, so I held on. Even now, he has all the divinity and aura of love’s longing and stands as an idol no matter how sure my mind is that he is only a plaster saint. When these two images finally separate, my bid to be loved will come back to its source in me, and he will be reduced in size and only be “someone I once knew.” Doing the work and maintaining no contact is the best path to a liberating iconoclasm.
Instead of holding out for fulfillment, will I settle for a repetition of an old cycle? I can make this mistake again. A new face makes someone seem to be a new person, but it may only be the same projection—it’s like I’m casting a new actor in the same old role. Perhaps what I long for is, after all, an unopened potential for self-nurturance. My longing is not to find my fortune in someone else, but rather to find clues to where I will find my own buried treasure.
I have to watch this relationship go the same way I watch the roses fade: with neither blame nor grief. I will give a gift to the world in thanks for all I am learning.
If you are interested in this book, you can email me (kh.nebulishvili@gmail.com) and I'll send the PDF version of this book :)
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