Life hack #15: Tango with the stages of grief, don't expect to evolve through them
Life hack #15: Tango with the stages of grief, don't expect to evolve through them
[00:00:00] So there is usually five stages of grief that people go through when they're grieving the end of a relationship. There's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. One of the most helpful life hacks is to manage your expectations on your healing journey so that you don't think that you're not progressing in the right way or you're disappointing yourself if you seem to jump around from the different stages of grief instead of evolving through them.
If you think that you're going to graduate from denial to then go to anger and then graduate from anger to go to bargaining and then graduate through depression and so on. Yeah, that is a very nice one way, uh, flow through the grief process but that is not typical. And so, yes, you might face a lot of denial initially at the first part of a break up, but you could revisit anger many times. You could bypass anger, get to depression, go back to anger again. Then you could have a brief period of some acceptance and then you might get to the point of sadness, depression again.
So [00:01:00] you really need to manage your expectations and don't be hard on yourself if you do transition from a stage of grief to another stage of grief, even if it's one that you thought you were past. So yes, I've gone through anger phases after the end of a break up, you know, then I get, I move on, whatever.
And then sometimes depending on what happened, I might've seen a photo of them with someone new and then I get angry again, right? And I'm like, well, wait, does that mean that my healing didn't work? And does that mean that I failed the process? No, it doesn't. It means that you have to manage your expectations and don't judge yourself by navigating and what I like to refer to as "tangoing" with the stages of grief, because you need to not expect progression through them as a one way street. You will probably get to the end of acceptance, and then be able to fully accept a break up and move on. So you could end up with a conclusion at acceptance, but don't be surprised if you go back to then denial, or bargaining, or [00:02:00] depression, or all of them at once, or all of them in the same day.
It depends on how you process this break up. So, I think it's important to discuss the different stages of grief so that you know what they are. Denial, this is the initial shock. Where it's hard to accept that the relationship has ended and you might find yourself replaying memories and hoping things will go back to how they were.
Anger. You might feel frustrated, resentful, or angry towards yourself, your ex, or the situation. These emotions are normal and part of processing the loss. Bargaining. You might think about what you could have done differently or even hope for reconciliation. It's a way of trying to regain control and make sense of the situation.
Bargaining is an interesting phase because sometimes you'll bargain with your own mind what you're willing to, like, put up with in order to, like, maybe stop the pain of the break up, like, maybe you bargain with yourself, oh, could I handle the fact that this person cheated on me. Can I handle the fact that this, this, this happened, right?
And so that bargaining phase [00:03:00] isn't even just with the other person, sometimes it's with yourself. Depression, sadness, loneliness, and a sense of loss often set in. It's important to allow yourself to feel these emotions as they are a natural part of the healing and then acceptance. So over time you begin to accept the reality of the break up, this does not mean the pain is gone, but you do start to feel more at peace with the situation and look forward to the future. So I did rely on chat GBT to get a list of the stages of grief so I could give them to you as clear as possible. But the most important life hack is to manage your own expectations and don't be hard on yourself if you go back or if you regress from one stage of grief to a to a prior one because it is a dance, not an evolution.
