This article deals with the stages of healing, healing your grief. Denial, anger, fear, and so on.
The most important distinction I can add is: check your cone of vision. If your cone of vision is narrow, everything is colored or filled with your grief: the context of life becomes your grief, independent of the content of life.
In addition to that, when you are grief stricken, you start interacting with unreality, and avoid reality.
If there is any hint of “no” in your thoughts, you are interacting with unreality. There is NO no in reality.
I learned this through my own grieving process almost 20 years ago, when my mother died.
She was in Hungary and I was in New Jersey. I didn’t even know she wasn’t well until after she died.
My whole grief was about what I didn’t, could not do, and what we could not do together.
All unreality.
When I came to terms with that, that all grieving is about unreality, I started to tell the truth about reality: I was in New Jersey and she was in Hungary and she died. If I am interested in doing all the things I planned to do with her: I surely will find the time and opportunity to do it with myself or with someone else.
Stabs of grief were still there, but only occasionally.
When you find what’s real, your love, your appreciation, you will have a time that if they could watch you, they would love to watch. Instead, they are watching you crying yourself into oblivion, turn to drinking, or sex, or gambling… If they could grieve, they would have a good reason now, watching you.
Grief strikes every one of us sometime or the other in our lives. Many of us find it difficult to come out of it. People get stuck in grief and find it unable to move forward. The situation is similar to a vehicle getting stuck in deep mud and not moving out of it despite frantic efforts made by people.
Coming out of grief is very important for us to progress. But several factors inhibit this process. The most important of them is the state of denial. Many people will find it difficult to accept the happening of a sad event. The obsessive belief ‘This cannot happen to me’ is so deeply entrenched in our minds that we refuse to see the reality that stands before us.
The grief can be the result of a natural event like the death of a person close to us, an unexpected financial loss etc. It can also be the result of someone acting against us. It can be an act of cheating, betrayal or just being let down by someone whom we trusted. The initial response will always be to deny the happening. This state of denial will persist for a while. We sometimes read about someone living with the corpse of a person dear to them for several days, unmindful of the stink emanating from the disintegrating body. These are examples of extreme states of denial.
The second stage is anger. Once we accept (or are forced to accept) what has happened, then the belief ‘This cannot happen to me’ turns into a question, ‘how can this
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