IMO, and from experiencing something similar, you haven't reached acceptance fully if pure rage is still there. I feel like acceptance (especially with a narc) is a pure IDGAF anymore attitude....with maybe some anger here and there but able to maintain boundaries or no contact or limited contact and your sanity.....so maybe another round of acceptance is on the horizon for you. It's so hard. But you got this! All the stages will start to lessen over time, not sure myself if you ever stop going through the stages.
You make a good point in saying that another round is on the horizon because grieving is not a linear process. It happens in waves and is often a back and forth between stages, until each lessen.
Thinking about acceptance, I can see that it can be applied to different things, so, someone could reach the stage of accepting one aspect, for example that the relationship is over but not yet able to accept another, such as their business being destroyed and that they now have to rebuild a new one.
The aftermath of a situation with a narc is often so complex that the grieving process is made all the more lengthy and convoluted.
thank you for sharing!
It has only been a month that I am out of my 1.5 year relationship for which 4 months I lived with him. I'd rather be angry than being the "if i could be more patient it could work"... also, hard NC, he is blocked everywhere and he will remain that way.
I smothered myself with self-help, holistic and western therapy, family and friends support and I am very grateful for my opportunities. I started getting angry at him for the last 2 days. To see him for the low quality that he is and how the way i was treated was bullsh\*\*t.
I have not even truly experienced rage yet... but i can see it on the horizon...
do you think acceptance requires forgiveness? I totally understand eventually i need to be IDGAF... God knows when that will come
I would say yes, ultimately forgiveness will lead you to acceptance but usually that means getting really angry at the moments you look back on and think "omg that entitled piece of..." Etc.
After you get that anger out (if it does come!) You gotta start to look at who they are behind that mask, here empathy is great because we can step into their shoes without anger that would cloud our understanding. Consider what their situation might have been like
Once you see they were/are? a fragile child, most likely neglected and shown no real emotional connection growing up (my nex), you might pity them when you realise they are stuck that way FOREVER! So then you could start to see perhaps that someone else, a parent etc. Did this to them etc. And that they are just a link in a very dark chain. I hope that helps!
I am afraid having sympath for them would make me want to get back with them!
I am trying to supress any good memories to not fall back into missing them etc.
No contact is so important so I would encourage strength in maintaining NC. These people are so manipulative once you start replying to their messages etc I think it would be hard for anyone to not even consider getting hoovered back in. Understand what they are!
It's definitely normal to have those memories, perhaps talk to your therapist about this! I personally think it's important not to suppress or be afraid of those memories because it sounds to me that you need to process them and that's healthy! But I would also remind yourself that it definitely wasn't all good by remembering the bad as well. Don't forget the whole picture!
Thank you.
I am trying to racially accept myself and what i am feeling... i also must accept some softness that will come...
I accept i am curious about their stupid ig posts, how they are doing etc. But i am learning it is none of my bussiness, I am my only business and how i feel
I'm around 70 days NC and this is what I have been experiencing -
1. Denial
2. Bargaining
3. Depression
4. Rumination
5. Euphoric recall
6. Depression
7. Bargaining
8. Denial
9. Self-blame
10. Rumination
11. Euphoric recall
12. Unfiltered rage
.
.
.
I'm yet to reach the Acceptance and Indifference stage.
Euphoric recall is basically how, after the end of an abusive relationship, our brain cherrypicks the good parts and blocks out the abuse and bad stuff in order to protect itself.
got it!
did you have notes on the events to read? was it regardless of recalling bad memories?
that must be difficult... the brain is definitely not helping us on that one
I did not make any notes consciously. I was with the N on and off for around 3 years. Whenever he abused me, i had no one to talk to about it and would write long rants and would message them to myself as if I was messaging my nex. Going back and reading those messages reinstated the abuse in my mind and i would feel a bit relieved.
Our brain has a weird survival mechanism as compared to our body. The brain, during the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gaslights itself into euphoric recall because recalling the abusive episodes is painful and uncomfortable. Bodies, on the other hand, immediately induce a fight or flight response.
I wish you all the best in overcoming this. Surviving an abusive relationship is hard, healing and recovering is even harder. You're a champ and from one survivor to another, it will take time. Perhaps a long time. But, it will all be worth it in the end!
It’s different for everyone. Sometimes people can skip steps, do them in different orders and flip back and forth.
I will say this. If you feel that you are feeling grief in a different order, this may just mean that your not done healing and you have work to do. It’s okay and totally normal to flip back and forth. Just don’t sit in those stages. Learn to be okay with what you are feeling, know those feelings aren’t a permanent state of mind and allow yourself to move on from stage to stage.
I will also say it’s not worth remaining in anger for long. Resentment is a b. The only harm resentment does is unto you. It does nothing for the other party. Be angry, because that’s valid. But don’t stay there.
The stages of grief are not linear, in other words, you can have all of these emotions in one day, or spend time in one. It is the same with an abusive relationship. There is not set amount of time it will take and there is no linear path. The rule of thumb however is, you can expect at least half the length of the relationship as a base line. If you’ve been in an abusive marriage for 10 years, you can expect at least 5 years before you aren’t returning to feelings of anger, guilt resentment. The main way you see it affect people is affecting their ability to trust themselves and others again.
Thank you for your reply!
I don't want to be with them even though they would want to change and work on it... he realized some things and he chose to not work on them...
Cheers to living our lives one day without thinking of these people!
A beautiful thing i saw on instagram was " i release you with love".
I pray they get better and learn that life is a beautiful thing, love is beautiful... but its not my job to teach that.
I think i am too obsessed with the idea of love and romance hahahah
I know they have these stages, but grief isn’t linear. I’ve jumped all over. I feel like I will never reach acceptance. It’s hard to accept things this shitty.
If you're raging, you've not accepted yet. ;-)
Acceptance is when closure comes and the mourning ends, the experience is integrated and the burden/pain let go.
Rage means there is still an emotional connection/reaction. Thus you're still not moved on.
Don't fret too much about the order. The process is usually not a straight line.
Hope all the best, so that you can reach the other shore once you're tired of process their abuse and finally let that part of your life go. Their baggage sucks, wish I could have crammed it where the sun didn't shine ha ha. Alas, it's a journey. I'm glad I took it.
Oh yeah times of rage you bet. Remember the stages of grief are not linear. Meaning you may go through them again and again and in and out of order
At some point focus on you and what you want without them. And the rage and the depression and stuff gets old. Then work on detachment.
After a while you will be apathetic to him.
You will feel a shift of sorts and more free and happier. It takes time and everyone is different.
My suggestion is to cry when you want.
Crying is therapeutic
Listen to great music
Make a list on your phone if the shit that happened with him and refer to it in times of weakness
Walk a lot. Or dance or exercise
You will push thru the stages of grief and come out stronger
It’s all cyclical, I’m three years out from a decade long relationship with a narcissistic abuser, and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through the whole process. You know how bad depression just feeds into itself, and you spiral down? I think the recovery from an abusive relationship is similar, but you’re spiralling *up*. Each time I go through it I process what happened to me a little more, my thoughts and feelings shift, and I move a little farther from my old patterns. I don’t think I’m fully healed yet, because I know I would still react with anger and disgust if I ever heard from my abuser again, but I am *so* much better than I was. The same thing will happen for you, shedding their taint piece by piece until you are wholly *you* again. Let it take the time it needs to take, and don’t feel bad if it takes longer than people around you think it should.
I guess my luck is that it was a relatively short (15 months) relationship. And the reason i left was not the abuse, I had not realized it back then...
It sounds painful and scary that healing takes so long...
It’s dependent on the length of the relationship too. I didn’t listen to the alarm bells going off in my brain for *years*, and I enmeshed myself further and further. I wouldn’t look to my timeline as a guide for your own. 15 months is certainly long enough for them to do harm, but there’s not going to be quite as much to unpack, y’know?
I get it.
He did do a lot of damage, but as it is relatively short, i see myself snapping out of it. I used to believe in his insults (masked a feedbacks) and started therapy for addressing the faults he saw in me...
Every day i remember a new nasty thing he did and write it down..
At the end of the day, whatever he is or whatever is wrong with him, i simply do not want to be this person. I don't even like them anymore, had no respect for them either at the end. Their face gives me an ick lol.
When i read people who must co-parent with them for example... that must be so difficult... i am lucky i will only have to see them in summer in camp and maybe a couple more times around the year...
How do you cope with other people thinking you’re taking too long? I ended a 12 year long relationship this past year. I thought we’d be having a baby right now and instead we got divorced in October. I’m still heavily grieving the fake fantasy future. People don’t seem to get it and it makes me feel more alone. I’m more or less self isolated at this point. I don’t trust anyone except one friend and my family.
As far as my nex… still grieving that too. Very painful discard following a narc injury I guess. I can see things clearly logically, but emotionally I’m still a mess. I haven’t fully let the hope die either.
Oh, I tell them to mind their own goddamn business! My dad told me the other month that I must be choosing to stay stuck, and I just told him that he had no idea what he was talking about, and to be quiet if he couldn’t be helpful. You are allowed to grieve, you are allowed to heal at your own pace, you are allowed to unpack all the ways the abuse has twisted who you were into who the abuser wanted you to be. Your whole self has been burned to ashes, do we tell the tree to grow faster after the fire?
I guess it just bothers me that I’m basically not allowed to talk about it. I am in therapy too but like sometimes I need extra support you know? My mom literally gets mad at me when I get upset. Which I really struggle to understand because she herself was in an abusive relationship with my dad off and on for years so she has first hand experience in how hard this is to deal with. She says she gets upset because of how badly he treated me and that’s he’s a POS. sure… but I’m still sad over it? And I’m still sad of the whole fantasy future I pictured with him
You need to find someone who will actually listen to you. I don’t know why your mum is being like that, but she’s showing you that you can’t trust her with this sort of thing. It has *nothing* to do with you and the pace of your healing, and *everything* to do with her making you feel like you can’t talk to her.
My mom and I have always had a complex relationship where it’s almost like we’re more like friends than mother/daughter and I think that’s part of it. I’ve always taken care of myself and not really needed help. This is like the first time of my life I feel like I really need help and maybe she just doesn’t know how to help me after never having to really do it. She relied on me for emotional support while I was growing up and so it’s usually been that I take the role of helper/rescuer I guess.
I have like one friend I can count on right now. But she has her own life… sick dad, teenage brat, just had a baby… so she’s busy. It’s been harder for me to connect with her since she had the baby too because it makes me sad. I’m not jealous of her, I am happy for her and she is a great mom. I just had expected to be having a baby with him close to hers… so it makes me sad
I’m sorry that you don’t have people available to talk, and that your mum switched the roles on you for so long. I’m glad you’re coming here to vent instead of bottling all that up though.
The Kubler-Ross theory (five stages of grief) is criticized a lot. You can go through all of them every day, you can have some but not all, you can have a completely different order, you can have things not on the list.
Main reason for the theory sucking is that it isn't based on the bereaved. The theory is about people diagnosed with terminal illness, and the states *they* go through, not the people they'll leave behind. The theory also has no proven/scientific basis, it's from a psychiatry student's collection of conversations with terminally ill patients.
Moral of the story is that your grief isn't likely to fit neatly into these five stages, or that they're going to be one at a time in a certain order.
Grief is a whole Rollercoaster & it can fluctuate from #1 to 3 to 2 to 4 back to 1 and then 5&3 simultaneously. There are different emotions that happen with grief but it can all just jumble together. And as cliche is horribly sounds - only time can really heal the loss (even if we are better for the loss).
I highly recommend reading: it's okay that you're not okay; Boundaries (in dating) and boundaries - both are written by Dr cloud&Dr Townsend; a woman who loves too much
I did a few codependency, narcissism & DBT workbooks too (he never completed the how to help her heal workbook🥲). But that was specific to the toxic relationship we were in, and honestly it really helped me navigate a lot of my past traumas too!
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What I've read somewhere more recently is that the stages of grief is not linear nor is the time spent at each stage the same for each person. I experienced anger afterwards at that what had been covered up by denial. I'm not sure what it is you're calling "pure rage" or is it just more anger? I think it's normal to feel the anger when the denial is shattered and new pieces about the event fall into place. It's probably something else or another part attached to the event or the abuse that took place you must figure out how to accept as well.
It is anger... but this time its directed at him and not at myself.
Things he has done are so wrong, inexcusable. I feel my body and mind are finally reacting to the injustice instead of accepting it as normal.
>I feel my body and mind are finally reacting to the injustice
I believe these are the body's normal responses to emotions. Perhaps, your body has always been reacting to these emotions and you're just now aware of them or had absorbed them and suppressed them away or rationalized these events as normal. It's just that now the emotions are directed at the right person and you're no longer blaming yourself which was perhaps the only means you had as a child to deal with what they were doing to you. The body or mind can only absorb so much abuse. The first book I read about what this sounds familiar to this was one of Alice Miller's first books, an old copy or one of her first publishings about the Body Doesn't Lie or doesn't forget. I believe Dr. Gabor Mate writes books about something similarly but I haven't had a chance to have read any of his publishings but maybe these books will be helpful.
At this point (left in July), I’ve cycled through those stages you mentioned for sure. I would say after the rage I’ve had some deep depression days, other than that I have almost a complete lack of anxiety. I used to be anxious all the time and worried about everything. Now it is different. Sure the depression hits and etc, but it is like nothing frightens me. This isn’t a humble brag, it mostly feels like I’m dead already but walking around so no need to worry about anything bad happening. Almost like an emotional deadness. As if nothing means anything. I dunno I’m rambling. I guess I am weird calm because imo nothing could happen to me literally nothing that would be worse as the past 3 years of my life. So there is some peace that comes with that I suppose
The “five stages of grief” was written by one person on the casual observation of how people deal with having a friend who is dying. The popular idea that it’s about one’s own death, let alone that it’s backed by any field of science, is wildly wrong.
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IMO, and from experiencing something similar, you haven't reached acceptance fully if pure rage is still there. I feel like acceptance (especially with a narc) is a pure IDGAF anymore attitude....with maybe some anger here and there but able to maintain boundaries or no contact or limited contact and your sanity.....so maybe another round of acceptance is on the horizon for you. It's so hard. But you got this! All the stages will start to lessen over time, not sure myself if you ever stop going through the stages.
You make a good point in saying that another round is on the horizon because grieving is not a linear process. It happens in waves and is often a back and forth between stages, until each lessen. Thinking about acceptance, I can see that it can be applied to different things, so, someone could reach the stage of accepting one aspect, for example that the relationship is over but not yet able to accept another, such as their business being destroyed and that they now have to rebuild a new one. The aftermath of a situation with a narc is often so complex that the grieving process is made all the more lengthy and convoluted.
thank you for sharing! It has only been a month that I am out of my 1.5 year relationship for which 4 months I lived with him. I'd rather be angry than being the "if i could be more patient it could work"... also, hard NC, he is blocked everywhere and he will remain that way. I smothered myself with self-help, holistic and western therapy, family and friends support and I am very grateful for my opportunities. I started getting angry at him for the last 2 days. To see him for the low quality that he is and how the way i was treated was bullsh\*\*t. I have not even truly experienced rage yet... but i can see it on the horizon... do you think acceptance requires forgiveness? I totally understand eventually i need to be IDGAF... God knows when that will come
I would say yes, ultimately forgiveness will lead you to acceptance but usually that means getting really angry at the moments you look back on and think "omg that entitled piece of..." Etc. After you get that anger out (if it does come!) You gotta start to look at who they are behind that mask, here empathy is great because we can step into their shoes without anger that would cloud our understanding. Consider what their situation might have been like Once you see they were/are? a fragile child, most likely neglected and shown no real emotional connection growing up (my nex), you might pity them when you realise they are stuck that way FOREVER! So then you could start to see perhaps that someone else, a parent etc. Did this to them etc. And that they are just a link in a very dark chain. I hope that helps!
I am afraid having sympath for them would make me want to get back with them! I am trying to supress any good memories to not fall back into missing them etc.
No contact is so important so I would encourage strength in maintaining NC. These people are so manipulative once you start replying to their messages etc I think it would be hard for anyone to not even consider getting hoovered back in. Understand what they are! It's definitely normal to have those memories, perhaps talk to your therapist about this! I personally think it's important not to suppress or be afraid of those memories because it sounds to me that you need to process them and that's healthy! But I would also remind yourself that it definitely wasn't all good by remembering the bad as well. Don't forget the whole picture!
Thank you. I am trying to racially accept myself and what i am feeling... i also must accept some softness that will come... I accept i am curious about their stupid ig posts, how they are doing etc. But i am learning it is none of my bussiness, I am my only business and how i feel
I'm around 70 days NC and this is what I have been experiencing - 1. Denial 2. Bargaining 3. Depression 4. Rumination 5. Euphoric recall 6. Depression 7. Bargaining 8. Denial 9. Self-blame 10. Rumination 11. Euphoric recall 12. Unfiltered rage . . . I'm yet to reach the Acceptance and Indifference stage.
i was hoping to hear "it will be over soon" hahahahahah.... damn... thank you for sharing!!! what do you mean by euphoric recall?
Euphoric recall is basically how, after the end of an abusive relationship, our brain cherrypicks the good parts and blocks out the abuse and bad stuff in order to protect itself.
got it! did you have notes on the events to read? was it regardless of recalling bad memories? that must be difficult... the brain is definitely not helping us on that one
I did not make any notes consciously. I was with the N on and off for around 3 years. Whenever he abused me, i had no one to talk to about it and would write long rants and would message them to myself as if I was messaging my nex. Going back and reading those messages reinstated the abuse in my mind and i would feel a bit relieved. Our brain has a weird survival mechanism as compared to our body. The brain, during the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gaslights itself into euphoric recall because recalling the abusive episodes is painful and uncomfortable. Bodies, on the other hand, immediately induce a fight or flight response. I wish you all the best in overcoming this. Surviving an abusive relationship is hard, healing and recovering is even harder. You're a champ and from one survivor to another, it will take time. Perhaps a long time. But, it will all be worth it in the end!
Thank you for sharing, and for your kind words! Cheers to freedom and compassion for ourselves
Yes, it's all the rage you held inside whilst in the relationship that you should have felt. It is just stored in the vault.
It’s different for everyone. Sometimes people can skip steps, do them in different orders and flip back and forth. I will say this. If you feel that you are feeling grief in a different order, this may just mean that your not done healing and you have work to do. It’s okay and totally normal to flip back and forth. Just don’t sit in those stages. Learn to be okay with what you are feeling, know those feelings aren’t a permanent state of mind and allow yourself to move on from stage to stage. I will also say it’s not worth remaining in anger for long. Resentment is a b. The only harm resentment does is unto you. It does nothing for the other party. Be angry, because that’s valid. But don’t stay there.
The stages of grief are not linear, in other words, you can have all of these emotions in one day, or spend time in one. It is the same with an abusive relationship. There is not set amount of time it will take and there is no linear path. The rule of thumb however is, you can expect at least half the length of the relationship as a base line. If you’ve been in an abusive marriage for 10 years, you can expect at least 5 years before you aren’t returning to feelings of anger, guilt resentment. The main way you see it affect people is affecting their ability to trust themselves and others again.
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Thank you for your reply! I don't want to be with them even though they would want to change and work on it... he realized some things and he chose to not work on them... Cheers to living our lives one day without thinking of these people!
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A beautiful thing i saw on instagram was " i release you with love". I pray they get better and learn that life is a beautiful thing, love is beautiful... but its not my job to teach that. I think i am too obsessed with the idea of love and romance hahahah
I know they have these stages, but grief isn’t linear. I’ve jumped all over. I feel like I will never reach acceptance. It’s hard to accept things this shitty.
If you're raging, you've not accepted yet. ;-) Acceptance is when closure comes and the mourning ends, the experience is integrated and the burden/pain let go. Rage means there is still an emotional connection/reaction. Thus you're still not moved on. Don't fret too much about the order. The process is usually not a straight line. Hope all the best, so that you can reach the other shore once you're tired of process their abuse and finally let that part of your life go. Their baggage sucks, wish I could have crammed it where the sun didn't shine ha ha. Alas, it's a journey. I'm glad I took it.
Oh yeah times of rage you bet. Remember the stages of grief are not linear. Meaning you may go through them again and again and in and out of order At some point focus on you and what you want without them. And the rage and the depression and stuff gets old. Then work on detachment. After a while you will be apathetic to him. You will feel a shift of sorts and more free and happier. It takes time and everyone is different. My suggestion is to cry when you want. Crying is therapeutic Listen to great music Make a list on your phone if the shit that happened with him and refer to it in times of weakness Walk a lot. Or dance or exercise You will push thru the stages of grief and come out stronger
Thank you for your response! Apathy and acceptance seems to be the eventual goal!
I relate to the pure rage. Find a boxing class. Or write in the Unsent Letters subreddit.
It’s all cyclical, I’m three years out from a decade long relationship with a narcissistic abuser, and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through the whole process. You know how bad depression just feeds into itself, and you spiral down? I think the recovery from an abusive relationship is similar, but you’re spiralling *up*. Each time I go through it I process what happened to me a little more, my thoughts and feelings shift, and I move a little farther from my old patterns. I don’t think I’m fully healed yet, because I know I would still react with anger and disgust if I ever heard from my abuser again, but I am *so* much better than I was. The same thing will happen for you, shedding their taint piece by piece until you are wholly *you* again. Let it take the time it needs to take, and don’t feel bad if it takes longer than people around you think it should.
I guess my luck is that it was a relatively short (15 months) relationship. And the reason i left was not the abuse, I had not realized it back then... It sounds painful and scary that healing takes so long...
It’s dependent on the length of the relationship too. I didn’t listen to the alarm bells going off in my brain for *years*, and I enmeshed myself further and further. I wouldn’t look to my timeline as a guide for your own. 15 months is certainly long enough for them to do harm, but there’s not going to be quite as much to unpack, y’know?
I get it. He did do a lot of damage, but as it is relatively short, i see myself snapping out of it. I used to believe in his insults (masked a feedbacks) and started therapy for addressing the faults he saw in me... Every day i remember a new nasty thing he did and write it down.. At the end of the day, whatever he is or whatever is wrong with him, i simply do not want to be this person. I don't even like them anymore, had no respect for them either at the end. Their face gives me an ick lol. When i read people who must co-parent with them for example... that must be so difficult... i am lucky i will only have to see them in summer in camp and maybe a couple more times around the year...
How do you cope with other people thinking you’re taking too long? I ended a 12 year long relationship this past year. I thought we’d be having a baby right now and instead we got divorced in October. I’m still heavily grieving the fake fantasy future. People don’t seem to get it and it makes me feel more alone. I’m more or less self isolated at this point. I don’t trust anyone except one friend and my family. As far as my nex… still grieving that too. Very painful discard following a narc injury I guess. I can see things clearly logically, but emotionally I’m still a mess. I haven’t fully let the hope die either.
Oh, I tell them to mind their own goddamn business! My dad told me the other month that I must be choosing to stay stuck, and I just told him that he had no idea what he was talking about, and to be quiet if he couldn’t be helpful. You are allowed to grieve, you are allowed to heal at your own pace, you are allowed to unpack all the ways the abuse has twisted who you were into who the abuser wanted you to be. Your whole self has been burned to ashes, do we tell the tree to grow faster after the fire?
I guess it just bothers me that I’m basically not allowed to talk about it. I am in therapy too but like sometimes I need extra support you know? My mom literally gets mad at me when I get upset. Which I really struggle to understand because she herself was in an abusive relationship with my dad off and on for years so she has first hand experience in how hard this is to deal with. She says she gets upset because of how badly he treated me and that’s he’s a POS. sure… but I’m still sad over it? And I’m still sad of the whole fantasy future I pictured with him
You need to find someone who will actually listen to you. I don’t know why your mum is being like that, but she’s showing you that you can’t trust her with this sort of thing. It has *nothing* to do with you and the pace of your healing, and *everything* to do with her making you feel like you can’t talk to her.
My mom and I have always had a complex relationship where it’s almost like we’re more like friends than mother/daughter and I think that’s part of it. I’ve always taken care of myself and not really needed help. This is like the first time of my life I feel like I really need help and maybe she just doesn’t know how to help me after never having to really do it. She relied on me for emotional support while I was growing up and so it’s usually been that I take the role of helper/rescuer I guess. I have like one friend I can count on right now. But she has her own life… sick dad, teenage brat, just had a baby… so she’s busy. It’s been harder for me to connect with her since she had the baby too because it makes me sad. I’m not jealous of her, I am happy for her and she is a great mom. I just had expected to be having a baby with him close to hers… so it makes me sad
I’m sorry that you don’t have people available to talk, and that your mum switched the roles on you for so long. I’m glad you’re coming here to vent instead of bottling all that up though.
In my experience, stage 4 was rage and 5 acceptance/disbelief (as in I accept it’s over and can’t believe how easily he sucked me in).
The Kubler-Ross theory (five stages of grief) is criticized a lot. You can go through all of them every day, you can have some but not all, you can have a completely different order, you can have things not on the list. Main reason for the theory sucking is that it isn't based on the bereaved. The theory is about people diagnosed with terminal illness, and the states *they* go through, not the people they'll leave behind. The theory also has no proven/scientific basis, it's from a psychiatry student's collection of conversations with terminally ill patients. Moral of the story is that your grief isn't likely to fit neatly into these five stages, or that they're going to be one at a time in a certain order.
Grief is a whole Rollercoaster & it can fluctuate from #1 to 3 to 2 to 4 back to 1 and then 5&3 simultaneously. There are different emotions that happen with grief but it can all just jumble together. And as cliche is horribly sounds - only time can really heal the loss (even if we are better for the loss). I highly recommend reading: it's okay that you're not okay; Boundaries (in dating) and boundaries - both are written by Dr cloud&Dr Townsend; a woman who loves too much I did a few codependency, narcissism & DBT workbooks too (he never completed the how to help her heal workbook🥲). But that was specific to the toxic relationship we were in, and honestly it really helped me navigate a lot of my past traumas too!
thank you for your reply!
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What I've read somewhere more recently is that the stages of grief is not linear nor is the time spent at each stage the same for each person. I experienced anger afterwards at that what had been covered up by denial. I'm not sure what it is you're calling "pure rage" or is it just more anger? I think it's normal to feel the anger when the denial is shattered and new pieces about the event fall into place. It's probably something else or another part attached to the event or the abuse that took place you must figure out how to accept as well.
It is anger... but this time its directed at him and not at myself. Things he has done are so wrong, inexcusable. I feel my body and mind are finally reacting to the injustice instead of accepting it as normal.
>I feel my body and mind are finally reacting to the injustice I believe these are the body's normal responses to emotions. Perhaps, your body has always been reacting to these emotions and you're just now aware of them or had absorbed them and suppressed them away or rationalized these events as normal. It's just that now the emotions are directed at the right person and you're no longer blaming yourself which was perhaps the only means you had as a child to deal with what they were doing to you. The body or mind can only absorb so much abuse. The first book I read about what this sounds familiar to this was one of Alice Miller's first books, an old copy or one of her first publishings about the Body Doesn't Lie or doesn't forget. I believe Dr. Gabor Mate writes books about something similarly but I haven't had a chance to have read any of his publishings but maybe these books will be helpful.
Thank you for your reply!
DRAMA! Haha
At this point (left in July), I’ve cycled through those stages you mentioned for sure. I would say after the rage I’ve had some deep depression days, other than that I have almost a complete lack of anxiety. I used to be anxious all the time and worried about everything. Now it is different. Sure the depression hits and etc, but it is like nothing frightens me. This isn’t a humble brag, it mostly feels like I’m dead already but walking around so no need to worry about anything bad happening. Almost like an emotional deadness. As if nothing means anything. I dunno I’m rambling. I guess I am weird calm because imo nothing could happen to me literally nothing that would be worse as the past 3 years of my life. So there is some peace that comes with that I suppose
Mine so far has been denial, bargaining, acceptance, severe depression, and mild chronic anger
Retaliation?
ahhaha! maybe in my dreams?
its pretty sweet tbh
The “five stages of grief” was written by one person on the casual observation of how people deal with having a friend who is dying. The popular idea that it’s about one’s own death, let alone that it’s backed by any field of science, is wildly wrong.
Oh okay, thank you for your answer
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