Learning..

Tears are normal, anger is normal, feeling the pain is normal, wanting to talk about it incessantly with anyone who will listen is also normal, be kind to yourself and allow yourself to grieve till you get to the stage of acceptance. That is when you will wake up and go to bed “pain-free”.

Losing a loved one through a breakup emulates the same sense of loss and grief as losing someone to death. You will survive. You will heal, even if you cannot believe that now, just know that it is true. To feel pain after loss is normal. It proves that we are alive, human. But we can't stop living. We have to become stronger, while not shutting off our feelings for the hope of one day being healed and finding happiness again.

There are stages of grief and all of us may go through each one of them or not, and the time we take in each stage also varies depending on our willingness to move on and our past experiences. Some of us may breeze through some stages, because in some way, we already went through them whilst STILL in the relationship.

Generally the five stages of grief are:

1-Denial-"this can't be happening” “ I don’t believe this”

2-Anger-"why me?", blaming!

3-Bargaining- this often takes place before the loss. Attempting to make deals with the partner who is leaving, or attempting to make deals with God to stop or change the loss. Begging, wishing, praying for them to come back.

4-Depression-overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, frustration, bitterness, self pity, mourning the loss of the person as well as the hopes, dreams and plans for the future. Feeling lack of control.

5-Acceptance-You have to accept the loss, not just try to bear it quietly. Realization that it takes two to make or break a relationship. Our goals turn toward personal growth. Stay with fond memories of person.

BE VERY HONEST NOW:

How long were you in the relationship?

How many days were you angry and felt you would be better off alone, or wonder if you could change her or him? Threaten them into doing what you wanted? How many times did you cry or were you upset and dissatisfied with how things really were, out of the entire time?

How often were you drunk when you felt really happy with each other?

How many hours in a day were you truly satisfied and happy?

How much time did you say or think “this will get better”?

How intimate were you really towards the end of the relationship?

Physically? Emotionally?

How well did you communciate? How much did you really say and how much did you hold back?

How many times did you outwardly or inwardly complain about your partner?

Be truthful.

This is a very important step. If you need to, ask your closest friends and family members to help you remember and be truthful about the numbers here.

Finally you left the relationship. You knew you deserved better than just some fraction of what you wanted. But the attachment to your ex lingers. It lingers because you never succeeded in making him or her fulfill your needs completely. It feels as if you failed. You feel that somehow not getting what you wanted was your fault. If you were only good enough your ex would have given you the love you wanted, all of the time. After all, he or she did give it to you some of the time. If you were slimmer, fitter, not so controlling or jealous, if your mother was nicer to them, if you could cook better, if you had more money to spend on them, if you were smarter, better looking, if you gave more attention, smoked or drank less, dressed better, showed more respect, were more tolerant…

Another thing that keeps you hooked into that relationship is anger. Anger arises when someone has something you want but won’t give it to you, especially when the giving of the thing would seem to be the natural or the expected thing to do. You are justified in being angry, yet anger is a way to stay connected to someone, albeit not a positive way.

Thoughts of jealousy, that he or she will be with someone else faster than you have recovered and that the next person will “benefit” from all the stuff you taught him or her and they will give freely and quickly what you waited so patiently for them to give to you! That the new person better embodied the stuff that you believed he or she wanted in a partner.

This is where you have to be very positive and have utter faith in the Universe that the two of you were brought together to go through the learning and the evolution that you can only do in a relationship. As you may already know, it is in a relationship, more than anywhere else, that we can discover who we are. I seem to remember God telling Neale Walsch in one of the Conversations with God books, that the exquisite gem relationships have to offer is this ability to tell us who we are, and who we are not.

Our relationships, then, mirror back to us what we don't like about the way we think we have to be. The cosmic mirror reminds us what we don't like about what is going on in our life, and reminds us of what we are tolerating that we don't want to tolerate any more.

Those who are wise, when they come up against themselves in this way, ask the question "What is this uncomfortable situation telling me about me?" Those who are unwise ask the question "Why doesn't so and so change?"

So look at the relationship as a course or a workshop, where you got to learn certain things about yourself and KNOW that the learning is embedded in you.

Think of a time when you studied really hard for an exam in school, you learned and you know, however it is only when you read the question that your mind will go in and extract that particular answer, so even if you cannot identify or list all your learnings, know that you have learnt and when the time comes, you will act and come from a new place of “knowing”.

The next person in your life in an intimate relationship will be attracted to the “you post the ex”!

So, if you discover through common friends or facebook that he or she is seeing or committing to another person in a way that they did not do with you, bless them. You loved this person and to love means to truly want the best for the other person and for yourself. If you have ever sold a home, or a car, because you have out-grown it, does it mean that the house or car should remain unused in a museum? Do you want to be the eternal curator?

There is another reason why it’s hard to let go of the relationship that got away. The person you were in love with truly had great qualities. With him or her you had an incredible connection. Maybe he or she loved you intensely. He or she may still love you. The only problem in the relationship was that he or she could only treat you well part of the time. The rest of the time, he or she acted hurtfully towards you and you towards them.

It is very difficult to throw away this type of connection. And it is more difficult still when you interacted with the wonderful, caring side of him or her. Having to walk away from such a relationship can be the hardest thing you will ever do. Even when you walk away it may still pull at your heart.

It is so much easier to let go of someone when it is clear he or she doesn’t care about you. It may even be easier to let go of someone who dies, because there is nothing that can be done. But to let go of someone who is well and alive and loves you is an incredible task. Yet let go you must if the partner you are clinging to is not willing to meet your needs.

So how do you do this? How do you let go of the living, breathing former partner who may love you, or whom you may love, and yet who is not good for you? How do you let go of the one who seems to have been the one?

The first step is to understand that your partner would have given you the MOON if he or she could have. Even when he or she appeared to be holding back or hurting you on purpose, he or she was always doing the best he or she could. Understand that he or she never intentionally hurt you.

To let go of your past relationship, you will first need to forgive your ex, forgive yourself, and understand that his or her behavior was not your fault. Understand that all that he or she did, the good and the bad all together, comprise the totality of this person. Sometimes he or she was wonderful and sometimes he or she was horrible. And all of the time he or she was the person you cared for.

There is no way you could only have his or her good side. Because you were connected to the whole person, you had to experience the bad side as well. His or her bad side was hurtful, and in the end the bad outweighed the good. Since the bad side was a part of the package and could not be changed, the whole package had to go. Just like a doctor may recommend that you amputate a bad finger, instead of risking losing the entire hand.

You can’t stop thinking of your ex. You have to find other things to think focus on.