Heal and Move On by Andrew G Marshall

Author:Andrew G Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Roberta used this idea to look back over her fifteen-year marriage. She had a high for the birth of her daughter and after that everything was more or less a flat line. Beyond the last three and a half years, Roberta’s graph showed that her relationship had been better than she had painted it. ‘Obviously, I have regrets but actually it was not all bad,’ she concluded.

Five Stages of Grief

These were originally outlined by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who wrote the seminal book On Death and Dying (Simon & Schuster, 1969). She had been working with terminally ill patients in New York and noticed that they moved through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although Kübler-Ross’s prime aim was to help doctors approach the dying with sensitivity and understanding, her stages have been transferred wholesale into bereavement counselling without taking into consideration that losing someone is a totally different experience from dying. With that note of caution, the five stages are useful for coming to terms with loss – whether through death, divorce or relationship breakdown – because they show that our feelings are natural, healthy and very human.

Here are her five stages:

Denial

The first response to bad news is numbness: ‘No, it can’t be happening to me.’ Denial is like a buffer against the shock. It provides us with a breathing space to collect our thoughts, find our coping strategies and gather our supporters. For Carrie, fifty-six, who ended her thirty-year marriage, it was like waking up from a long sleep: ‘I remember looking round the family dinner table one Christmas and knowing that I could not do this for another year. Suddenly, I realised that I had been fooling myself. My husband would never change and the relief . . . it flooded through me. It was only then that I understood just how sad I had been.’

Anger

The evidence is impossible to ignore. Finally, the truth dawns: ‘Oh yes, it really is happening.’ The next emotion is anger: ‘Why me?’ ‘What have I done?’ Generally, there are two kinds of anger. The first makes complete sense – after all, we are very hurt – and is normally aimed at our partners (for betraying our love and trust) and ourselves (either for our mistakes or for not spotting the seriousness earlier). I call this kind: rational anger. The second sort of anger, however, is completely different. Although we need to be angry, we dare not show it to our partners (especially if we are trying to persuade them to stay). Instead, the feelings are dumped on to someone else. For example, the person who told us that our partner had been cheating, the other man or woman in the triangle, or our partner’s family for ‘encouraging’ the break-up. I call this kind: irrational anger.

For the person who is left, the anger often lasts longer – especially if their partner has been unfaithful – and the ensuing depression phase involves a greater sense of being betrayed. Mark, twenty-eight, speaks for a lot of people: ‘I would have done anything for Francesca but it was never enough.

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