Getting over it

[mdlbear]

(I'm posting this one because it looks as though several people on my flist could use it. I'm doing fine right now, thanks.)

There are two links here, and they're related only because they both touch on the way a relationship can change after it's over.

The first is this review of a book called Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adults Life--For the Better.

Death Benefits demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author's own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young; and that loss must simply be endured or overcome.

I probably ought to get this one, but I don't really need to: I can easily believe it. Sometimes you need a whack on the side of the head with a very big cluestick, and that's about the biggest one you can get. That cancer screening you've been putting off? Do it now.

 

The second is a little more problematic: The Emotions of Grief During A Breakup (via Wikipedia). In particular,

When the person is alive and there was a breakup, this is often when people will try to open up communications with the ex. Recognize that the urge to search is part of the grieving process and you should not act on it. When you are pining and searching, you are in a temporary state and anything you say now can and will be held against you at a later date.

(Emphasis mine) This is probably good advice, sometimes. If you want or need to make a clean break of it, if there's pain or anger or hatred on one side or the other, if you've broken up before and can't seem to stay away from one another, yeah: I can see it.

But if the objective is to stay friends, to cool a too-intense relationship down to a level that you're both comfortable with, it's probably best to keep talking. In many cases, you'll both be grieving, though perhaps to different degrees. Help one another work through it. As friends.

(I'll note as an aside that you'll need to give one another space and time. Call or IM when you have news, or to congratulate your friend when they post happy news in their LJ. Not every day. Maybe not even every week. Drop back to email, perhaps, and the occasional LJ comment. Don't go for dinner and a movie -- that's really courting disaster. Meet for lunch on a weekday when you both have things to get back to at 1:00 sharp.)

As a friend, realize that you want your friend to be happy. Not with you as their lover, apparently, but happy. Stay interested in their life. Help one another through it, as best you can. Be glad you're still friends.

 

(Added 17:00) Let me just restate something from the last post on grieving: "getting over" your loss does not mean "forgetting about it". Your goal is to come to terms with it, whatever those terms happen to be; to "get over it" in the sense of getting over a challenging obstacle, so that it's safely behind you and doesn't keep getting in the way of your life.

Comments

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I got the Cancer Cluestick with my mom's first mastectomy. Every year, without fail, even before I was old enough to "need" it that often.

When you're right...

[chaoswolf]

You're right. I have been coming to grips with the breakup over Laura for almost a year and a half now --- I find out that Sam's ex boyfriend is making a choice between one of my friends at school and Laura, and I'm just not touching it.

Whatever hatred Laura bears towards me is her own affair, I am not holding a grudge against her.

[tiggerypum.livejournal.com]

I have seen all sorts of results in terms of people's reactions to death of a parent, and of course not all of it is bad. Grieving is a complex process, takes time, and sometimes is hard to handle. And not everyone does it in the same way, even with all the 'stages' that are published.

With the second part (breakup) frankly, I think that most people should take a lot of space and should process their feelings -with someone else- not the former lover. Stepping 'back' in a relationship (especially if there were some expectations/future that now will not happen) is rarely easy, and there will be a lot of patterns to be relearned. Whatever dependencies on each other that had formed need to be broken, and if you can go back and get the old desired result part of the time, it's just the crazy-making random/variable positive reinforcement loop that will probably muddle the letting go process. (random reinforcement results in addictive like behavior, rats will press the food lever more often in their box if it turns out they need to press it a random number of times for food, this is the same thing that works to keep gamblers gambling). So anyway, I think that the 'friendship' would probably need to be limited to certain contexts for some period of time, while new different boundaries are being set, and so that each can go through their own adjustments/grieving/etc.

[mdlbear]

Good advice. Lots of space, keeping things light, casual, and infrequent. Depends somewhat on how far the relationship is moving, where it was before, and how much self-control the parties have.