Divorce or the end of a long term relationship can be a traumatic experience, whether you are the initiator or the one being left. Even though we may have gone through a lot of emotional turmoil on the way to the break up, that doesn’t mean we are by any means complete emotionally just because we have left the relationship. We carry with us the baggage of unresolved issues. If we don’t find a way to unpack those bags and sort through what we want to keep and what we need to discard they will adversely affect us in the future, whether we get into a new relationship or not.
When a relationship ends we are not just saying goodbye to what has been, we are also saying goodbye to what the relationship meant to us and all the unmet hopes, dreams and expectations. We must grieve what was and what could have been to say nothing about dealing with all the beliefs and assumptions we develop that can be very limiting as well.
Being a child of divorce and having experienced more than one divorce myself, it took a long time for me to realize just how the incompletes from my past were playing out in my relationships over and over. I was not able to have a truly authentic relationship until I dealt with my unresolved grief.
In our culture we are not taught to grieve endings, we are taught to distract ourselves or just keep going and pretend that time will heal all wounds. It would be great if that actually worked but I have not found this to be the case. Time does not heal, replacing the loss with yet another relationship does not heal, nor does isolation.
“Incomplete relationships create unresolved grief, and…Unresolved grief creates incomplete relationships.”
We need to take action to complete on the unresolved issues in order to move on. This is an important part of self care and preparing ourselves for a brighter future.
