Acknowledgement: Taking the time to feel my losses instead of pushing them away

[pearlsw]

Hi all,

I have been dealing with a lot of loss in my life (and potential loss) and I wanted to take the time to revisit how I process loss. Instead of just doing what I always do, I thought I'd give the lessons on the right side of the board a deeper look.

From Acknowledgement:

- Get in touch with your true feelings. Feel them. Don't avoid, distort, or minimize them.

- When things are going well for us, when we feel strong and positive, when we're healthy and full of inspiration and when we're in love it's easy to wonder why the yogic texts carry on so much about detachment.

- When we're faced with loss, grief, or failure, it looks much more appealing—our practice in detachment becomes a lifeline that can move us out of acute suffering into something close to peace.

ACKNOWLDGEMENT [Stage 1]: When we're dealing with a major loss or strong attachment, we begin our healing by acknowledging and working with our feelings. The feelings that are the stickiest aspects of attachment are:
the excited desire we feel when we want something,
the anxiety we feel about losing it, and
the sense of hopelessness that can arise when we fail to achieve it.

Acknowledgment doesn't just mean recognizing that we want something badly or that we're feeling loss. When you want something, feel how you want it—find the wanting feeling in your body.

Remember when you were feeling cocky about a victory and you beat your chest and said, "Me, me, me!"

Rather than pushing away the anxiety and fear of losing what you care about, let it come up and breathe into it the same way. And when you're experiencing the hopelessness of actual loss, allow it in.

Let yourself cry.

[pearlsw]

I think I want to try this notion of breathing along with the losses instead of stuffing them down... .I want to experiment and see if this helps me find peace with them.

Are you really able to sit with your losses in the way? Have you tried it? How do you find it? I think I tend to minimize or put them into place so fast I don't do the work they require sometimes... .worth considering at least.

[toddinrochester]

Hello Pearl! The moment someone decides that instead of dealing with this pain, instead of sitting in it and learning about them and more importantly us. I feel, my uneducated opinion is, that you hit the reset button on the process.

What I mean is this. Say you are feeling the intense whirlwind of emotions, the withdrawal like symptoms, the grief and the sadness. The worst one, that what we thought all along was the very thing we knew and grew to be true love... .It was not love. Not on their end. I believe I loved her with all my heart, I would have done anything for her. I know that during that relationship I felt it was reciprocated. I know now that it was not. That it was fake on her end. But! I came to a place where I stopped thinking maybe I was wrong about her and maybe someone else will make her happy and maybe it was not BPD (flying in the face of the fact that everyone on this board has the same story as me) and I could have been wrong. The worst one was my desire to be recycled. I wanted it in the worst way.

So I avoided doing just what you are talking about, I avoided it and pushed that pain off like the tides of the ocean and until that day when the water went out and I saw who she was without the covering, the barren ocean floor. I was you. I am not sure when you know you are done. There is not some bell that goes off and you feel remorse instead of hate (lets be honest the rage we have felt towards our BPD exes is evil at times), once you sit in like you are about to do. Once you let it all out and understand there is no coming back to that person because they will only cause you heartache and pain.

Once you sit on that exposed ocean floor near the beach you once sat on for safety knowing the waves could not get to you. That's when you begin to heal.

Let me know if this makes any kind of sense. There are lots of times my thoughts are fragmented.

[pearlsw]

Hi toddinrochester,

I haven't read all your previous so I hope you don't mind if I cut to the chase here, but how can you be so sure she did not love you? I mean, I've had relationships end, but I never felt unloved. With my "h" I have to say I feel LOVED, but not in a very healthy way. He's got a lot of issues and seems so hard to do or have what feels "normal" for me this go around in life.

Are you working your way through these 5 stages of Detachment on the right hand side of the board? --->

Has this step been one you've found meaningful?

[toddinrochester]

Read my posts from the start. You will see my journey.

[pearlsw]

Hi toddinrochester!

I'm on it... .scanning through your early posts on the site... .Yes, you have come a long way and learned so much!

take care, pearl.

[BeagleGirl]

Pearlsw,
Thanks for starting this conversation. 

I personally have a tendency to try to rush through the acknowledgement step.  As soon as I have an inkling of the "problem", I'm off trying to solve it.  It's been very helpful for me to use the phrase "sit with my __".  Yesterday I had the pleasure of "sitting with my joy", acknowledging that I was joyful at a time when most people (myself included) would have said it was unexpected or even inappropriate.  I got to take the time to own what I was feeling without having to understand why I was feeling it. 

It's not as pleasant when that feeling is "negative", and I'm learning that some of the discomfort around feeling those things is directly tied to my categorizing them as "negative".  One clear example of that is anger.  I consider anger "bad".  I avoid sitting with it, probably just as actively as dBPDstbxh does.  I'm still trying to learn on a heart level what I read in the Bible.  I'm not told not to be angry.  I'm told not to sin in my anger.  The feeling is not "bad".  What I choose to do with that feeling can be good, bad or indifferent.  I think that the problem is that when I choose not to accept that I'm angry, I am not accepting responsibility for choosing how I respond to it.  I'm just responding, and it's usually not good.

BG

[Jeffree]

Oy... .where to start?

OK, yes, so I have been dealing with A LOT of loss in the past year, too -- loss of my marriage, loss of my job, loss of my financial security, loss of my dad, impending loss of my most favorite dog ever. It has been never ending, and all of my attempts to recover my balance have been pretty futile.

For quite a while I have been living life in my body but not feeling as though this is really my life. Too much is going wrong and there's no end in sight.

I have been at what I believe is rock bottom.

But how do I navigate all this loss?

I just keep going, doing what I will to function in my baseline activities -- getting up to face each day, getting ready to commute to my job in which I am greatly underemployed, doing the best job I can while there, then at the end of the workday leaving for home and chipping away at keeping up my house (which too big for me now) and getting it ready for sale and applying for better jobs. That's about it. Yeah, I could make the time to go to the gym, but I'm not that interested in joining one and getting into that routine. It bores me to tears. I'll hang out with a friend occasionally, head downstate to see my sister and my niece and nephew, and a couple of random social things, but that's about it.

Along the way I will think on what has happened and why and what I can do about feeling better about things or just accepting this new landscape of my life.

All of this has really shaken up my belief system, and I don't know if it has done so for the best of worst.

In short, I used to believe in karma and that good things happen to those who wait and treat others as you would like to be treated. Now? I think all this positive hocus-pocus we tell ourselves are just stories like Santa Claus to keep ourselves falsely hopeful. I know that's pretty grim, but it's where I am. That's what it looks like looking 51 years in the rear mirror and understanding what this thing we call life is about.

Basically, most of what separates the haves from the have-nots is sheer luck, but we typically want there to be more of direct correlation to our fortunes in life and our role in making those things happen.

To me, loss, gain, good, bad, happy, sad, indifferent are all flowing through us at once. How we choose to see any of it at any given time is up to us, and probably the best we can do moment to moment. I'm out of the beating myself up about business. I tried my darndest to have a good life and to bring anyone who entered my life in any meaningful way on that journey. That pretty much everyone wanted to reject me for it is just how it played out.

J

[BeagleGirl]

Oy... .where to start?

OK, yes, so I have been dealing with A LOT of loss in the past year, too -- loss of my marriage, loss of my job, loss of my financial security, loss of my dad, impending loss of my most favorite dog ever. It has been never ending, and all of my attempts to recover my balance have been pretty futile.

Jeffree,
    Not that this helps, but I am so sorry for all you have been through.  My heart ached when I ready your post and still aches.
    I think I've been in a similar place to where you are now.  I think the hardest loss at that point in time was my loss of faith.  Pain doesn't seem so hard to bear when I can make some sense out of it, but when it got to the point where I felt like God was just being cruel... .  When I was going through my third miscarriage in a year and I hadn't even had the faith to beg God to allow me to hold this baby, I just didn't want to have to be going through a miscarriage on Mother's day and the day before the doctor had called to give me the bad news and it's Mother's day and there's no doubt that I'm losing this baby too... .Yeah, that day I understood why people thing that there either isn't a God or He's a cruel puppet master who gets His kicks out of seeing how much pain we puny humans can endure and still believe in Him.  And that set me adrift in a sea of pain with no anchor.
    I can't give you hope that it will all work out.  I would feel like a hypocrite if I told you that God's still there and He loves you, because some days I still don't know.  Not that it would help you if I could.  All I can say is that I will sit here with you.  I see your pain and I hurt with you.
BeagleGirl

[lovenature]

Buddhist people believe in fully allowing your thoughts and feelings and then just letting them go, they realize that thoughts (and the emotions that stem from them) are just mental events and nothing more. I think that above all else we must be realistic, no one who hasn't lived through a BPD relationship can ever imagine how it affects your mind and emotions.