Lesson 1 Part 1: The Stages of Grieving

[Family Court Strategies: When Your Partner Has BPD OR NPD Traits.]

the lessons on this site are a great road map to recovery, and they are often overlooked and under utilized. as i read through them, im struck that they seem to speak to, cover, answer, everything i struggled with during and especially in the aftermath of my relationship; many of the things i see my fellow members struggle with.

some of us on this board are further out and detached from some of the immediate pain of the breakup. some of us are fresh in it, but looking for guidance in how to heal and move on. i thought it would be a good idea for all of us to band together and explore our detachment and recovery process for the sake of others and ourselves, and maybe reexamine and learn some things in the process.

Lesson 1 begins with different "stages" that include the kubler-ross stages of grieving, susan andersons stages of abandonment, and bpdfamily's stages of Detachment. This thread will cover the kubler-ross stages of grieving.

Lesson 1: Healing, the big picture

Where are you going?  This is the road map.  Please refer back to it often.  It's important to see healing as a process and to constantly be marking your progress.  You need to know where you are going and the pathway there if you are ever going to reach healing.  Without this, many just get stuck in a stage without realizing that it is a stage.



How grief passes through us: The Five Stages of Grieving

Denial- This is when we and our partner are on different page about our commitments to the relationship. This stage is filled with disbelief and denial.  Often in this stage we are engaged in relationship struggles and are expecting our partner to respond in the way that someone in a relationship would respond. However, they are in a very different, less caring place.  We are confused, hurt, put off by their behavior.

Anger- Anger is often the reaction to being hurt and/or fearful, and helpless to do anything about it. The greater the loss, the greater the reaction. Anger is a very complex part of grieving - many of us stumble in this stage with either unhealthy anger (misdirected, trapping) or no anger (no release).  We need to determine why we're angry and focus our feeling on the true issues - if not, anger can imprison us.

Bargaining- Bargaining is that stage of the break-up when you’re trying to make deals and compromises. It’s when you start talking about how an open relationship might be a possibility or a long-distance thing could work. It’s when you say to your partner, “if you just did this then I could do that and it would work”. It’s when you say to yourself that you’ll do x, y, z to be a better spouse so that the relationship doesn’t have to end.

Depression- After all of the denial and the anger and the bargaining have been done and we realize that things really are starting to end and we become depressed. We fell helpless and powerless and overwhelmed with sadness about the loss that we are experiencing.  This acknowledgment often starts the serious process of us trying to understand what happened.

Acceptance- Acceptance is a final stage when we have finally sorting out what happened, accepted it and are more interested in moving forward than looking back. Acceptance can take a lot of time and a lot of processing. It involves understanding the situation, understand our role / understand their role, understanding what can be learned, and letting go / moving forward.  

Note: Each person mourns a loss differently.  You may not experience these stages in one fluid order. You may go through some of the stages more than once. Sometimes during the bargaining stages we recycle the relationship. Or an event will trigger us to experience one of these stages again - like hearing your ex-partner is to remarry.

Questions:

1. If you are in the grieving process, where are you?
2. If you are out of the grieving process, how did these stages apply to you?
3. How have you practically worked through each stage?
4. Which stages have you had the most difficulty with, or stayed longest in?

Article on detachment process: Leaving a Partner with Borderline Personality Disorder

Member discussion of the Five Stages <click here>

[once removed]

the lessons on this site are a great road map to recovery, and they are often overlooked and under utilized. as i read through them, im struck that they seem to speak to, cover, answer, everything i struggled with during and especially in the aftermath of my relationship; many of the things i see my fellow members struggle with.

some of us on this board are further out and detached from some of the immediate pain of the breakup. some of us are fresh in it, but looking for guidance in how to heal and move on. i thought it would be a good idea for all of us to band together and explore our detachment and recovery process for the sake of others and ourselves, and maybe reexamine and learn some things in the process.

Lesson 1 begins with different "stages" that include the kubler-ross stages of grieving, susan andersons stages of abandonment, and bpdfamily's stages of Detachment. This thread will cover the kubler-ross stages of grieving.

Lesson 1: Healing, the big picture

Where are you going?  This is the road map.  Please refer back to it often.  It's important to see healing as a process and to constantly be marking your progress.  You need to know where you are going and the pathway there if you are ever going to reach healing.  Without this, many just get stuck in a stage without realizing that it is a stage.



How grief passes through us: The Five Stages of Grieving

Denial- This is when we and our partner are on different page about our commitments to the relationship. This stage is filled with disbelief and denial.  Often in this stage we are engaged in relationship struggles and are expecting our partner to respond in the way that someone in a relationship would respond. However, they are in a very different, less caring place.  We are confused, hurt, put off by their behavior.

Anger- Anger is often the reaction to being hurt and/or fearful, and helpless to do anything about it. The greater the loss, the greater the reaction. Anger is a very complex part of grieving - many of us stumble in this stage with either unhealthy anger (misdirected, trapping) or no anger (no release).  We need to determine why we're angry and focus our feeling on the true issues - if not, anger can imprison us.

Bargaining- Bargaining is that stage of the break-up when you’re trying to make deals and compromises. It’s when you start talking about how an open relationship might be a possibility or a long-distance thing could work. It’s when you say to your partner, “if you just did this then I could do that and it would work”. It’s when you say to yourself that you’ll do x, y, z to be a better spouse so that the relationship doesn’t have to end.

Depression- After all of the denial and the anger and the bargaining have been done and we realize that things really are starting to end and we become depressed. We fell helpless and powerless and overwhelmed with sadness about the loss that we are experiencing.  This acknowledgment often starts the serious process of us trying to understand what happened.

Acceptance- Acceptance is a final stage when we have finally sorting out what happened, accepted it and are more interested in moving forward than looking back. Acceptance can take a lot of time and a lot of processing. It involves understanding the situation, understand our role / understand their role, understanding what can be learned, and letting go / moving forward.  

Note: Each person mourns a loss differently.  You may not experience these stages in one fluid order. You may go through some of the stages more than once. Sometimes during the bargaining stages we recycle the relationship. Or an event will trigger us to experience one of these stages again - like hearing your ex-partner is to remarry.

Questions:

1. If you are in the grieving process, where are you?
2. If you are out of the grieving process, how did these stages apply to you?
3. How have you practically worked through each stage?
4. Which stages have you had the most difficulty with, or stayed longest in?

Article on detachment process: Leaving a Partner with Borderline Personality Disorder

Member discussion of the Five Stages <click here>

[once removed]

NOTE: While insight is appreciated, I am not asking for feedback or commentary, this is not a personal thread. It is my hope that you will join me in sharing your own journey through the stages of grief and discussion questions.


  it was certainly true for me that these stages were not linear.

  Denial was an awkward phase for me that can be hard to distinguish from Bargaining. for starters, i guess it applied to the last few months of my relationship. it had really been over for a couple of months. our fights had been nasty and our conflict protracted. she said some things that there was no coming back from. i withdrew. the thought of really breaking up though, spooked me, i couldnt pull that trigger, and when it would occur to me, seemingly out of the blue, "its over", i would dismiss it. in fact by the time we ended, i had made a conscious decision to reinvest in the relationship, spurred by these thoughts.

there was one day in particular that i recall, where it was almost as if i heard a voice telling me to break up with her. i pushed back on it. i asked it why? i told it that it seemed so out of nowhere.

another night that we spent together, we had a big fight. whereas for so much of the relationship she was willing to take more responsibility than was hers, and i was inclined to take less than was mine, she was telling me that this was not a 50/50 split, not even 70/30, that it was all me. she was frustrated and crying. i went on her patio for a few minutes. i could feel that same sense, that it was over, and it scared me. i came back in and just kissed her forehead and we went to sleep.

the description of Denial in the lessons is fitting. i was genuinely shocked that she was capable of breaking up with me, she had been so dependent upon me for so long. i was genuinely shocked that she wanted to. we had always planned to marry. we told each other that we were the one. i couldnt understand why she didnt appear to be struggling, and i couldnt understand why, after a pretty amicable breakup, she quickly turned vindictive.

i remember endlessly ruminating on what caused this. in my mind, there had to be something, even some cosmic force at play. i literally turned to wondering if the weather, the change in seasons had anything to do with it.

i dont know how "fully" in denial i was. part of me wanted it to be over. part of me was even relieved when there was someone else. i just wasnt ready for it. i dont know that i ever would have been.

  Anger really came much later in my grieving process, a last hurdle if you will. dont get me wrong. i tried my hardest to be angry or to feel disdain. i felt it was "wrong" of me to feel anything else, and it felt much better than sadness or longing or feeling weak. my self esteem and confidence were shot and i would try to put her down in my mind. it wasnt clicking.

the honest truth is that there was a lot i did not like about her, and did not respect about her, as a person. there were many times that i tried to leave the relationship. so i couldnt understand why i felt so rejected, so weak, and now saw her on a pedestal. i suppose this was "anger turned inward". or just fear.

in desperation, i turned to writing down a list of things i didnt like about her. it turned into more of a letter to myself than a list. it was ugly, and it was only one side of my feelings, and i knew that, but id be lying if i said that it wasnt a major turning point in my recovery, which was interesting because its not like i didnt repeat these things in my head, but something about putting them to paper was different. at this point my feelings were genuinely more balanced. i didnt pretend that i didnt miss her or that i wasnt struggling, but she also was no longer on a pedestal. i dont remember what i wrote. i know in retrospect that it was railing against rejection. it was a lot of "she cant reject you, you rejected her first." it reversed that sense of rejection, but it missed, at the time, the how and why of why i felt so powerfully rejected and why i struggled.

but when i say that it was mostly a last hurdle, at several months out, i was feeling a lot of feelings of injustice. i knew at that point that she had cheated, likely several times; after all the endless circular arguments and fights about her jealousy. i talked to a couple of mutual friends and learned that the first few months of her new relationship had been completely nuts; shed abandoned her schooling, her home, her pets, she flipped out at her friends and even harassed them to the point that they changed their phone numbers. shed gotten violent out of jealousy toward another girl. shed moved into the new guys home and driven out his room mate and broken up their band. i was told quite a bit about the new guy himself. there was more, like her stealing from me.

i wanted to expose her. i wanted her to know that i knew all of this, that she "hadnt gotten away with it". it burned and nagged inside of me. looking back, i think feelings of powerlessness were associated with this anger. any ruminations i had left were around this subject. i was frustrated. i wanted my say.

again, i put that into creative writing. its always been my outlet for saying the things i literally cant, or mentally cant say to someone. it helped rebuild some confidence because it was my best stuff. the things i would write would be revealing, in terms of how i was processing. i shared them on social media. she read them, and i got something out of that. i dont really have any regrets, and they werent vindictive, nasty, or obvious in that way, but i probably wouldnt do it again.

i believe in sitting with anger. i believe that when a relationship (of any kind) is over, that its petty, weak, and immature to lash out at an ex. my mantra in the early days, when i wanted to reach out, was "silence is golden". later on it was "forever hold your piece." ok. i cheated a little when i posted that stuff knowing she would read it, but even today im proud that i didnt display the kinds of heart on my sleeve weakness as i had after past relationships. in my experience when you hold your piece, it has a way of morphing into a profound sense of inner peace.

  Bargaining was a constant in some way or another. it persisted, and it was the stage i would say i spent the longest amount of time in.

when she broke up with me i was in disbelief. i made the case for our relationship, though i did not beg or plead and i was accepting. however as soon as that phone call was over, so much of it was mentally blocked out, there was so much i couldnt recall and kept trying to replay. i tried to tell others about it and recall as much as i could. i was especially hung up on the fact that when pressed, she wouldnt quite close the door (in retrospect, of course she was), and i parsed anything i could remember to back that up.

so much of the stages of grief seems to me about not being able to accept/process an outcome, and trying to control the outcome, and thats Bargaining in a nutshell. at first i fantasized of her returning, and me being reluctant with my list of demands. i fantasized of her returning and me rejecting her. probably even more than i did about us living happily ever after.

but the longest period of Bargaining was where i tried to get my stuff back. we exchanged a few messages about it, shed always have some excuse, id contact her every few weeks.

meanwhile, i discovered that she was getting into the email attached to my facebook and reading messages that were sent to me. i let this go on for the couple of months that i tried to get my stuff back. i do think that it made some sense if that was my strategy. but i would have honestly told you at the time that seeing this invasion of my privacy (which drove me nuts during the relationship) was of great comfort to me. it let me know she was thinking about me. at first i took it to mean she wanted me back.

there were other periods before that where i was in fight and flight and fantasized (feared?) about her doing really vindictive stuff. i would physically shake, terrified. im not sure how crazy those thoughts were, but in retrospect they were things that wouldnt really be like her. i had a friend tell me that i was in denial and that my ex probably wasnt even giving me a second thought, and also that i shouldnt diagnose her. yikes. but i do think, in retrospect, that imagining these vindictive actions was a form of bargaining.

i finally gave up on getting my stuff back. i changed my password. and then i began to really and truly grieve, and went into a different kind of depression.

  it isnt as if i hadnt been in Depression throughout all of this. i was a complete, non functioning wreck. but it was a manic sort of Depression, interspersed with fleeting resolve, hope; it was all over the place. this Depression was black. it was at this point (i think. maybe it started sooner.) that i would have crying jags every day. they lasted for months.

thoughts of suicidal ideation developed. i was desperate. i wrote my first song that began with the line "a cry for help that never comes". my own fear of abandonment was at an all time high. i felt like a wounded child stripped of his skin.

to be honest, a lot of this stage was less about her, and more about how very alone and powerless i felt. my friends, who were there in the immediate aftermath, were not very present at all after a month or two. my mother, who was my main confidant, was exhausted. whereas i had tried to turn to daydreams and fantasies of how much stronger i would become, and how my life would blossom, i wilted, and that made me even more depressed.  i was trying to do all the right things, and they werent working, and how discouraging that felt. i sought out old friends who had moved on and flat rejected me. i felt so isolated, partly because my sleep schedule flipped completely upside down, and that contributed to a sense of living under a constant dark cloud.

i tried some supplements during all of this. they were crucial. i took Sam-e, which did give me increased feelings of well being, and seriously limited my ruminations. i took passion flower, which stopped my daily anxiety attacks. but we broke up in mid february, and by july, the suicidal ideation was at its worst. i would hear a childlike voice in my head say "no one wants to hang out with me" and cry.

sometime that july i finally saw a doctor and got on some anti depressants. im not sure how much they helped in the sense that they couldnt improve my circumstances, but in a timely way, my circumstances began to improve. for two weeks i felt the "zombie" like effects, which i guess was an improvement. i did get my sleep schedule under control. sometime in the midst of this, one of my buddies started coming over every single day, staying all day. we didnt talk much about most of this, it was just nice to have company. i started recording my music, and it was at this point that i started to pour it all into creative writing. my buddy and i hung out with another old friend of mine. i started to see my other friends a bit more. life started to get back to normal, and it was at that point that i moved into that "last hurdle" anger.

  when did Acceptance come? its hard to say. maybe it started with Depression. i feel that so much of my recovery came in retrospect. i would look back and compare myself to where i was now, and see what i couldnt at the time. see that in fact all of this, even the stagnant periods, was progress. i did explore my role on some level, at times obsessively, but it was more limited to, lets say "what i did wrong with someone who has BPD". i explored some of my issues on a surface level. i forgave. i closed the book and put it away for a year or two. i dated again, and ran into some of the same old stuff, bumped up against some of the same old issues. made some arguably even worse choices. i hadnt fully owned and taken responsibility for my lot in life. i didnt have any new tools for navigating either my own deficits or others. i had some idea of what i wanted to avoid and where was that getting me?

and it was around that time, maybe a year later, that i came to bpdfamily. i read the lessons and compared it to my recovery process. i saw that a lot of my beliefs about BPD, about how the relationship evolved and devolved, were faulty, or limited. i read the lessons on the Improving board and could better see my own skills deficits. i put my efforts into helping others, which kept me learning.

and today, my narrative and what ive learned looks very different than how it did years ago. my life has been transformed. im far stronger and wiser, and most importantly, im less afraid. i know what i want and i know how to get it. my relationships of all kinds have improved - im a better "people person". im a better adjusted person. i cope better. i feel lighter and drama free.

we both tried our hardest to make it work. it wasnt meant to be. i finally accepted and became okay with that.

[heartandwhole]

Hi once removed,

Thank you for sharing this in-depth lesson on the stages, and your experiences. I remember that the road to recovery (through grieving) wasn't linear, and it seemed I skipped and jumped around through the stages.

Like you, anger was one I had trouble with. During the relationship, I remember getting angry several times. But after the breakup, it came much later than I expected. And then, it was milder than expected. I remember receiving an indirect communication from him about 9 months out, and at first, I thought it was kind of sweet. Then I read what the content more carefully and felt angry! Anyway, I got in touch with my anger then. And yes, it felt like injustice, too. And it felt good to get in touch with that anger. I didn't act on it at all, I just allowed myself to feel it. Writing things down was helpful, too.

I think I was moderately depressed for close to a year. I had physical symptoms that came out in full force months after the breakup, as well. During the depression, I allowed myself to take time away and alone if I needed it. I let myself cry and feel sad. I also continued to practice yoga, get some fresh air, eat well, as I had lost a lot of weight near the end of the relationship. I'm not going to pretend that I was always good at taking care of myself, but at least I didn't pick up new bad habits. At 6 months out, I started to feel glimmers of hope... .at 9 I felt like I had turned a corner, even though I had more grieving to go.

Those are the two stages that stand out for me, as I look back.    I remember fiercely trying to bargain at the very end of our relationship. I was in so much pain and grasping at anything to make what was happening not happen. But deep down I knew it was over.

What really helped me get through all the stages (in no particular order):

1) Therapy
2) No Contact (until I felt comfortable with it again)
3) Feeling my feelings and not judging myself / practicing self-compassion
4) Joining this community—helping others
5) Making new goals, taking creative action

heartandwhole

[Lucky Jim]

What really helped me get through all the stages (in no particular order):

1) Therapy
2) No Contact (until I felt comfortable with it again)
3) Feeling my feelings and not judging myself / practicing self-compassion
4) Joining this community—helping others
5) Making new goals, taking creative action

Hey h&w, Agree, those five points have been key to my recovery.  I might add a sixth one:

6.  Learning to love and accept myself, just the way I am.

LuckyJim

[MeandThee29]

Good reminder.

I spent a lot of time bargaining with myself, trying to think how I could have done "better" (note the quotes), and how we were going to reconcile. Even knowing how hard BPD is to treat, I was somehow convinced it was going to happen. I really didn't grasp yet that there wasn't much I could have done long-term. Sooner or later, our marriage was going to implode. And the thoughts of how we were going to reconcile began to fade away when it became clear that he had zero interest in changing. I also realized in time he had pretty much written me off. He spent a lot of time and effort convincing his side of the family that I am mentally ill and severely damaged him. How could he possibly retract that? One of his siblings is more sympathetic towards me , but they asked very early on if mental illness was involved and had actually been estranged from him for over a decade.

Thankfully it gradually dawned on me. I was in a spiral downward with little hope all along. He's never going to get counselling. He's never going to forgive me.

I progressed to acceptance. Periodically I'll have a "what if" thought, but they're rare now.