Re: stages of a breakup? teacherwriterguy: The best way I heard it described was this:
There's the common theory about the stages of grieving - denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance.
When you first begin to grieve a loss, those stages cycle very quickly - you might go through some or all of them in a span of minutes, hours.
As you heal, the spiral widens out - you stay in stages for longer periods of time. You still revisit them, but they aren't quite as chaotic.
Eventually, the spiral gets wide enough that the rhythms of your moods match 'normal' life. You are angry about as much as anybody else is - or depressed about as much as anybody else is - or happy and accepting and content about as much as anybody else is... etc.
I don't know that there's ever a time when people feel 100% completely ok in life. Maybe that's because I've never been quite satisfieid with my life? I don't know. Having up periods and down periods is part of being normal.
I think sometimes that the loss involved in a divorce hits us so hard that we expect eventually to have even greater happiness to compensate for what's happened to us. We want to get to that 'better than ever' or 'i've learned so much' or 'i couldn't imagine i'd get to be this happy again' stage.
Life is life though - and even before the divorce, we probably had low periods and high periods. We just didn't associate them with the grieving process.
twg
