CHRISTIAN PARENTS of ESTRANGED ADULT CHILDREN Community Group
Estrangement makes it difficult to talk about with family, friends, neighbors and church members. Christians are NOT immune to broken families. Talk about your experiences with those who know how you feel and get positive support through your Christian faith...."In these last days difficult times will come, for men will be lovers of self...disobedient to parents,...
One day I feel kinda okay and I can get on with my chores.
Some days I even plan things I would like to do.
But days like these I wake up and think oh God no, not the daybreak again.
Give me death, let it overcome me.
This is too painful for me. I can't bear it.
I am grieving so much over the granddaughter that grew up in our home and I worry about her with her unstable parents. I have to keep putting her out of my mind or go crazy.
Or am I already crazy?
Some days I even plan things I would like to do.
But days like these I wake up and think oh God no, not the daybreak again.
Give me death, let it overcome me.
This is too painful for me. I can't bear it.
I am grieving so much over the granddaughter that grew up in our home and I worry about her with her unstable parents. I have to keep putting her out of my mind or go crazy.
Or am I already crazy?
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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross n Five Stages of Grief:
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance
The stages have evolved since their introduction and they have been very misunderstood over the past three decades. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.
The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss.
Denial
This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.
As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.
Anger
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this?
Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – - your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.
Bargaining
Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?”
We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.
Depression
After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.
Acceptance
Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves.
Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are
Source: http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
Note: You don't have to have all these stages or even experience them in this order.
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/grief_loss.htm
That said, though, the goals, counseling, and school saved my sanity. There were times when I teetered on the brink, again...when I heard her voice on the phone when my son was ill, for example. When I realized that she really had bought into the lies my SIL was telling her...before that I had always kept a dream in the back of my mind that she would see his deception and manipulation and would come to me to reconcile. I am now finding myself sinking down into a bit of a depression at the thought of seeing her and starting all this detachment over again after the wedding (unless, of course, the miracle happens).
But I am enrolled at University of Colorado in the fall to finish up a Bachelor's degree in writing; I am planning to start an online copywriting/proofing business; I am taking a high school exchange student from another country for the upcoming school year; I bought a sweet little doggie that helps occupy my life and heart. My second oldest, a son, and his wife are leaving with my two grandbabies (the two I still get to see occasionally, although they live out of state) for Africa in August to do missions work, so I have another hard good-bye coming up...but praying for the grace to endure. I took up scrapbooking! I changed my diet. All of these things have helped me to stay alive, to have something to look forward to, and to keep me from losing my mind, truly.
My four other children have been supportive, and I try to give back to them as much as I can...they also lost a sister they loved in the deal. Three of the kids (the other adult children) have had some level of contact with her recently, which had ceased for the first year or so...so who knows. And my SIL is on his deathbed...the one who lied and tried to destroy us...he is dying of cancer. I don't know what will happen when he's gone...whether she will withdraw even more in grief, or she will be released from the bondage he has put her in. Either way, though, I have a future with or without her. Sadly.
Hang in there, my friend. The roller coaster of emotions is something we are all riding...and I truly, truly thought I would lose my mind. Time has helped, but the roller coaster, while the ups and downs are slightly diminished, is still an ugly ride we are on for life, I guess...I am thankful we are not alone on it. Jesus is sitting in the seat right next to us. I wish I would remember to grab onto His arm more often when we are spiraling down...I usually just scream (inside) and close my eyes. :-(
Blessings to you today, and prayers going your way.
Just what I needed - I am in that deepest depressions and despondency part a place so deep that I never knew it existed before. And yes, my identity too has been wrapped up in being a wife, a mom, a grandmother - that was all I ever wanted out of life.
I will do as your therapist told you MamaDon - to just say a prayer for them when they come to mind. At present echoes of their cruel words come back to me in flashes - a time when I had to drive on the opposite side of the road to what I do in my own country - and my ES grabbed me cruelly by the wrist and almost broke my finger asking if I was mad as I was parking too close to the curb. He was stressed, going through a divorce at the time and he wanted me to fit into a neat little box and be a nanny to his child but she would not bond with me having been abused by her mother she needed a forensic psychologist to work with her - and he was angered about that and he sent me home but only halfway by air leaving me stranded miles from home. I felt such a failure. He had filled my days with the verbal abuse he probably would have liked to give to his soon to be ex-wife. My ED was angered that I was even prepared to help him out in the first place, jealousy arising. It was downhill all the way from there. No-one remembered that I was a wife also and I had a husband waiting at home and could not be away for 12 months at a time. Perhaps because they were so accustomed to Mom fixing everything.
Now I can truly understand your reluctance about the wedding MamaDon. You have come and long way and I commend you because you have achieved much! I think we would all like to congratulate you, the entire group! Where on earth you found the energy, I don't know. Obviously it came from God.
Heartpain, you are right too and I thank you. I must concentrate now on myself as if I were my own child and take care of me (something I have not been doing). I have to do this sooner rather than later. I must get out there and join a group of peers and make some good friends. My husband has reacted to the loss of the ED he raised and the little granddaughter by remaining silent and morose. Without him talking, he does not want me to do so either so I can share with no-one at present.
Jadenot, thank you so much for all the info you have given to me which made me realize I am at the deep depression stage and I am looking forward one day to achieve some kind of acceptance just enough to survive each day. Thank you for the links. I read this all sapping it up like a sponge, needy.
Yesterday I spent the entire day in bed with the curtains drawn. I felt God was so far away I could not reach Him. Tomorrow is my husband's birthday so I have no option but to get out, which is good. My heart aches for him being ignored, no rejected by our ED and without our little granddaughter. We have not seen her now for 8 months but it feels like a lifetime. Her father took her to therapy because she was missing us so much. Gggggrrrr that makes me so mad as this is so unnecessary. He is controlling, jealous and deviant. He would even take her away from her mom our ED if he could but she is too much under his control to even realize this.
Thanks again everyone....and for your prayers!
Romans 8:28
New International Version (NIV)
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who[a] have been called according to his purpose.
: Much love and prayers,
Gma
May you feel the peace and love as you walk with Him.
Hugs
Gma
Here these books, imported - cost a living fortune but I am definitely going to get that TJ Jakes book as soon as I can - the title seems to say it all!
Yes this is a very painful walk and pain is a lesson from which we can learn much I remember reading once.
I have a Bible message for us all and will put it on the TOPICS so we can all glean from it.
God bless you all xx