How to Navigate Divorce Grief: Acceptance

She lied to me. This lady I paid to help me out lied directly to my face. For the second time in a month, I felt violated by a woman. Was I releasing some “this-guy-is-a-sucker” pheromones? I wanted my money back.

Not just from the first therapy session but all three sessions I attended. She had to lie about something else if she lied about this. I couldn’t figure out why you would lie to someone who would come to you and open up about their pending divorce, but whatever.

She told me about the stages of grief I would be facing. I specifically remembered her saying that acceptance would be the last stage. I could move on as soon as I could accept that things were over. It sounded reasonable.

The problem was that I accepted things being over with my wife two weeks ago. As soon as I could get my wife to tell me directly to my face that she didn’t want to continue our marriage, I could accept that it was over. There was no turning back for me.

So why was I bouncing back and forth between anger and depression? Things were done; I should be able to pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on, right?

Not even close.

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Acceptance is the fifth stage of grief. Elizabeth Kubler Ross introduced us to the five stages of grief in her famous book On Death and Dying. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

The stages don’t necessarily go in order. This is because everyone experiences grief differently.

So what is acceptance, and why do many people view it as the “end”?

Well, it’s tricky. At face value, acceptance means you accept things for what they are. It gets murky with how you view acceptance. For some, it’s a finish line because acceptance means you are at peace with things. For others, it just means that you agree with the reality of the current situation.

Using myself as an example, I accepted that my wife had made her choice and was done. But hell no, I wasn’t at peace with it. I was angry, and I was hurt more than I had ever been in my life. She didn’t feel my hurt, and I didn’t think that was fair.

The grieving process is overwhelming if you’ve never learned how to deal with your emotions.

My experience to that point had been to shove everything down. This time, I couldn’t put a tight enough lid on them to keep them held tightly enough in place. They would always resurface. This is because there was just so much turmoil going on at once I couldn’t handle it.

This caused me to ricoche around anger and depression like a pinball. Acceptance was easy. Dealing with the feelings of what was taking place was the hard part.

If you laid my grief stages out, they would look like this: denial, bargaining, acceptance, anger, depression, anger, depression, anger, depression……..

“Care for your psyche…know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves.” — Socrates

Being able to persevere has always been one of my strengths. I can take a hit and keep on going. Only that perseverance came from disregarding facing my problems and emotions and moving on like they didn’t exist.

This divorce revealed all the cracks from the years of patching my emotional dam. All the moving water came rushing out, and I was flooded. I was left by myself with a small bucket to remove everything.

It didn’t take me long into my grieving process to understand that I wasn’t just grieving my divorce. I was suffering from everything else I had avoided going back to childhood that I had pushed aside.

All the pent-up insecurities and low self-esteem I had developed as a child came rushing out. The clinical depression I had been diagnosed with ten years prior that I never really dealt with staked itself into the ground at my feet. This divorce appeared to validate all of it to me.

If none of those bad things I thought about myself were true, why was she leaving? Of course, it’s natural to be depressed because reasonable people don’t get abandoned by their wives.

The mind is a genuinely fantastic muscle. You can talk yourself into or out of anything before you even start. Because I felt so bad, my mind searched for evidence to back up the feelings. That kept me feeling inadequate and my thoughts in a negative space. Negative momentum is just as powerful as positive momentum.

After a year of going through the motions of life by white-knuckling it, I applied for a promotion at work. I got the promotion, which led me to a significant breakthrough in my ability to recover.

Your grieving process will last as long as it needs to survive. Maybe yours will have five stages. Maybe it will have more. Maybe it will have less. Perhaps yours will be rare, and you won’t grieve at all.

Don’t rush through the process. Experience every emotion at every point of your process. Those emotions are there for a reason. Examine them. Explore them. Indulge in them to see what they are about. Don’t hide them away because they aren’t comfortable for you.

The breakthrough for me was staying stagnant, and wandering through the motions was doing more harm than good for me. I needed to see that there was more to life than the banal existence I clung to. Divorce had done such a number on me; I settled for less in every aspect of my life.

Your ability to heal and move on won’t be successful unless you realize Life will continue around you, whether you decide to join it. You can let one bad thing ruin all of it or decide it’s a learning experience and keep living. A divorce or someone leaving you doesn’t mean anything about your value or worth. A divorce can’t define you.

You can either cling to the lesser version of yourself that a divorce can give you the illusion is real, or you can call that illusion the lie it is. You can change your identity at any time. You can decide right now that you will change and then put in the work to do it.

“We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.” — Henry Rollins

It’s not going to be a cakewalk. But you never grow when things are easy. You grow from the tough times. Divorce makes you feel like your back is against a wall when things are hard.

The good news is that you now have a clean slate and the perfect reason to become the person you’re capable of becoming. Now is the time. The future you is going to do something big.