How To Navigate Divorce Grief: Bargaining

Realistically, there was nothing I could do. That didn’t stop me from thinking of everything I would do differently and better if things worked out between us. It didn’t stop me from making prayers that were just empty promises to get everything to go back to the way it was.

We could go to marriage counseling. I’d stop doing all of the things that irritated her. I would completely change who I was. If it just meant we could stay together and get through this.

I even replayed every scenario in my head that I thought I could have changed to make things better.

I could bargain to make all the pain and anguish disappear. I forgot something significant about bargaining. You need two interested parties to negotiate. I only had myself.

I was left feeling like everything was out of my control, but making frivolous bargains made me feel like I had some control over things.

Bargaining is the third 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.

While it’s debated now whether the stages of grief apply, I certainly experienced them with my divorce.

When you separate from your spouse, you feel lost all hope. You’re probably left in a situation where you want them to change their hearts, but you can’t control what they do. The easiest way, you think, to regain some control and hope is to bargain.

If someone leaves you, you feel responsible for them going. It makes you feel guilty. You think you did something wrong that pushed them away. You overanalyze every word and action to find details that make them want to go.

The tricky part about bargaining is that you can find yourself bargaining for your future or trying to change things from the past.

The future part of it looks like an if/then situation. If they stay, I will do this. If this works, then I will never do this again. You can make these bargains directly with your spouse. You can also find yourself appealing to a higher power, like God, or even making deals with yourself.

You will do anything to make things go back to happier times.

The second part of it is trying to change things from the past. This is impossible, but it doesn’t stop you from reliving moments in your head. If only you had listened more. If you had been more romantic, the marriage would have been better. Maybe if you had done more chores, things would have been different.

You analyze everything under a microscope to come up with something you could have changed that would have kept you out of this situation.

I found myself replaying old scenarios in my head. I rewrote everything about our past that may have upset my wife. Any joke that wasn’t received well. Any time she was angry at me. Even things that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of our relationship, if I thought they pushed her away, I wanted to change them.

The guilt was smothering at times. I was sure it was all my fault, but was it?

We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional grief stages, it is ultimately no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that’s impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past. — Kristin Armstrong

The guilt you feel will come and go throughout your grieving process. It did for me. I didn’t spend much time bargaining for the future; I spent more time reliving the past. The strange part was that I wasn’t just reliving the history of my marriage but all my previous relationships.

None of them had worked, so there had to be a common thread in all of them. I wasn’t ready for the realizations that kind of self-reflection could bring. Instead, it just trapped me in a guilt and shame spiral that made me feel that I’d never be able to find love. I thought I was unlovable.

Of course, that is not true, but at that time, I believed it.

The quickest way to get out of bargaining and guilt for things already taking place is to recognize what is in your control and what isn’t. This is hard to see when your emotions are raw. When you’re going through it, you want it to end.

With time, as your emotions calm, it’s easier to see that you’re focusing too much on things out of your control. The past has already happened. No amount of mental reliving it will change it.

You also can’t control the future. You can set things up to go how you want, but it’s not guaranteed. When you depend on someone else’s decisions, things are less sure. When someone has their mind made up, it will be hard to get them to change it in most cases.

You’ll see that you can only control yourself and your actions from today onward. That is where you should put all your thoughts and energy into taking control of yourself.

If you feel stuck in the bargaining stage and the guilt overwhelms you, therapy and support groups will help you get to the root of things. A therapist can help you have breakthroughs, and support groups surround you with others who have either gone through it or are going through it.

As hopeless as you feel, seeing others who have successfully made it through your struggles will bring you hope. It may speed up your grieving process.

An interesting thing about the bargaining stage that I don’t see mentioned often is the benefit it can provide you in terms of growth for future relationships. Of course, while grieving, the last thing you want to hear or think about is a new relationship. This is a great time to journal and return to things later when your emotions have settled.

Bargaining will have you accepting more responsibility than is necessary. Societally, we praise being accountable and taking responsibility for your actions. Bargaining will have you placing the blame squarely on yourself unfairly.

By letting your emotions calm, you can take an honest look at how you showed up in the relationship by running through what you have written down in your journal about what you would have changed. Some things won’t be true, others will be, and you can work on those from now on for your next relationship.

We are all humans, and none of us is perfect. There were things you could have done differently and things you could have done better. There were also things your partner could have done differently and better.

A relationship is not a one-person operation. There were things you both could have done. If you had to suffer from how things ended, you’d be better served to carry the lessons with you. Your growth will come from your most challenging situations, not your easiest ones.