Some times we get stuck

Back in 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross authored a ground-breaking book, titled "On Death and Dying." The real essence of the book was the development of the five stages of grief a person goes through upon learning they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

The stages are Denial (this can't be happening to me, this ISN'T happening to me), Anger (WHY is this happening to me?) Bargaining (Making promises to change things about our lives), Depression (giving up hope, not caring about anything), and finally Acceptance (This is the way it is).

These five stages have been applied to all kinds of circumstances since the author originally devised them, most often to help people deal with the death of a loved one. But, obviously they can be applied to a variety of circumstances in our lives. In fact, they can be applied to ANY circumstance where we face loss or impending loss. Kubler-Ross contends these five steps constitute a natural process most people proceed through and that most make it out the other end and are able to return, more or less,  to normal, rational behavior. On the other hand, she also postulates that some people get "stuck" in one of these stages and are unable to proceed to the next step.

Obviously, this also happens in relationships, especially when someone makes a decision we're not ready to accept. That's exactly what happens when someone receives word of a terminal illness. Although the long-term consequences are much more serious for the terminally-ill patient than the jilted lover, it's sometimes hard to convince the jilted lover of that.

What increases the pain of losing in love is that the person who gives us our walking papers did so willfully and intentionally, unlike most people who die. They walked away of their own free will, knowing the sense of loss and the depth of grief we were going to encounter and yet not evidently even caring, which makes an already bad situation almost unbearable. How can that person go on without us when they told us so many times they couldn't?

How can they no longer care about how it makes us feel when they protected and nurtured our feelings for so long? How can they stop loving us when they promised they would love us forever? And a thousand other questions the jilted ask themselves every single day.

This grief is just as real, just as personal, just as painful, and just as eternal as any other grief is. And, just like the death of someone close to us, the kind and caring words of others offer us some comfort, at least temporarily.

But the kind words are not always there and we find ourselves alone and lonely, inside the four walls of our soul, searching for answers that will most likely never come and mourning the loss of our love the same as we would mourn the loss of someone who died.

Those trying to help say encouraging things to us like, "There's more where they came from", "There's thousands of fish in the sea," "You'll get over it faster than you think," "She's not worth it," "You're better off without her" and innumerable other responses designed to make one feel better but, for some, it never works.

That's because they're stuck in a stage. That's often because they defined their lives as close to perfect because they had found their soulmate, their lover, their best friend, and now she is gone, not because something took her away like death, but because she took herself away. And that reality is the most painful reality some will ever experience.

In relationships, I think the most likely stage to get stuck in is the fourth stage, the depression stage. It's fairly easy to work through denial because once you had them and now you don't and that becomes painfully obvious fairly early on in the process. Anger tends not to last very long either.

In fact, the only reason to use anger in a relationship loss is an attempt to shame your lost lover back to you. That either works fairly quickly or it doesn't work at all. Some people don't go through the anger stage at all in a relationship loss.

They proceed directly to bargaining, where they promise their lost love anything and everything if they'll just give them another chance. This is really the last opportunity the "scorned" has to influence the "scorner" at all. If bargaining doesn't work, then our greatest fears are realized when they simply withdraw from our lives.

No more phone calls, no more holding hands, no more conversations, no more moments of intimacy, no more anything. They're just gone. Where once our lives were filled up with them, our lives are now barren because of their absence.

That leads to depression where people literally stop caring about most things in their lives because they knew they had the one thing in life that sent them to bed with a smile in their heart and woke them up the same way. And they sense, and sometimes know, they will never have that again.

That, of course, makes progressing to the final stage of acceptance difficult, if not impossible, for so many people reading these words.

Now those lucky ones out there who haven't experienced this won't understand this column at all and they also don't understand or have much sympathy for those who are enduring this kind of loss. But those who are or have know every word is true.

Some of you eventually made it out the other end, some are still stuck but will eventually get through and some are stuck and won't ever get through.

That's the way life is.