"It's not my fault!"
I think I finally learned the
secret to “acceptance”. You know the last stage of grief? . Grief as five
stages and acceptance is the last stage. It is only with this stage can we
start to grow and heal. We feel grief for any number of reasons… many times it
is the loss of a loved one. The secret to being able to accept is in our
ability to be able to accept personal responsibility.
When we accept personal
responsibility then we recover our own sense of control, and it is with that
added sense of control that we can move forward with acceptance. When we loose
a loved one in a relationship via divorce or a break up, we feel the same sort
of grief as if someone had died. Accepting personal responsibility is sort of
difficult when talking about the loss of a loved one; even in a broken
relationship. After a heart break, we can get stuck on the depression or anger
stage for a long time. That’s because we’ve given the control to the other
person (normally the person that ended the relationship), but is the broken
relationship 100% their fault? Normally NO. If we can see where we went wrong
in the relationship… own that, by taking some responsibility, we then take back
some of the control. Once we have some of the control back then we can
accomplish quite a bit… including acceptance.
This is pretty straight forward
in terms of relationships, but much hazier when we’ve lost someone to death.
But in terms of death, where do we get stuck? Depression usually. But why are
we depressed? We miss our loved one. Could that be because in your life time
you gave too much of yourself to them… or more the case THEY gave too much of
themselves to you. When we accept that we are responsible for being a whole
person without the input of another, we gain that control, and can accept their
loss.
Bright blessings ~ Richard