What stages of grief are related to divorce?
During your divorce you can expect to experience different stages of grief. Often people start out feeling shocked, not just shocked because a person wants a divorce, but shocked that their actually going to do it finally. Its actually happening even though they've thought about it a very long time, and then often what happens is after that they recant, they take a step backward and they start negotiating. Maybe we can make it work and often what that is; is that's a function of fear. That's really not a function of appreciation of the other person, but I'm so scared and overwhelmed; I'm going to try to make this work now because it looks, the side of the mountain looks so much scarier than this side of the mountain that I'm going to do whatever I can to not have to cross over, and so what happens is people start negotiating. But the negotiation leaves you angry because it means you sacrifice and so then you become very angry and you find yourself angry that you're in a situation where you're splitting up. Where you've tried negotiating; it hasn't worked of course. You're split up and you're just angry about you're situation and you're usually angry at the person who initiated the divorce. You're not angry at yourself. If you've initiated, you're still trying to rationalize that you had to do this. So you may go through rationalization stage if you initiated it, that I needed to do this for my own welfare but more importantly for the sake of my children and that may or may not be the case it may be helpful or may not be helpful for the children. So you rationalize and then you start feeling sort of an acceptance that you're going to be two individual people no longer together and acceptance takes a long time; it sort of, you go back and forth between anger and frustration and guilt and a sense of lose and also this deep sense of failure; that I must have done something wrong because my marriage failed; when it may not be anything you've done at all. In fact you may have been a great marital partner, but the other person was not a great marital partner. Or your lives have really taken two distinctly different paths and you no longer are on the same paths and you don't want to live each others life. So you're going to go through all these stages and don't be concerned if you don't do them in any particular order. You're going to go in and out of them, and years later you may still find that you're going to in and out of phases; even temporarily when things are brought up like during holidays, special events, occasions. When you look at photo albums. When people will bring up things. When you see your children. You may go right back and regress. You may be right back where you were ten years ago for a moment.
