I got an email yesterday from Nicole. She was blind sighted when her husband walked out of  their fifteen year marriage and desperate to find a way to survive and move on. Sometimes its hard to see the future through the hurt and pain of the moment. Nicole lost the man she loved not to death, but to life, and her pain is legitimate. Regardless of the reason, the pain of loss is never easy and when an important relationship disintegrates in our hands we have to grieve. Its impossible to heal if you refuse to feel.

They say there are five stages to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Like a thief that lurks in the shadows and steals an essence from your soul. Grief is an overwhelming gut-retching despair that hits us all in different ways at different times and leaves us empty ” feeling abandoned.We can’t escape its grasp. The emotion is too powerful and devastating. It can hurt so much you can’t breathe. You can’t run from it, or hide. Grief rips your heart out and holds onto your core. It consumes your life, takes away your passion and drive and you feel like you won’t ever escape the despair.

I spent my life wanting love and at the same time, running from it. I felt thrown away by my biological father and the wound in my heart festered. My patterns drug me through toxic relationships resulting in pain. I even destroyed relationships so they wouldn’t destroy me first, but betrayal wasn’t my deepest fear, it was rejection and abandonment. When I finally opened my heart and I truly loved, he walked out of my life and the fear I had perpetually run from was realized. I was abandoned ” I grieved ” but I survived.

I survived a fear that had haunted me for too many years. I went over the relationship in my mind a hundred times or more and somehow, the picture changed with the passage of time. At first I saw it contorted through tears, pain and fear. I could only react, “How could he have done that to me?” ” But over time I realized that he was grieving too and I saw a hurting soul isolated and struggling to survive as well.

That’s what we all are doing. We live our lives struggling to survive the pain and grief the best way we can and we try to move on. The way we endure is to find compassion ” first for ourselves ” then for others. If we’re lucky, we experience love along the way and share as much as we can ” while we can, because grief can come again when you least expect it. But there is a way to not only survive, but thrive. Read my blog tomorrow and find out what it is.

Casi