Letting go – but not *too* much

Posted on Mar 5, 2017 in English Posts | 0 comments

Dealing with breakup pain, part twenty million:

I mentioned in a previous post that dealing with loss seems to come in stages. Grief is not grieving after one thing: rather there are many different things one has to come to terms with, all tangled up with each other.

The most recent pain I had in the last few days involved repeatedly recalling various good moments we had. It felt unclear to me what it was that I needed to do in order to absorb and integrate this pain: accept the fact that those moments were gone? But that didn’t seem to be it, and besides that was something that I felt I had processed already.

It turned out that it was kind of the opposite.

It was as if previously some part of my mind had come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t have these kinds of moments with this person again. Now another part was saying something like “these moments were precious to us; and even though we are not going to have them with this person again, we wish to remember how good they were, and make sure that one day we’ll find something similar with some other person”.

The thing that the pain was calling my attention to, was in effect a reminder to not go too far in accepting my loss. A reminder to keep to thinking about the good moments and cherish them, lest I abandon the hope of finding something similar again.

And now that particular pain seems to be gone, the lesson having been learned and its message integrated to the rest of my mind.