T.E.A.R.

When this whole thing with the LCT leaving kicked off, I wrote an email. Something subconscious must have been going on as I mistyped the email address so he never got it. Anyway, it was about loss. I had found an interesting page

http://www.counselingforloss.com/article8.htm

And it talks about a grief model which goes like this:

T = To accept the reality of the loss
E = Experience the pain of the loss
A = Adjust to the new environment without the lost object
R = Reinvest in the new reality


A lot of this blog so far has been about just that process. Not one stage at a time, but elements of all of the TEAR model in any order.

Someone in the village who had a vaguely similar experience about a year ago was commenting that it was like giving up smoking. You know you are better off without it but you still miss it now and then. But with time the "now and then" becomes less often.

In a partnership you develop (well I do anyway) a habit of including the other person the whole time. That habit does not go away instantly but its purpose changes and becomes about accepting the reality and investing in the future. It becomes about closure (taking his name off things) rather than about a "going concern".

There are still things that shock and hurt. (Where DID he get the money to go to Portugal when he was always claiming to be so poor ?). But they are about remembering the pain, the loss, not about wanting him back. In some situations the sharp pain is followed by a moment of relief that I am not part of that any more.

(With horses we often talk about "remembered pain". I guess this is something similar).

It has been bugging me that I am aware of a continual ache. I have tinnitus - and it is something that is there all the time but I only notice at certain points in time. Well this ache is the same. Its like a "whole body" head ache.

It bugged me that to think it was the LCT behind the ache. But I think that it is NOT the LCT himself, but rather than deep deep feeling of loss. A loss of both a past that I thought was based on solif rock, but was actually based on the shifting sands of deception and lies. And also a loss of the future I thought we would have, that I now know was a phantom, a ghost, something that was never real (again because of the falsehood the present was based on).

Of course I am sad about that. Of course I am grieving. That is about the T and the E of the process. But that does stop me accepting it and moving on as well. I think I had this naive idea that I could do the first part and then it would be done. Unrealistic of me. More healthy to accept it for what it is - part of a process.

This is the right kind of TEAR.