Love Philosophy

Stages of grief

There are 7 stages of grief. These are seen following any kind of loss; such as breakups, death of someone, loss of job or failure in exams.

First stage: Denial.
On learning about the loss, you react with numbed disbelief. You keep denying what happened. This protects you from facing the overwhelming shock all at once.

Second stage: Guilt
In this stage, you keep blaming yourself for the loss. If your partner left you, you'll probably feel guilty that you were the cause. I want you to know, it takes two people to build a relationship. You alone can not be the reason for a breakup.

Third stage: Anger
This stage is where you bring out all your frustrations. You'll feel immense anger directed towards the person who left you, or towards everyone around you. You might find yourself calling the person and shouting at them.

Fourth stage: Bargaining
This is where you try to avoid the loss by bargaining. You might call your ex, and beg them to come back. You must have seen cases, where after someone's death, the wife vows to not eat unless her husband is brought back alive.
A child saying, he'll be a good boy if his parent is brought back alive, is another example of bargaining.

Fifth stage: Depression
The reality finally sinks in. You realize that things are never going to be the same. You cry, you lose your appetite and sleep, you lose your interests.

Sixth stage: Reconstruction
You slowly start to find 'solutions', solutions to make your life better. You try doing things without your partner. Gradually adjusting yourself to the changes and moving on.

Seventh stage: Acceptance
Here, you have come to peace with your past events. You realize you are 'letting go', and not 'giving up'. With acceptance, comes hope for a better tomorrow.

All these stages can occur in any order or maybe extremely brief with acceptance being the last stage.
Normal grief can last upto one year.
If you find yourself grieving your breakup for more than a year, that's not normal.
Also, in normal grief, you are functional at suboptimal levels. It doesn't affect your job or your studies to that extent. You'll face difficulty in concentrating but you won't throw your books or job away.
In case, you lose your functional life-you stop eating completely and start losing lot of weight, become insomniac, become an addict, throw tantrums and destroy things, resign from work and sit at home, or anything in extreme- this is termed as major depression. You'll need help.
Allow others to help you out.