Moving Forward, Not Moving On

This might be a little more complicated than the titles suggest. While moving on is kind of a simple idea often mostly centered on other people telling us that we should be quickly finding a new relationship to make us ok, moving forward is a lot more complex and often interacts with our acceptance of the things that have changed in our lives.

Moving on or moving forward:

It’s time for you to move on! It’s one of those things that people often say to us. The “non-bereaved” often seem to feel that the way for us to end our grieving or have us be less sad is for us to move on.

Many times, non-bereaved friends and family (and maybe even strangers) feel that if only we could move on and quickly find someone else to be with or at least if we would “start dating again” as soon as possible, everything would get better and we would become happy again and maybe we would also return to being the person they knew before.

Having us move on in that way may make others think they would feel more comfortable being around us too. And again, it may also be a part of their hope that moving on will make us become ok again and not be lonely and hurting anymore. Sometimes we too may think and feel those same types of thoughts. Sometimes those type of thoughts or actions are the last thing in the world we want to entertain…

So, do we really need relationships and someone in our life again immediately? By filling the empty spaces in our life with another person really quickly, perhaps a stranger we don’t really know very well, will that actually fix things, will it all get better and the grief and the pain and the loneliness go away as people outside our grief (and perhaps sometimes we ourselves) suspect it will when they tell us to move on?

Moving forward:

If moving on and “replacing” our loved one with someone new as people sometimes suggest is not what we really want or need to do, instead of moving on, can we find ways to do something different, can we find ways tomove forward instead?

Can moving forward be another approach? Can moving forward not be about quickly entering new relationships but rather, be about growing and healing for ourself, by ourself, on our own terms? Can it maybe include finding some good friends to talk to and hang out with, especially as we begin exploring the next part of our lives?

Instead of quickly moving on into things that might look like or remind us of our past relationships, can we slowly and gently find ways to include others in our lives in lots of different ways as part of our healing journeys and in our moving forward when we are ready to do so?

In the end, the idea of moving forward can be more about asking ourselves lots of questions about everything that is happening in our lives and finding answers and changes that fit our own personal grief and healing journeys and not be about relationships and bringing new people into our lives much at all.

But, as we explore this, how might relationships actually fit into moving forward? Is every relationship just a moving on or do some relationships happen and fulfill us in our grief and grieving at different times and in different ways than those who tell us to move on can understand?

The ideas here for us to think about are in some ways really about understanding that we have choices we can make and different things we can do mainly to promote healing. In terms of bringing other people into our lives, healing may be more about the types of interactions we intentionally choose to have and the types of relationships we choose to establish that help us move forward and not about being a way to cling to what we miss from the past or about ending our loneliness. They are also about intentionally deciding how and when we choose to include bringing people into our lives during our grief journeys in the first place.

These ideas are also about the difference between moving on into new relationships and moving forward into the next part of our lives and especially, to do these things, not from the perspective of the non-bereaved, but from the often very different perspective of how it looks and feels to us in our grief.

Hope and Healing:

Finding healing and wellness and moving forward in your life can be and often is, a long, hard, complex process. It takes a lot of work on a lot of things to learn how to move forward. We generally don’t go from grief to wellness overnight. It may not really be about finding another person to be with to fill the emptiness and make it all better as other’s suspect. In a sense, that may just get in the way of what we need to do for ourselves, especially early in our journeys.

So, to move forward, can we find ways to let ourselves grow while not leaving anything behind and not wanting or trying to replace anything, including what are now empty spaces from the past? To move forward, can we, should we and will we find more healing if we learn to become whole again in new and different ways on our own first.

If we are willing to do the work, can we make our grief journeys be about much more then just relieving our pain and sadness? Can we find ways to work our way through our grief to places of healing and wellness? Can we find ways to move forward into the next part of our lives but not necessarily to move on into new versions of our old life?

And then, if we get to a place sometime along the way and find a person to move forward with, maybe we can be and give so much more for having taken the time to learn to move forward on our own first. And because there is no one right way to proceed, in other cases, if we find someone else who is on their own grief journey to be with relatively early in our journeys and we then choose to help each other to move through our grief and to help each other find healing together, that can also be a type of moving forward instead of just being a moving on.

Finding hope and healing, moving to wellness and moving forward in our lives is never going to be simple or easy. It takes time, effort and commitment to learn and grow and make something new out of our often shattered lives, to perhaps have a phoenix moment where we begin to rise out of the ashes of our grief!

Acceptance

One of the most difficult but also one of the most important parts of the healing process is finding acceptance within ourselves of all that has happened and changed in our lives. It may be a large part of deciding how and when we begin to find ways to go forward.

Acceptance is also a very difficult place to reach. There is often regret, guilt, anger, sadness and probably most of the other emotions that live within grief that we experience and have to work through along the way. The journey is filled with uncertainty and unknowns as we do the work of thinking through all that has happened and decide how we are going to respond, accept and deal with it and go forward in our lives.

Coming to gradually and slowly understand and accept what happened to our loved ones and that our loved ones are not coming home, that the place they occupied in our material lives is going to be empty of them forever, is perhaps one of the hardest and most painful of these things. We are also faced with finding acceptance of the very many changes in our lives and of our futures that we never expected to face or never expected to have to face alone and for which in our grief, we may be ill-prepared to experience or handle.

Unfortunately, since many of the things that have happened are also outside of our ability to change, we really can’t do anything about them now. They happened. They are unchangeable and nothing we can do will make it any different. So now, somehow, we will need to learn to deal with those changes and find acceptance of them to help us and allow us to move forward. Those changes certainly include in large part whatever it was that happened to our loved ones that we couldn’t stop or change or fix and of course that our loved ones are not here with us any longer.

In the end, acceptance at some level is almost essential to healing and moving forward into the next part of our lives, to allowing us to start to look for and find ways of thinking, of acting, of living and of moving forward that both honor what was and create what will be as we transition from us, into me alone. Until we accept what has happened and what has changed, it is difficult to want to even look for or consider alternatives.

Acceptance in our healing:

Once it begins to appear, acceptance doesn’t usually come in one single flash of insight or light. It more likely will grow gradually within us over time as it slowly comes into focus. It can also move like our grief does, sometimes we go forward and think we’ve got it and sometimes we go backwards and don’t have it at all and sometimes we stagnate and don’t seem to be going anywhere. These are all part of the process and kind of a “normal” way for us to learn to accommodate the huge changes that have occurred in our lives.

It may also be “one thing at a time”. We may find acceptance of part of the changes in our lives and not others, different things may come into focus at different times in our journey.

Like everything else, once acceptance does begin to appear, there may be times when our acceptance is strong and healing and then at other times, often unexpectedly, the reality of what has happened reaches out and grabs us again and the pain of that realization triggers lack of acceptance back into full intensity, but usually, only for a short time before that too passes.

As with so many parts of grief, there is no timetable. We each reach acceptance in our own time and in our own way and when it happens for us, that’s when it happens for us.

Here’s a maybe “too long” list, in no particular order, of (other) things to consider that we may not have thought about that we may have to come to accept (temporarily or forever) and deal with in some way to help us move forward in this next part of our lives.

You don’t necessarily have to accept all or even any of these things. They are possibilities that may or may not appear along the way in your healing journey. There may be others you can think of to add here too.

That our grief journeys are long and hard
That we need to find a new equilibrium in our lives
That we need to find a new meaning and purpose in our lives
That grief and grieving are going to be painful
That we need to grieve to find healing
That we are looking for healing of our grief and not of what happened to our loved ones.

Being alone.
Living alone.
Spending our time alone.
Having to become comfortable being alone.
Sleeping alone.
Eating/cooking alone.
Having no one to talk to, especially in the evenings.
Having to do everything our spouse or partner used to do.
Figuring out what to change, keep in or leave out of our lives without our loved ones.

Taking care of all of our material world responsibilities by ourselves.
Making decisions alone.
Growing old or older alone.
Traveling alone.
Dealing with medical issues alone.
Being lonely.
Being sad.
Not being able to sleep as we used to!
My mind keeps racing and looping.
I can’t stop crying.
Finding our emotions are out of control a lot.

Dealing with finance changes or issues alone.
Dealing with living arrangement changes.
Raising children alone.
Losing the support of old friends and/or family.
Figuring out how to accept it and what you want to do if family and/or friends don’t know what to say or start to avoid you or say hurtful things.
Losing the future we had planned to have with our loved one.

Going out to eat or to a movie etc. alone.
Needing to make new friends.
Not knowing how to make new friends.
Enjoying being with/going out with new friends.
Feeling guilty for being with/going out with new friends.

Feeling guilty for changing things, for wanting to do things on your own.
Taking their things out of the closet or other parts of the house.
Knowing we have to move forward.
Finding wellness.
Realizing it’s ok to be happy.

Realizing it’s ok to be ok.
Realizing there are times when its ok to be sad.
Realizing it ok to have a good time.
Coming to like living alone.

Being “relieved” to not be a caregiver anymore.
Learning how to not be a caregiver anymore.
Learning that we have to take care of and be gentle with ourselves now.
Learning that we are strong.
Learning that it’s ok to say no!
Saying no!
Learning that it’s ok to say yes!
Saying yes!
Learning to honor and remember our loved ones without grieving them or forgetting them.
Realizing we are no longer actively grieving.
Realizing its ok to not be actively grieving.
Realizing its possible to meet someone else.
Realizing its ok to meet and be with someone else.
Learning that it’s ok to be happy again.
Learning to build a new life.
Others?

Some things we may need to accept doing without (temporarily or forever):

Affection in both physical and emotional ways.
Touch.
Affirmations.
Someone to share the story of our day with.
Someone to hold us when we are sad or need to cry.
Someone to be weak with.
Someone to be strong for.
Someone to bitch to.
Other’s?

Questions:

What does moving on and moving forward mean to you?
Can you think of ways to do the hard work of moving forward from grief to healing and wellness?
Is trying to heal from our grief the same as trying to keep ourselves from feeling the pain our our grieving?
What are some things that you might be thinking that you can work on to help you to move forward and build healing in your life?
Where and how do relationships come into your version of moving forward and healing?

What role does acceptance play in moving forward?
Where are you at in the process of learning to accept what has happened?
Is there an aspect of denial in your thinking?
What parts of acceptance are you having a hard time coming to grips with?
Can you think of ways to overcome those things to help acceptance grow?
What have you come to accept so far?
What would you most like to be able to accept now that you haven’t come to yet?