Help Heal Emotions Before, During or After Divorce
The cycle of emotions one faces during grief can be applied to the feelings that surface after divorce. Knowing what is ahead can help ease the pain, according to some psychologists.
“The good news, is it a process, and eventually, with time, the acuteness of the pain will dissipate,” said Christine Cauffield, Ph.D., the president and CEO of Aspire Behavioral Health, Inc., a national organization of geropsychiatric hospitals.
The Kabler-Ross cycle of grief is widely used as a tool for mitigating feelings of loss. “Divorce provides several situations in which grief is a relevant emotion, therefore the cycle of grief can apply to the divorce process”, Cauffield said. “Going through a divorce not only represents the loss of a parent or a spouse, but numerous other losses one must grieve,” Cauffield said.
Some examples of losses faced during a divorce are: the obvious loss of the relationship and companionship, losing the family connection to in-laws, moving and losing the home community, or losing friends if they choose sides in the divorce. “There are so many losses when one is going through a divorce,” Cauffield said, “and the Kabler-Ross stages definitely come into play.”
The model of the cycles of grief was developed by Elisabeth Kabler-Ross after spending time treating and researching terminally ill patients. Her original intent was to provide information about the cycle of accepting death. However, the model is now used for a variety of life-changing topics, including divorce. The model is a cycle of emotions that usually circulates in this order: Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression and acceptance. (Sometimes the cycle is edited to five emotions, with shock and denial in one category and bargaining and guilt in another.)
It is during the shock stage that one feels stunned at hearing the news of a divorce. During denial, that person then tries to avoid the idea of the pending divorce. From there, the person will often move into the anger stage, where he or she will begin to express the pent-up frustration and emotion about the break-up. The bargaining stage may begin after the anger stage. While bargaining, the person is likely to try to change the outcome of the relationship by thinking about the what-ifs: what if I brought more flowers, what if I did more housework, what if I paid more attention?
There is also guilt intertwined in this thinking. During the guilt stage, the person takes on as his or her responsibility the failures in the relationship. The stages that follow bargaining and guilt are depression, followed by acceptance. During the depression phase, the person realizes the likeliness of the divorce and gives into the sadness of it. And in the last part of the cycle, acceptance, the person starts to move forward from the divorce. “The benefit of understanding the cycle”, Cauffield said, “is knowing that there is a range of emotions everyone faces when going through divorce.”
“Recognizing that the chaotic feelings that emerge are normal helps keep people moving forward emotionally”, she said. “The knowledge that you are normal, you are not going crazy, that the roller coaster ride is part of the process,” Cauffield said.
CYCLE IS NOT LINEAR
Michael D. Zentman, Ph.D., the founder and director of the Adelphi Postgraduate Program in Marriage and Couple Therapy, said the Kabler-Ross cycle of grief can be used to help provide a sense of stability in a chaotic time. He has been a practicing clinical psychologist for nearly 30 years and teaching at the graduate and post-doctoral level for almost 20 years.
“One of the hallmarks of divorce is that everything you are accustomed to you, everything that gives your life stability, is upended. And that’s what gives your life stress,” Zentman said. “If you can anticipate what will come, that can be helpful.”
Zentman cautions, however, that the process is not a smooth, neat one.
“A person who is grieving goes through the cycle several times. He or she may also get partway through and backtrack. There is only one given about the way the cycle will proceed”, Zentman said. “Acceptance doesn’t come early, and denial doesn’t come late,” he said.
During a year or more, one will travel through the emotions. As the person proceeds, the stops at each stage may become less frequent, less intense and shorter in duration.
“You may come to a point of acceptance, and you may lose that again weeks later,” Zentman said.
“What makes it effective is allowing yourself to feel the emotions”, he said. “Anesthetizing them with drugs, alcohol, or even a new relationship, will suspend the grieving and healing process, Zentman said.
“Recurring feelings about other losses or failed relationships may also begin to emerge”, Zentman said. “The end of a relationship is a retraumatization of sorts”, he said, “and the new feelings of loss may dredge up old, similar feelings.”
“Grieving is grieving, whether it is divorce, losing a relative, moving, the stages are the same, obviously less than when you sold your red Corvette than when you lost your parent, but the stages are the same as long as we have a strong attachment to what we are losing,” Zentman said. “So old losses may come to the forefront when they are going through a divorce.”
ANOTHER GRIEF MODEL TO APPLY
Gloria C. Horsley Ph.D., a national board member of The Compassionate Friends, said that she is not convinced that the Kabler-Ross model is the most relevant to divorce. Horsley, who is a psychotherapist and bereaved parent who has worked in the field of family therapy for more than 20 years, said that the Kabler-Ross model was never meant to be applied to anything but the use for which it was originally intended: for people in the hospital to move into accepting death. She said the cycle might be applicable to grieving the end of the marriage and the fact that the family unit is no longer intact.
“You do grieve for the contract that you made that is being broken, no matter why. We do grieve for the fact that we were not able to keep that marriage together,” Horsley said.
Using the cycle to acknowledge that the emotions associated with the end f a marriage are normal can also be a benefit of the cycle, she said.
But for her, a better model for grief is the Continuing Bonds model. In that, the person grieving finds a new way to understand the relationship that has passed. “How you accept the fact that the marriage is over, or accept the fact that the person you love is gone, however you continue on in the relationship in a new way, and you invest in new relationships in a new way,” Horsley said.
In Continuing Bonds, the person experiencing the loss finds a new way to view and recognize the positives in what went before. For example, one grieving a death might put together a scrapbook, light a candle, or celebrate the life lost.
“One grieving the loss of a marriage should not give up the past. Instead, recognize what was positive in the relationship and try to remember the in an optimistic way”, Horsley said. “Why do we have to feel failure? It’s not a failure,” Horsley said.
“This is especially true when children are involved”, she said. A divorced parent should remember that it was the marriage that brought the children in the first place, she said, and the children need to be reminded of that. They need to know that the entire marriage was not a mistake.
“They don’t need to see that it was all wrong,” Horsley said. “It was never all wrong.”
About the author: Michele Bush Kimball has a Ph.D. in mass communication with a specialization in media law. She has spent almost 15 years in the field of journalism, and she teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. She recently won a national research award for her work.
