Gratitude & Grief

I was shattered into a million pieces. I am a bit groundless, looking desperately for the rug that had been pulled from beneath my happy normal life, only to find that someone has taken the floor too.

  

                                         

After we experience a loss, we tend to focus on what we no longer have. As a result we focus our energy on the negative, or what is missing in our life, rather than on the positive, or all of those wonderful things we still have. Yet gratitude can be one of the most healing tools we have.

Being grateful for what remains after you have experienced that rug of your life being ripped away, or the whole floor. it can be a powerful way to deal with, and heal, that loss. My thoughts, the ones I have discovered are often experienced by someone who is grieving, sometimes turned to darker questions like, 

“How can I go on?” 

“How did this happen?”

“WHY?”

Grief also brought up a feeling of emptiness, depression, and hopelessness.

I knew Thanksgiving was going to be hard, I knew the reason I had been triggered and struggling I knew it was Thanksgiving day. 

Thanksgiving 1996, I thought I found my eternity. I said YES to the one person I wanted in my life and wanted to create a future with. I had no idea that day the future would include abandonment. 

Then I realized it was okay for me to feel gratitude and grief that this day was a reminder of all I wanted in life all I had dreamed and built. It was a reminder of the love I gave freely even if it was ripped away and I was blind to the truth of the lies.  

I had been beating myself up for

Feeling this because I can’t find the joy, it’s been temporary stripped from life but I had so many moments and people to be grateful for. 

Gratitude has the power to help those in grief rise above their loss. That rug that turned into a whole floor. It can provide hope. And, perhaps most important, is that the lord is right there saying this...

It’s better to feel pain, than nothing at all.

Satan comes at you dressed as everything you've ever wanted how else would he convince you to join him?

 Who am I, and what will I become. I wish I had the answer to this question? How I plead with the Lord to show me. 

Recovery, yes, a fancy word they use in therapy. How was I going to recover from the betrayal trauma? I felt horrible, and a bit lost and ashamed because often Satan is right there whispering and I all ears ready to listen and join him. Defeated, that’s what it feels like utter defeat, and I am exhausted. 

                                    

 There was a quote that hung on my 1st therapist wall that said.  "it's better to feel pain than nothing at all." I walked in one day and asked, can I rip that off the wall? Can I throw it at you so you can decide if that’s better than feeling nothing at all? Yes, I have had many of my most utterly deplorable moments in therapy. Yes, that quote had stood out from my 1st visit. I had forgotten all about this day until I re-read it. That month of June 2018 was a blur, and me not sure I would remember any of it had I not written it down. He said you understand that your pain makes you normal, right?  Your body hurts when you're injured, and that's what you are right now. Then he said, will it make you feel better? He stood up, took it off the wall, and handed it to me. He just called my bluff. The anger went away, and the utter sadness was back, and the tears flowed, and I knew it wasn’t going to take any of it away.

My next visit was gone; maybe he was afraid I would actually do it. Nothing sat in its place, so I knew he removed it for me and me alone, because it triggered me, also a fancy word they use in therapy.  Anger would last about three days, all while Satan was close by, and then the pain, sadness, and sorrow would take over again. It was in the anger days that I would listen to all ears to Satan, I wanted to run, hideaway, I wanted to feel nothing at all. So I cried, that’s what I did. WHY? Because I wanted to live in the anger because it gave me relief from the overwhelming sadness. I had prayed a million times for the Lord just to let me be angry. I was convinced that it was so much better than the constant heartache that I was going to die from physically. I couldn't and didn't want to continue to feel that. I was foolish then to think that the Lord knew what I didn’t know that I would spiritually die if I stayed in the anger phase too long, so he let me stay there until it was too dangerous. Even the smallest prayer of- PLEASE let me stay angry, I will die if I have to feel the shattering of my heart. He gave to me because he knew that living in pain was better than feeling nothing at all.  So three days is what I got. Three days at a time, that's was the longest I ever got to stay in the anger, He had stayed close by, He knew when I felt spiritually drained, the sadness would be back, the heartbreak the devastation of what I didn’t know. He gave me exactly what I had asked for in small doses because it was all I could take without taken Satan's hand and him pulling me in to join him. The Lord was there to give me small doses of what I had asked for, but to protect me from what I had no idea would be one of the biggest battles I would face.

                                                     secrets keep us sick,
                and then your just another person alone falling into the darkness.