It’s never easy when a relationship comes to an end. Even when it’s you that wants the relationship to finish, you’ll still feel a sense of loss. While it can be confusing, that feeling of loss is only normal. After all, you’ll have invested a lot in it. You’ll have given it your time, money and self.

For the person who didn’t want the relationship to finish, the sense of loss can be greater. Aside from their own investment in it, they will experience confusion over where they went wrong and a certain amount of self-blame.

How do you move on and get over the loss?

There are a few clichés that address this – both banal and crude – but let’s look at some practical methods.

Don’t Fight the Pain

Don’t go through it, grow through it. It’s okay to feel awful. It’s okay to feel like you just want to hide under a duvet and watch TV reruns all day. Continue reading →

The death of a child is often a situation so heartbreaking that it has been known for many parents of deceased children to commit suicide – often as part of a joint pact. Nothing can prepare you for the loss if your experience of death so far has been that of a friend or family member whose natural time had come.

There is a Buddhist expression that a good life is one where you die before your son and that he dies before his son. It’s the natural progression of life, and when we see it disrupted – the hopes and dreams of what was to be the life of a child becoming an adult and raising their own children, the disruption can cause untold grief.

The grief can be hardest to bear by those parents who have an especially spiritual outlook on life – calling into question the presence of the god they looked to for safety and protection. Such a dilemma of faith can call into question a host of other former staunch beliefs such as the existence of an afterlife. Continue reading →