Unresolved Loss

This blog is almost 10 years old, and has been a private affair for most of that time. It has been almost like a diary. I recently took the bold step of registering for the Mumsnet bloggers network. There has been a modest increase in traffic since then. Hello new people! I have also really enjoyed reading your blogs, especially those in the sex and relationships category where, apparently, I0naFi0na belongs. However, I must apologize on one account. You have walked in on an interesting time in my life. There has also been an upsurge in my posting, but this has been all around an intense and frustrating love-affair which has resulted in unresolved loss. Before I go on though, a bit of history. This blog, and I have traveled an uneasy path through

Autism
Mental health
Infertility
IVF
Divorce
Infidelity
(Yep in that order)
Sex Addiction
Single parenting and now belatedly
Love and
Grief


I am concerned that my new audience will find a self-centred, preoccupied middle aged woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis over a ridiculous self-centred toff who somehow needed to exert power over her, or use her to massage his own ego, or as a stop-gap on the road to his own relationship nirvana.

Also my recent post about how to get over a break up was unique to me, it was bespoke as it were. There are many more qualified to help you through break ups. But one element which I suspect is quite common in divorce in particular is, as I mentioned above, unresolved loss. This is exemplified by the case of someone who goes missing. The family are not able to grieve their death and continue to live in hope indefinitely which is painful.

My particular florid - but ultimately non existent  love affair is a case of this. Grief does not have to occur as a result of bereavement, there are many other life experiences that cause it. And there are also many great resources to help with grief. So the unique and heady mix of quasi-break up, unresolved grief and other unresolved issues I didn't know I had have resulted in a unique footprint which I have been moved to address in writing. In fact what I have been doing in the last 15 posts or so is, as grief recovery method advises, completing some unfinished emotional business  even the triggering reminders when I am trying not to think about this person are common in grief as well, and what I need to do is build an accurate memory picture. And again from grief recovery method

"We must grieve and complete our relationship to the person as well as to our relationship with the pain we generate when we think about or are reminded of the person. And, we must grieve and complete our unmet hopes and dreams and expectations. You must become willing to re-experience some of the painful events, and finally communicate what you would have said had you been allowed to, or if you had known how. It may seem frightening to root around where there has been so much pain. Perhaps it would be more helpful to be frightened of the alternative, a life of restriction and limitation caused by staying incomplete. The alternative of keeping the pain forever, of trying not to remember, of trying to avoid any circumstances or events that remind you of that person. Many people today talk of giving away your power. There is no clearer or more painful example of that then to have your life's actions and reactions ruled by the painful memories of someone who is no longer here."

As the author Russell Friedman says, even if the person you are grieving is still alive, you need to complete your part of the relationship, That living person won't change, they will probably carry on being just who they are, but you need to live a life of meaning not limited by painful reminders.

Clearly George was able to process and dismiss his role in the "relationship" quite easily, probably with the aid of  his own personal narrative which I can only guess at but might have been something like "Oh it was only a bit of harmless flirting, I didn't expect her to take it so seriously. I was only being gentlemanly when I asked her to come to stay. I thought it was better to tell her face to face about the real love of my life. Anyway I think she got the message she hasn't contacted me lately"

So my narrative which is emerging through months of tortured blog posts is something like "He was in a difficult place, he may even have not been in his right mind, he probably liked me at the time, he essentially got a better offer and was too cowardly to tell me, I think I massaged his ego and saw him through a difficult time. I also think from my point of view I imbued the friendship with a lot of other things I shouldn't have. Conflating all the things we have in common, even probably down to temperament, as implicit reasons that we are right for each other, getting my hopes up of righting some of the wrongs of my teens and early twenties and returning to my country of origin feeling a desperate need to keep this emblem of all I was looking for (or thought I was looking for) in a man, in my life. There will never be another like that. Well there may never be, but by his very actions he has proved that this particular emblem may not, in fact, be what is good for me. He was like a drug for me, and it has taken a long time to come down and process the withdrawal"

It was like anticipating a trip to a colorful market and finding it closed on arrival