I may be suffering twice for having left the Jehovah's Witnesses and watching my JW wife and other family members stay in. Once for the changed situation (or loss) and another time for expecting to make progress in getting over it.
The 1969 book On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced us to the Kübler-Ross model , commonly referred to as the " five stages of grief. " They are very helpful, but the original idea of the book and the hypothesis was that when a person is faced with the reality of impending death , he or she will experience a series of emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
It isn't always the case, but those stages are often felt by terminally ill patients. Some may only feel some of those stages or be completely different for their own reasons. Still, The Kübler-Ross model was very valuable.
Since it was valuable, the Kübler-Ross model was also applied to situations of grieving loss- the loss of a loved one, the loss of a happy family due to the divorce of your parents or yourself, the loss of oneself to substance abuse, YADDA YADDA YADDA.
Some people miss the point and kind of insist that a person goes through the stages in order and moves on to acceptance. Then some people feel guilty when they are still angry or depressed, if even occasionally, when years have passed and they deal with an anniversary or just a memory-triggering occasion. We often try to insist on the stages even for ourselves, and then think that acceptance means total (or near total) closure.
Our own society thinks like that too and tells us to read the right book on resolving grief, or getting a counselor to help us reach that final closure. And if we don't do it easily, to take some pills. Either way, society and well-intentioned people tell us to buck up and get over it. They insist that grief is something to fix when you reach closure.
The difference between a terminally ill person and a grieving person is that the terminally ill person needs to accept their outcome no matter what. They die and have final closure, even if they refused with their last breath to accept it. Not so for the living. We may need to move on with our lives to a large degree, but some feelings may only diminish and never go away in our lifetimes.
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Well, OTWO rambled on. Now he will make his point. Even in my own comments on this subject over the years, I assumed I would reach some sort of near-total closure. Yet here I am with thousands of entries on JWN. Some would say, "When you are ready, you will stop coming here." I might reply that I would like to reach the point where I check in from time-to-time with good friends, but see myself not really commenting much in the future. I still believe that my wife's JW activity will slow down, if not halt, and that my JWN activity will lessen or halt. That still might happen. But it might not. She might never slow down, or I might never really lessen my JWN activity.
Make no mistake. I do join in on JWN to give advice, thoughts to newbies or others on their path. I do debate a bit with people about spirituality, the Bible, hearing voices, whatever. But I don't come here mainly for that. I come here for my own grieving/loss/anger over my life and the lives of my loved ones.
But part of my internal harmony / clarity of thought / therapy is a different kind of acceptance. I am getting there. If I read a new experience of someone being treated wrong by the elders or their JW loved ones, I no longer have to believe that I shouldn't be angry after all this time. I may not waste as much time on anger as I used to, I may be able to accept that WTS is what it is, but I can still be angry when I see an injustice or think about what my family is learning. I no longer have to assume I should have moved on by now, nor set a deadline for such.
The notion of closure- of having finished with grief (or any of those stages of it)- can be just a notion.
And part of my accepting that it can be just a notion is trying really hard to understand that others are in a completely different place for the same reasons. I read a story about someone going through a loss because of death, then them going to visit a clairvoyant. They talked to their dead loved one through the clairvoyant. Of course I don't believe that they actually talked to the dead person, but the point is that often people want to believe. They want to believe that another Bible-based belief will bring them closure, or that God has a special mission just for them now that they have grieved, or like me- they want to believe that their family will all eventually come out. Some of those (and other) beliefs are rational and some are farfetched if not irrational. But they are what they are.
So, if I argued with you because of a difference between where we are in relation to each other, I don't promise to stop. I promise to do my best to be understanding more. I promise to give thought to your different point of view. I promise I will do my damdest to never say "Get over it."