Endings...Where the Possibility of New Begins

As familiar as I am with William Bridge's model of transition, teaching and using it regularly with teams to lead and manage change, it is never fun to be living through it personally, again. Yet it does crystallize all the concepts and associated feelings more powerfully. Experiential learning is the best teacher for this student. 

We mistakenly walk through life thinking in fairy tale journeys that have a beginning, middle, and always a happy ending. Bridges illustrates that the ending is where we truly begin. While recently coaching a beautiful young professional woman, who is preparing to marry later this summer, the Bridges model was in full display. In our society, marriage is celebrated as an exciting and joyful new beginning. But before that can happen, we must experience the endings of our single life. She is struggling with the endings (and losses) that are unfolding. Moving from the city to the countryside where his family is and where it “makes more sense” to buy a home and prepare to have a family. Loss of freedom and spontaneity to see friends and socialize at will. Loss of clear and separated money decisions and independence. Loss of this treasured early-adulthood stage of her life, as she begins her transition. The transition happens in what Bridges calls “the neutral zone”. This stage is fluid, unbound by time, and includes both positive and negative emotions. The normalization that this model provides, gives us permission to relax and allow the ups and downs to flow freely. As we do, space is created for new beginnings to emerge.

While Kaya is safely on her journey of growth and healing (I hope) in California, space has been created for me to move through the final ending of my love relationship with Matthew. At least final for now. It’s been interesting to navigate two big aspects of change in my life simultaneously. My relationship with Kaya will evolve and hopefully grow stronger over time as we both learn new ways of coping and relating with life and each other. My relationship with Matthew has reached its definitive end as he drove away for the last time with all his belongings, to his new life in Mexico.

I’m not sure which of the two transitions are more difficult. I think that the pain of the love relationship ending is more acute in the short term, but because it is a “clean break”, healing and new beginnings may come more quickly. The pain of the parent-child relationship struggle runs deeper. Living through the disappointment, guilt, fear, and powerlessness requires much more than a quick round of therapy or a few self-help books. It requires deep introspection, humility, openness, and study of healthier ways of communicating, relating, and supporting those I love, as well as myself.

There are so many gifts hidden in the seeming darkness of endings. But the path to finding them has required absolute willingness to walk into the fire of my feelings and into the dark hidden rooms of my life. To face the shadows, the fears, the mistakes, the patterns, and the pain that accompanies a life fully lived. As the last 4 months have passed, I have grieved, raged, felt self-pity, elated freedom, gratitude, hope, excitement, rinsing and repeating continuously! 

I love the way one of Kaya’s therapists re-framed traditional thinking of grief from happening in defined stages, to instead grief encompassing many aspects that come and go through the entire process. “Stages” imply a one-way trip with definitive shifts from one phase to the next. He provided a metaphor for the aspects framework that stuck for me. Think of a basketball as the container called “Grief” and inside of that basketball, there are lots of ping pong balls representing all the aspects of grief. Denial, sadness, anger, resistance, negotiation, confusion, depression, hopelessness, hopefulness, acceptance, etc.  Those aspects bounce around inside the basketball at random, not necessarily logical, or linear, and they can all come and go in any order many times. This has been my experience of this love relationship ending. Just when I thought I had cried every last tear, on my knees, in total surrender, more tears would arrive days or weeks later, and usually “unannounced”. After writing and then burning about 12 pages of free-flowing anger and judgment and all that comes with it, I felt free and thought I had “processed the anger” and could move on in the cycle. Then a second round of free writing happened on an airplane coming home from Boston. Only about 5 pages and not nearly as much anger. Again, I was over-confident thinking I was marching toward the light of new beginnings. Only to be triggered one more time unexpectedly, which lead to sitting on the beach scribbling out 24 more pages of hurt adolescent-feeling random rage, which I then took to the woods and burned page by page as I let it go.

Though waves of sadness continue, they are getting smaller, and I recognize they are based on an illusion of who I want others and myself to be. Always seeing the deeper, truer, beautiful souls of those I love, I get caught in a cycle of co-dependency that wants to “help” them see what I see. The weariness of the energy I have spent trying to convince my loved ones to “wake up”, “be conscious”, love and accept themselves and others…has deterred me from looking squarely in the mirror. I did not realize how much of my life energy was spent focused on Matthew and Kaya. And how much of myself I started to withhold or let go of as I tried to make them okay.

It was suggested that perhaps my own lack of self-love contributed to the ending of this relationship. While I didn’t like hearing that, I cannot deny it, even at 57 years old. It's hard to feel “not enough” all the time. Over the years, I have struggled with those feelings intermittently, regardless of my physical, financial, or relationship state. I am whole-heartedly convinced it’s an inside job to recover from my perfectionism and high ideals that hold my magnificence hostage.  It’s an inside job to restore the Absolute and Unconditional worthiness that we are all born with. Whatever childhood experiences and life scars I’ve collected, it is up to me NOW to allow healing and to choose, finally, self-care and self-love.

“The path ahead is unclear. There will always be unanticipated challenges, bumps in the road, learning curves and dead ends…Regardless, I stand at a crossroad. I cannot go back. I’ve already been there. I must bravely take that first step, the one that will lead me to my new tomorrow.” ~Jody Doty

“The past is but the beginning of a new beginning.” ~HG Wells

And so it is.