Introduction To The Grieving Cycle

​The future is uncontrollable, we make expectations based on our past experiences and core beliefs along with our current situation. We expect to be able to use substances/ food/ dishonesty and any number of other negative concepts in the future if it has worked as a coping mechanism in the past.
            Every time our expectations don’t match up with reality no matter how big or small they are we have the potential to have a very negative reaction. We grieve our unmet expectations. The person that we expect to be exists in our minds and when we end up not being the person that we expected the future self that existed in our mind dies and we have to grieve him.
If you wake up in the morning and put on a shirt you expect that you will end the day in that shirt. You make a cup of coffee and accidentally spill it on your shirt. At this moment the end the day in that shirt expectation dies and you enter into the grieving process you may move to anger or depression. You can then have this incident ruin your whole day or week or however long it takes you to get to a point of acceptance. At this point you realize you have no control over a past event so you move on. You no longer stuck in anger or depression or any other part of the grieving cycle. The danger is when your expectations are not met over and over again you may start to expect bad things to happen to you. Then you are trapped because either bad things happen and your prepared for them because you are expecting them so no grief or good things happen but you are so focused on the bad that a good thing would be outside of your expectations and you would actually grieve your unmet negative expectations.
             People that struggle with anger or depression and remain there for a significant amount of time are trapped in the grieving cycle. There is only one way out of the grieving cycle and that is through the door of acceptance. You can't escape it any other way. Guess what other ways people try to get out through, their struggles. But when they choose the struggle they expect to get out of the grieving process. Struggle doesn't take them out but further in. This leaves them with a new dead expectations and still trapped in grief but now they are pulling around a big heavy bag of struggle, and that is a big burden.
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*I used to think about the grieving cycle a lot. Mostly because I was in it. I think the older we get time forces us out of our expectations. When I wrote this I thought that I was supposed to be further along, making more money and being more successful. Now I see the cost of all of it and I can't go back. Now I know how much work the ideas I had are and how small the real pay off is. I let other people put pressure on me to have and do more. Now that my life is my own I can embrace the simplicity of it all.