All month, we’ve been diving into the 5 Stages of Grief. Here’s a recap:
DENIAL: This is not happening to me.
ANGER: I’m mad as hell that this is happening to me.
BARGAINING: I’ll do anything if you stop this from happening to me.
DEPRESSION: I can’t deal with the pain of this happening to me.
ACCEPTANCE: I can see past what’s happening to me.
A huge shift occurs when you move into Acceptance, the 5th stage of grief.
You start looking ahead instead of back.
Finally, you are done with the over-analysis of the details of your divorce. You’ve stopped picking apart every action, every conversation, every “what if”. You are now ready to forge ahead, to make plans, to visualize your future.
What a relief!
You feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders. You feel free. You are beginning to feel like your old self. Not the self you just left behind in those other 4 stages. No, the one you left a long, long time ago. The one you can barely recognize, but, oh, she feels so good and so right. Stepping into that skin feels like putting on an old, comfortable sweater that you’d lost for a very long time and thought you’d never see again, but you’ve just found.
Remember this you? The you that smiled more often than not. That laughed out loud. The you whose heart felt full at the mere sight of green grass, blue sky and happy children. The you who felt joy.
Once you find that old you, you will never want to go back to the sad and lonely place you’ve been wallowing in.
Welcome home.
Now the fun part begins. You get to create a new life. One you’ll love to live. It can be absolutely anything you want it to be. The sky’s the limit. It’s like hitting the reset button. A do-over. A mulligan.
So what will your new life look like? It’s hard to narrow it down when there are so many options. So, try this: visualize. Visualize your life the way you think you want it to look. See how it feels. Not quite right? Try another scenario. Have fun. Be creative. The more detail you can put into your visualization the easier it will be to imagine living in it.
Once you start honing in on the pieces that fit, find pictures that match that vision and tape them onto a board. Put that board in a spot where you will necessarily look at it every day. This is how you make your dreams come true. Sound silly? Just try it. It works!
One day, you will look at that vision board and realize that you have created the life of your dreams.