QUESTION: Can grief stop you from starting or developing a new relationship?

Don: Grief can prevent you from being present in your current relationship and starting a new one.

The pain of grief keeps a portion of your attention and awareness preoccupied until the loss is faced. Grief can feel like a weight you carry; sometimes, you only notice it when it is gone. Though you can push grief down to the side or ignore it, in reality, there is no getting around it. You have to, at some point, experience it. Until then, it is a part of you, keeping you unavailable to those around you. This is often expressed by saying, "He is here, but he isn't."

When you experience significant loss (change) of any kind, especially family members, due to death or divorce, the grief process begins and occupies quite a bit of your attention.

Only when the emotional and physical impact of the loss is acknowledged, felt, and accepted can you be fully emotionally present after forgiving to some extent. Your mind may resist accepting the reality of the loss.

The positive outcome of progressing through the steps of grief recovery is that you start to live more in the present and can better handle what's happening in your life at the moment. The imaginary conversations in your head, pretending the loss didn't occur, fade away or only occur occasionally when something triggers a reminder of the loss.

So, the experiences of grief happen without your control, consuming, for a while, most of your attention.

If you are already in a relationship and you have a significant loss, you will be less emotionally available to your partner until the grief is experienced. If you are not in a relationship, grief could keep you from making efforts to begin one until grief is faced.

This is true both with death and the broken heart of a divorce. However, some people start a new relationship to avoid and cover up the pain of the grief experience. If grief is not faced well, the relationship you begin will start on a very unsteady footing because you are not fully emotionally there and not able to be close. The new relationship will be based more on the thrill of hormones and the relief of avoiding grief. Eventually, grief will be faced in this new relationship.

The same is valid for pets. Many people quickly replace their pets to avoid the loss experience, but only later do they regret bringing a new pet in so quickly. These actions cover up, delay, and make grief more of a problem instead of a process to go through. However, with suitable changes, grief recovery can happen even when it has been massively avoided. Grief is a natural process and seeks to restore a person to the present moment of life that is happening now.