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Dealing With The Loss Of My Marriage Essay

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Loss History/Personal Awareness
Dealing With the Loss of my Marriage
Tina Gaffin
University of the Cumberlands

Abstract
This paper explores how I dealt with the loss and subsequent grief after the loss of my marriage. I will discuss the phases of grief that I have gone through, what most affected my coping style, lessons learned, and how the loss will or will not affect my ability to provide counsel.
Keywords: loss, grief, cope

“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”
~Vicki Harrison (2014)

Divorced is not what I had pictured for my life. Things had been going wrong, almost from the start, but I kept at it, because that is what you do in a marriage; you ebb and flow like the ocean. Sometimes it is easy, but mostly it is work, hard work. But, you cannot do it alone, and one day, I was done. I was tired of being alone in my marriage. I had been married just over nine years when I made the decision to leave. John Bowlby suggests, “Attachments develop early in life and offer security and survival for the individual. It is when these affectional attachments are broken or lost, that individuals experience distress and emotional disturbance such as anxiety, crying and anger; these emotions are often expressed as mourning” (AIPC, 2010). Even though I did not meet and bond with my husband early in life, an attachment
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