Hardcore Grief Recovery by Steve Case

Author:Steve Case [Case, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

If God had loved them…

If God wasn’t mad at me…

If I had gone to church…

If I had prayed better…

If I had given my life to the service of Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior…

Jesus Christ, this isn’t helping.

This is bargaining. This stage focuses on a little thing we call guilt. Guilt and bargaining go hand in hand. You feel like you could have done something—or done something more. And then you manifest that vulnerability into these “if only” thoughts.

Again, bargaining is not helpful, but it is totally normal.

There’s a good side to this phase of grief. It’s buried, but we’ll dig it out in a moment. But let’s start with what bargaining actually looks like. It’s like haggling. You think maybe if you had done something different, then things would not have turned out his way. We use this to delay the inevitable feeling of grief. And to delay our guilt. And to delay asking the many, often unanswerable “whys.”

Basically, bargaining is based on the idea that if you give something, you’re supposed to get something in return. But grief doesn’t work that way. Grief is a fuck-face.

Ask yourself this: Who are you bargaining with?

God?

Waste of time. If you believe in the idea of God, then you already know God has everything. Nothing you can offer God is going to change the situation.

Think you are bargaining with the great forces of the universe? With Karma? Who?

There is never going to be a deal. The universe doesn’t want anything from you. The universe doesn’t have a stake in the game. Bargaining is just a manifestation of our desperation—our yearning to have some power in a powerless situation.

Let’s just say you strike a bargain. You call upon a higher power and say that you’ll give up smoking and drinking and promise to go to church… Okay, fine. To seal the deal, the person you lost has to not be dead anymore.

What if you add in all the money in your bank account?

What if you promise to never think a mean thought or say a mean word again?

What if you take back all the bad shit that happened in the past?

All you want in return is for the person to not be dead anymore.

That’s not going to happen.

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