Bargaining

After the affair, I don’t think I ever really bargained with God. Mostly I just begged Him. The bargaining was more with myself although at the time, I didn’t recognize it as such. I didn’t realize that my thoughts and behaviors were part of this stage of grief that reeks of “if onlys” and “what ifs.” I didn’t see that my desire for life to return to what it was before or to be restored, no matter the cost, was all part of grieving. That wanting to go back in time and realize things sooner, before they escalated…or maybe go back far enough in time that I could change the whole course of events…was bargaining. That when I focused on my own faults and analyzed-to-death every minute thing I could have done differently or better, I was trying to negotiate my way out of the hurt and taking blame and guilt on myself to keep from feeling such deep betrayal from the person I had never imagined capable of hurting me that way.

I misunderstood bargaining to be about making deals – either with God or others – for some different outcome. And there are some instances of loss where that fits, but this stage of grief goes deeper than that. This is the stage that saved me, I think. The stage that kept me from processing and feeling the full extent and depth of the pain at all once because it would have been too much to bear. Instead, I clung to the way things were in the past in order to avoid the pain of the present. I tried to remain in the old reality because the new one was too much too soon. With one bit of news, all of life changed. All of it. I lost control, and bargaining provided a way for me to maintain some delusion of control in my life. I wanted no part of the new reality, so I evaded it by fighting off the truth and delaying the inevitable day when I would finally face reality.

Facing reality took time, especially since I no longer knew which parts of my past were real. Bargaining allowed me to work through memories, questions, and doubts. As time went on and I started coming to terms with my grief, the bargaining slowed. I didn’t ask as many “what ifs.” I didn’t think as many “if onlys.” I gradually saw things differently and acknowledged some hard truths that maybe I had refused to see for a long time. Three years later, I still question what was the actual truth of my fifteen years of marriage. I wonder whether some of the things I felt with such certainty were never as certain as I thought. Maybe some of the things I refused to believe early on were true after all. Even so, I don’t regret the way I responded or the way I held on, trusting so fully in what I thought was true. I accept that there is just as much possibility that I was wrong as I was right. I waver and wonder, and some of my initial thoughts have changed with time.

The way I handle the varying thoughts has changed with time. I allow myself to consider the possibilities, but they don’t wreck me like they did early on. I don’t beg God for the truth anymore because maybe sometimes not knowing helps preserve us. At this point, no good would come of knowing how much I was wrong or how much I was right. It wouldn’t change the past or the future. While I will always wish I had nothing to regret, I now realize the futility of “if onlys” and “what ifs.” Those thoughts don’t change the course of events either, and even if they could, things may have still reached the same end result, just with some other person or at some other time or place. Bargaining allowed me time after the worst hurt of my life to delay the pain – not so I wouldn’t feel it or deal with it, but so that I could do so at a pace that allowed me to survive.

A couple sites that helped me understand the stage of Bargaining. https://www.joincake.com/blog/bargaining-stage-of-grief/