Importance of Grief of Divorcing Couple in Dynamics of Matrimonial Dispute: BY Legal Mind Ajit Kumar

Grief is a natural and obvious emotion to any loss. It is part of human nature to grief and is by far the most complex human experience. The cognitive, belief, value system, culture and religious ways for coping with it makes it more complicated.

Conventional and Unconventional Grief

Conventional grief, when you miss your dog who died is different due to acceptance of a fact that it is an irrevocable loss.

The experience of emotions on death is different and it is a positive emotion, as it does not bring anger or guilt. Grieving on death may sometimes in a situation of a hospitalized patient be a sort of relief from continuous pain and anxiety. In case of death, all family and friends would be around you to support and encourage in your grief process. However, the same does not happen in the loss of a marriage, which is unconventional grief. Most of the family and friends don’t even recognize the necessity to grief in a failed marriage/divorce and the spouse finding no support would find herself/himself left alone to grieve.

Grieving someone alive is unconventional…. in a failed marriage and divorce, the grief is unconventional.

In India, there are lots of rituals in death and bereavement, which encourage and support grief. However, in divorce, grieving is in most occasion not identified and acknowledged.

It is this unconventional form of grief that is less talked about but remains a serious and real issue in the current social setup and ever-changing values and lifestyles.

Grief out of failed marriage is a sort of anticipatory grief, just like being experienced, when a loved one is admitted to the hospital for incurable disease and is going to die in the hospital. 

It could also be much more complicated than anticipatory grief of a hospitalized patient, as there was a certainty of a happening of event i.e. eventual death, which is irrevocable except that there is a time-lapse. However, in divorce, the inherent love in the past relationship does allow the hope to die and partner always had hope of a reconciliation.

In #DivorceMediation sometimes partners without saying so much in words are actually seeking help. They might not say “Help me” as they might be confused and under the depression of a devastating marriage and apparent loss of a relationship and everything attached to it. But actually, they are saying, I have a failing marriage and it is an incredible loss to me but how can I grief. The deeper the love in a relationship, the deeper would be the scar of loss of a marriage and the grief in terms of intensity and time period.

The divorce is like a storm in your life-damaging everything around you. There would be the damaged pieces all around you in the nonphysical form of magnificent memories of good times but then you have to find some memories and hang on to it. Maybe that amongst them one piece could be a physical thing, your child from the marriage and you can hang with it to stay alive and live life for a purpose.

Grief Stages and Grief Path

While grieving, a partner experiences many emotions. These emotions could be of love, anger, sadness, guilt, and depression, which are very powerful and more confusing and overlapping due to the fact one is grieving for a revocable loss and not an irrevocable loss like in case of death.

Anger is the most prominent and dominant emotion surfacing in such a grieving process. The grieving person would feel anger towards the other partner for not understanding the issues in the relationship and/or not changing a particular perception or mental state. When the anger subsides, it brought guilt that you are helpless and have failed to control the situation at the appropriate time. Such self-imposed guilt causes further depression and the partner starts blaming themselves for discontinuation of the marriage. This situation could further be aggravated and the partner may remain struck with the emotion of guilt and depression, due to personality traits and other mental health contributors of the said partner.

The behavior of other partners also plays a crucial role and a partner who continuously fuels false hope or may start blaming the situation to keep remain the partner struck with a particular emotion of sadness, guilt, and depression.

The full path of Grief covering all these emotions is shown in the below image.

Love and longing, when rejected bring Anger. An unresolved issue causes frustration and Sadness. The stage of sadness opens up the gate for self-imposed guilt and depression. The acknowledgment and acceptance of these stages bring Grief.

Experiencing different stages of Grief by a couple differently

I had mediated a divorce case, where the wife was seeking divorce having custody of their child and living separately from her husband of more than 3 months. The husband was desperate in convincing wife to restore cohabitation to safeguard marriage and for the sake of the child. The husband had shown strong emotions and felt hurt by the consistent stand of the wife to think no more of reconciliation. Still keeping his anger, he was desperately trying to avoid divorce.

However, the wife had shown no emotions, which had angered and hurt him. This does not mean that the wife had not undergone the stages of grief, starting from frustration, anger, sadness, guilt, and depression, she had during the subsistence of marriage already undergone and bypass these emotions. During that period, she had resolved, made savings and arranged assets for her separate living and child card. Therefore, her emotions during divorce mediation were not as strong, as of husband, who had lately experienced the emotions of loss of the marriage.

Most of the conflict in the couple’s relationship can be related to their own placement in the grief path. Due to which, they tend to misunderstand each other’s emotions, or lack of it leading them to grief all alone by themselves in their own way. In the above case, both divorcing couples were grieving differently, the wife mostly sees the loss of marriage final; the husband desperately hopes it is not. Therefore, they both grief differently. The husband would project his own feeling of devastation on to their child; wife instead would project relief. 

It is necessary for a partner to recognize, understand and experience the underlying emotions to cycle through the process of grief. They need to look beyond and after to move and avoid getting stuck on to a particular emotion in the path of grief. Sometimes, the motivation could be the welfare and upbringing of children from such relationships.

Grief in a way is a positive emotion. It is necessary as it frees you from all negative emotions.

“Grief does not change you, it reveals you.”― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Grief gives you a gift, that it changes the course of your life forever. It transforms and metamorphoses you in a way, which is otherwise not possible for you to be and give an opportunity to bring a change into your life.

If you are in a dysfunctional marriage and looking for a quick divorce, visit our website https://medvorce.com for a free registration by creating an account to find if you are qualified for a mutual and uncontested divorce. Let’s start a WhatsApp chat.