Endings are an inevitable part of life and yet we are unaware of the often complex relationship we have with them.
We are in relationship with almost everything in our lives - not just people - and we will have established feelings and connections with our entire world, both our internal, micro and the external, macro. This includes the environment we inhabit from our literal home to the broader external world. We connect emotionally with places we have visited and have relationships with dates in the calendar. We revisit the past when we smell a particular scent and remember the person, the place, the feeling it evoked at the time. We relate to our job , in the status it brings , the relationship with the money it provides, the amount we work or the unpaid labour we carry out as parents and caregivers. There is more, of course and this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the complexities of the relationships we have with people, including the relationship we have with ourselves.
And yet, how often do we think about our feelings when these relationships end?
Questions I like to ask clients, which help us to understand their relationship with endings;
1) What is your relationship with endings?
2) Are you the one to leave/end the relationship or do you wait to be 'ended' with?
3) How do you manage the emotional aspect of endings - do you sit with the feelings, allow yourself to grieve, dwell and ruminate? Or do you package it all up neatly, deny yourself the feelings and move on without looking back?
4) Do you "go back"? Do you reminisce, keep all and any evidence that the relationship existed, photographs, text messages, relationship paraphernalia...... or do you delete, burn, eradicate, destroy all evidence of the relationship?
There is no right answer to these questions but it can be helpful to be curious about endings given that we are in a constant loop of beginnings and endings.