Loss Follows Steps To Get To Healing Or To Hope

I overheard this real estate agent in my office feeling the STING of not getting a residential property listing RIGHT THERE in his neighborhood. He felt he owned coverage in that neighborhood but apparently not loyalty from everyone. While maybe a minor hurt to him it was a form of loss. We all have losses in life from minor ones, to moderate ones, to signficant ones.

Losses from their initial awareness of them through the end follow as a minimum a five step "grief reaction" process to get to the other side and move on. Think of all the things you can lose - in real estate a client, a listing, a sale. In life, a job, your home due to foreclosure or fire or windstorm, a marriage, a relationship, your health, an investment, your favorite sporting team "losing", and deepest yet death of someone you know, family, friends, acquaintance or pet.

The steps you will see moving through your loss and grieving over it are:

• DENIAL - you ignore it, magically thinking it will go away, perhaps thinking nothing is wrong, believing it can't be true, or reject those that are telling you the truth
• BARGAINING - Striking a deal with God to make the loss go away, promising to do anything to change matters, looking for some way to still fix things
• ANGER - Blame God, look for scapegoats, blame yourself, vent with rage, blame the one who left us, blame others
• DESPAIR - Just getting overwhelmed by the pain, shutting down your emotions, having guilt thinking we are responsible, loss of hope and faith and thinking we can't trust again
• ACCEPTANCE - Can now cope with the loss, begin to think rationally again, adjusting to the changed world after the loss, can now verbalize the pain, confidence returns, personal growth can resume

Be aware there is no specific time to get over a loss and you can go in and out of stages and even skip some of the middle ones.

There are two pieces of good news with loss

1) if you do the work of going through the steps the pieces of your heart will come back together and are eventually

HEALED

and

2) all losses at the outset are not necessarily losses. They are truly just SETBACKS. With more time, understanding, wisdom, communication, kindness, and as the Bible says LOVE, something can be repaired and NOT LOST!! This is a great feeling during times of problems. It offers all of us

HOPE