Stage 3. Bargaining.

Just make it stop. I’ll do anything.

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If that sounds familiar, it’s because you recognize the bargaining stage of the grief cycle. At that point many of us feel anxiety and a sense of desperation. That point in we feel like we would do anything to make the pain from our loss stop. It’s the unending game of offering trade-offs that will never come to fruition, because nothing we can do can change the situation.

I’ve been there, trust me. Although I could rationalize to myself that of course I would not do “anything” to make it stop, I still said and did a lot of silly things that obviously wouldn’t make a difference. For example, if I can just deliver a healthy baby, I’ll never eat processed sugar again, go to church every Sunday, stop swearing, and so on. Many times, bargaining is in the spirit of attempting to strike a deal with a higher power.

Many of the things we bargain about aren’t bad things. It’s not bad to cut down on sugar and clean up our language. But the issue is that this situation we are facing isn’t within our control. We can’t simply “bargain” our problems away. For those of us who have tried this tactic, we know from experience that it doesn’t work.

For me, feeling like I was doing something to try to “fix” my situation felt better than doing nothing. As humans, we often go to great lengths to avoid the feeling of powerlessness. For many of us, that feeling triggers anxiety. But in this life, we just can’t force a “fix” for a situation we don’t like. It’s just not the way things work.

That was a hard lesson for me to learn, but once I did, it made it much easier to understand my responses to various situations during that stage. It also helped me to recognize my triggers during that phase before they’d occur so that I could deal with them immediately, instead of getting overtaken by them, like I did initially. As an example of a trigger, when I was in the midst of a bargaining grief cycle after one of my miscarriages and saw a movie or TV show where a woman delivered a healthy baby at term, I’d feel immediate anxiety and think thoughts like “she must have done (such-and-such) and I didn’t, which is why I didn’t get a baby” or “she must be a way better person than me, which is why she gets a baby and I don’t”. That would almost immediately lead me into the “Please let me have a baby and I’ll do (such-and-such)” or “Please let me have a baby and I’ll never do (such-and such) again.” Typically, those were tearful pleadings in prayer form to my God.

Looking back on this, it’s easy to see the faulty logic at play here. But when we’re in the midst of the storm known as our grief, things aren’t so clearly disseminated. Objective thinking isn’t easy, but it is possible once we learn to recognize our personal triggers in time to prevent a full-on panic attack.

It took time and practice, but eventually I learned to “red-flag” my triggers and developed an immediate fail-stop so I wouldn’t let that cycle continue. Think of a treadmill. It has that little red button and if we need an immediate stop to prevent us from getting badly hurt, we yank the chord to free the button and the treadmill immediately slows to a stop. The same can be applied to our lives. When we hit the danger zone, pull the chord and stop. And then, just sit there and breathe, in silence. That way you won’t get bombarded with the panicked anxiety that comes along with this grief stage. Instead, you will find yourself more able to handle what comes your way.

Carl Jung said, “Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.” Because with grief comes growth. With that growth will come growing pains, but they are necessary. Just like when you begin a new type of exercise and you experience being sore from your muscles as they stretch and tear a bit as they grow, so will you experience pain (albeit, of a very different type) as you grow within your grief path.

Because with my thoughts of you, whom I’ll never know…

Come these memories not made and no photos to show.

No, I can’t hold your hand but you can keep my heart.

And with each new morning, the healing can finally start.

All in all, bargaining isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It serves a crucial function towards healing because in order to be in this stage, it means you are now ready to admit that your loss has occurred. That it is real and that yes, it happened to you. It wasn’t just a bad dream or something that you saw in a movie or heard someone else talking about. That is an incredibly strong step forward from being in denial and from being angry. This is because once you are able to fully acknowledge something, you become better equipped to actually deal with it. Eventually you’ll face the realization that you can’t “fix” it yourself, so no amount or method of bargaining will work. Equipped with that insight, you’ll most likely find yourself encountering the next stage of your journey.

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Cheers until next time,

Crystal