Ask Lemmy

You hurt because you care. You care because you hurt.

You care about your cat, about your partner, and about your relationship. This is important to recognize. It's important to give this its proper space, not minimizing it but also not making it define your life.

What I mean is that sometimes, our brain tells us things that are helpful and sometimes it tells us things that are unhelpful. Sometimes, our brain becomes a dictator. This dictator avoids pain at all costs. It looks at pain as something that needs to be solved.

Here's the thing: emotional pain cannot be solved in the same way that physical pain can sometimes be solved. We can fix broken bones. We can heal skin wounds. But we cannot magically solve emotional pain. Why? Because we hurt where we care.

Here's a way to look at emotional pain: would you want to be the kind of person that doesn't feel pain when their loved ones die? I bet you wouldn't. And that is human. It is a way of looking at emotional pain with dignity.

Here's another way of giving some dignity to the pain of losing someone: humans hurt when loved ones leave because we have a yearning to belong. This is not even a cultural thing or otherwise a learned thing. It is pre-verbal. Grab a baby and look at its eyes, and its brain will be flooded with endorphins. We are wired for connection. Most mammals are too. And some mammals have specifically evolved to live with us. An example of this is your cat: it comes from a lineage that has learned to live with people.

So what can we do about this emotional pain? For one, being open to it and being aware of it. It is a part of your life and it is worth holding with dignity. You can look at this pain as if you were holding a delicate flower. What's its shape? What's its color? Its texture? Its inner consistency? Its power? This exercise helps with coming to terms with tough experiences. It helps us accept problems that can't be solved.

You can also choose to actively engage with your life in a way that you find meaningful. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to stand for? How would you like to approach life? This puts you in the driver's seat. And you will feel your emotions pulling you aside. They will tell you that you have to stop driving, that you have to solve problems that can't be solved. Your dictator will not like the pain. And yet you can listen to your dictator talk in the copilot seat and choose to drive.

This is what grief sometimes looks like: emotions that come and sometimes overwhelm you. What I'm suggesting is that you can be open to them, be aware of them, and choose how you want to engage with life.

If you do this, your partner will notice. There are wild studies that show that psychologically flexible people are able to make others around them more psychologically flexible. It's been measured in the context of traumatic experiences like pediatric surgery and natural disasters: parents who are psychologically flexible are a safety net for their children, and those kids are less likely to be traumatized and more likely to be psychologically flexible later in life.

What I'm saying is that you can model psychological flexibility and that will probably have an impact.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you're interested in where my thinking comes from and I can point to some resources.

I'm sorry for the tough situation you're in. Best of luck.