The death of someone loved often leaves us feeling indebted to that person ; a sensation that, on the other hand, far from being pathological, is in many cases a proof of our good mental functioning. However, there are times when these supposed emotional debts become a real burden, which does not let us overcome the duel, much less move forward.
People are able to experience the feeling that we have emotional debts, both with living people and with people who are no longer there. The complicated thing is that paying off our debts with those who no longer live is, at least, complicated. Before, we could feel in debt, but there was an after . Not now.
The emotional debts with which they are no longer can torment us a lot, without any basis for it. Human relationships are essentially imperfect and there will always be something missing or about them . There is no situation in which there is no loose end. Therefore, we should not feed those imaginary debts.
Accept the imperfection of life
The death surprised us all with problems to overcome, goals to accomplish and experience without living . It arrives when it arrives and only on a few occasions there is the possibility of saying goodbye by closing all pending issues.
The same goes for those who survive that person who is no longer there. Death can generate guilt because we are alive and that person we love is no longer . It is an advantage that sometimes we fail to assimilate and this fault often takes the form of a long inventory of emotional debts.
We think we stop saying or doing something we would have liked to say or do with that person. However, we rarely get enough distance in those moments to see things with perspective.
On the other hand, it is likely that this person also left with situations that he wanted to solve, put a different end or continuation.
Emotional debts vs. Personal contributions
One of the keys to overcoming the duel for the death of someone is to focus more on the positive that is in the lived. We tend to look spontaneously at everything that that person provided us and that we will never receive again . We also tend to think about all its virtues and good deeds.
Unfortunately, we don’t always do that with ourselves. And if we do, many times we end up feeling that we had more emotional debts than we had written down. This is a bias that appears because that supposed selfishness seems inappropriate.
In spite of everything, if we take things with a little more peace of mind, we are likely to realize that we probably did that person well too . With whom we love, if we didn’t give more, it was often because we didn’t have more to give.
None of us is an ideal person, nor was he who left. It is better to remember the positive part and part.
Suffering and projection to the future
Many times we also feed and emphasize the supposed emotional debts with those who have already left, because deep down we think that suffering is a demonstration of love . We somehow build the idea that now our love must be expressed as suffering; otherwise it would be a sign of heartbreak.
That is another fallacy. It is obvious that we feel sorry for the inability to see or share with that person who is gone. However, this does not mean that suffering is the only thing we should experience. Love occurs in life and it never dies, and the truth is that it does not need such expressions to prove that it is authentic .
For this reason, it is worth doing the exercise of imagining what that loved one would want for us. Would you be satisfied to see us overwhelmed by pain and no possibility of experiencing another feeling? Would you be pleased or pleased to see that we have a hard time moving forward without your presence? Probably not.
Sometimes it helps to apologize for what we did or stopped doing . A symbolic forgiveness through a letter or some personal ritual. If we nurture the idea that we have emotional debts that must be settled, we will not only hinder the grieving process, but we will also not do something useful.