What happens to the psyche when we lose a person, a relationship or a sense of meaning? How do we experience separation and death, and how, afterwards, do we gradually restore our capacity to connect, to trust and to love?
Dr Margarita Tareyn from the team of the Institute of Medical Psychology, Psycho-Oncology and Psychosomatics appeared on the podcast „Преобръщане“ in a conversation devoted to loss and to the complex psychic process through which a person attempts to organise their life after it.
The death of a close person and separation are different experiences, but both can confront the psyche with the need to part not only with a specific person, but also with the relationship to them, the shared future, the representations, the expectations and part of the way in which the person has experienced themselves.
The conversation raises the question of why some losses remain so deeply within us and why “overcoming” is not always the most accurate word for the process of grieving. The lost person or relationship is not simply erased from psychic life. The challenge is for what has been experienced to gradually find a new place within it, so that life can go on.
In the interview, Dr Tareyn also speaks about the experience of abandonment, about loneliness within and outside partnership, and about the difficulty of building stable relationships.
The connection between early experience and relationships in adult life is also examined – how what was experienced in childhood may play a part in the way we seek closeness, react to distance, experience separation, or unconsciously return to familiar patterns of relating.
A particularly important question is what happens after the loss. How does a person allow another close to them again? How is trust restored after a painful separation? And can a new relationship be not simply an attempt to fill the empty place, but truly a new relationship?
The conversation with Dr Tareyn offers a different perspective on the popular notion that after a loss a person should “move on” as quickly as possible.
Grief has its own time. Pain is not necessarily evidence of an inability to cope – it is also connected with the significance that the lost person or relationship held for us.
Psychotherapy can create a space in which these experiences may be thought about and gradually integrated – without the pressure for the person to forget, to be freed of their feelings, or to prematurely close an important part of their history.
A new beginning does not require us to erase what we have lost. It implies finding a way to live with what has been experienced, without it taking away our ability to connect, to desire and to love once again.