Endings Can Be Unbearable to Renewing

For most people, moving on after a central part of their lives ends may be sad, but it isn’t usually devastating. The end of a relationship, a job, or a home can be challenging; you don’t know what’s next or how your life will reconfigure. Some people, however, particularly those who’ve suffered difficult early losses, may fear that their lives won’t reconfigure. For them, endings of any sort can seem ominous. I know. I have that person. Ending a seven-year live-in love relationship in my thirties left me with the confusing combination of relief, as if landing on the far shore of a river I wasn’t sure I could swim across, and dread that I’d landed in a place so foreign I’d be lost forever.

It took me a year, but I did recover from that breakup and settled into a happier ongoing romance. But it was harder still to recover from an ending I didn’t want, like the one I faced after being “terminated” from my first big teaching job. The morning after I’d gathered a couple of thousand people to hear Gloria Steinem, whose feminism the college administration spurned at that time, I was told I was too political and given the boot. Many years later, it’s still so painful; I wonder if I’ve ever fully recovered.

Even Minor Endings Can Feel Overwhelming

Okay, these two endings would count as big events in anyone’s life, but for those of us who have this sensitivity, far less significant endings can also feel shattering. I used to start my day with a morning run until I injured my foot so badly that I could only hobble a block or two at most. For a person in constant motion, immobility was agonizing. Disorienting. Yet even I was aware my reaction was disproportionately strong. When I complained to my therapist about my sport going kaput, she said, as if talking to a second grader, “You’ll find another.” After months of failed treatments, when I found myself contemplating suicide, I took up meditation. It gave me a whole new outlook. Now I could see how endings left space to cultivate another part of myself, which I did again after the right surgeon resolved my foot problem. Since running was still out, I started wandering up trails near where I lived instead. Eventually, wandering became hiking, a passion more rewarding to me than running ever was, a deep engagement with mountains and myself.

The very insignificance of this ending is what, on reflection, alerted me to the drama of my responses to the endings of things. I could track how my extreme and negative reaction morphed into a positive, even transformative one. How when endings trigger you as this one did me, slicing through your heart or burrowing into your core, they can leave you so raw and disturbed that you’re forced to find your way forward using deeper, more intuitive parts of yourselves. That’s surely what brought me to meditation and later, to hiking, both of which I still do, with dedication. And while that’s a good thing, it also raised the question: if endings are the portal to reinvention, inspiring resilience and flexibility, what makes them so hard for some of us to tolerate?

This is where psychoanalytic thinking comes into play, especially for people who’ve had those difficult early losses. Losses are pretty common in childhood. We have only to think of when parents divorce, a grandparent dies, or a child has to move away from their familiar home and friends. It doesn’t have to be a tragedy. If parents handle loss well, comforting their children, making them feel secure, and acknowledging their feelings, all’s generally well. If not, however, it’s worth knowing what you can about that childhood experience, even if you have to talk with your siblings or interview a couple of relatives to get the details. Knowing what happened then can make you aware of why a particular ending feels manageable, and another unmoors you.

The Role of Early Loss

I think it's easy to understand how, when facing an ending, the parents themselves might be inconsolable, too destabilized to offer their children a strong enough sense of security. Then, left on their own to deal with that ending before they’re equipped to handle it, children can feel that life as they know it is falling apart, or even that they are falling apart. These primitive fears might reemerge in adult life when an ending has stirred memories of earlier, often unconscious ones. They can shadow life’s inevitable closures. Luckily, awareness can calm them. Just knowing why you’re reacting can bring perspective and a sense of control to a chaotic time. It can signal the need for extra support, like meditation, therapy, or a visit with a beloved aunt. It can calm those primitive fears, allowing you to experience the ending for what it is, not what it was in childhood.

Putting whatever ending has arisen in the larger context of your life, beginning with any similar ending you may have had to face in childhood, can reveal how much past emotion you’re bringing to a current situation. It may illustrate how time moves us forward into the next iteration of ourselves, collecting new people, places, and projects even as it leaves others behind. It may eventually prove a good thing, an enriching one, not the corrosive disruption it was so long ago.