单项选择题
| There is one kind of pain for which nobody has yet
found a cure--the pain that comes from the ending of a relationship. The
relationship could be a marriage or a deep friendship. Such a relationship may
come to a sudden end; or it may simply fade away slowly as people and
circumstances change. You may be the one to "break it off’, with a short note or
a brief phone call. Or you may be on the receiving end. However it ended and
whoever decided to end it, the pain is equally hard to bear and it requires the
same time for grief. Although there is no cure for grief, we can not help
looking for one, to ease the pain and to make us forget our tears. We keep
ourselves busy with work, or we try to plunge ourselves into our hobbies.
Perhaps we start to drink more than we should to "drown our sorrows", or we
follow the conventional advice and join a club or society. But these things
cannot cure it. Moreover, we are always in a hurry to get rid of our grief. We
feel that we should try to convince ourselves, as we bite on the pillow, that we
are much too old to be crying. Some people bury their grief deep inside
themselves. Others seek relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or
to anyone else who can offer a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. It is not easy to
explain why we adopt these attitudes to emotional pain. Part of the answer must
lie in the nature of grief itself. The important thing to admit about grief,
then, is that it will take its time. By trying to convince ourselves that it
ought to be over sooner, we create an additional tension which can only make
things worse. How much time is needed will vary from person to person, but psychiatrists have a rule of thumb: grief will last as long as the original relationship lasted. The sad thing is that, when the breakdown occurs, we can only stumble forward over the stones beneath our feet. It is dark ahead, and we will fall painfully many times before we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. |