All good things eventually come to an end. It is all a part of the cycles of life. Sometimes, it is like a thousand points of colored lights in the sky exploding from rockets that shoot quickly into the night and then are no more.
Other times, it is as a long process as a majestic tree growing from a single seed. But it cannot go on indefinitely. When the end is near, we may not even realize that it is coming. When the point of no return to the final termination strikes, we will probably miss it. But it will come.
Sooner or later, we will realize that the world is changing. While there is nothing that we can do to stop this change, most of us—almost all of us —are unwilling or unable to face it head on. So we go through five stages to deal with the loss.
We have been told that the first stage is denial. While we can see that things are different than they were a day, a week, a month ago, we make excuses and deny what is unfolding before our eyes. Denial is a lie to ourselves, but it is also a defense mechanism. But this denial keeps us from taking any positive action. We sit and watch and wait, hoping that what we are seeing is not true.
But it is true, and next we move into anger. “How could this be happening?” “It’s not fair!” we might think. “I deserve just as much, if not more than other people.” Anger, though, can lead to action. A person may think that by doing something, anything, the loss will simply go away. We know that will not happen, but we feel the need to channel our anger into action.
When anger does not change anything, we begin bargaining. Our brains start working overtime. If I do this, then maybe I can offset that. We cry out to whatever makes sense to reverse the loss in our lives. “If this changes, I promise I will never do this again.” We might even realize that we are bargaining from a position of complete weakness, but that does not stop us.
We then enter the most difficult emotional phase—depression. Being depressed is horrible. All of the actions we have taken have failed. The situation is not better. We are helpless and hopeless, and there is no worse place to be. We are hurting, and the pain does not go away.
From depression, there is no other path to take and no place to go other than acceptance of what has happened and where we are now. This is the point at which we accept our fate.
There may not be any more shattering experience in life than seeing a stock that you own go from P8 to P15 to P7 or, another actual example, from P10 to P27 to P2.
However, unlike in mortal life, stocks do not die suddenly or otherwise. The price just fades away before our eyes. But as the price is going down, we treat it as if it were a loved one who has passed on, going through the five stages of grief as we lose more and more money. You have heard the wisdom, “Don’t marry your stocks.” There is a reason for that.
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E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunonmarkets.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by the COL Financial Group Inc.