When it comes to accepting the fact that you or your loved has a mental illness or when it comes to the fact that you have to accept that things may not go the way you want them to go. Then in many cases you experience a death. Not a natural death but an emotional death.  It’s a period in which our thoughts our ideas or what we want dies. It is where our expectations give way to reality. Initially it may be a sad experience and just like any deaths there is a grieving process. A time where we grieve what could have been and what we have lost. But after the death or the grieving process we can move into acceptance. A period where we can build something new out of the old or in spite of the old. (igbattmho.org)