divorce: will you be marked or mauled?
“if a romantic relationship ends for any reason other than death, we assume that relationship to be a failure” -Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling
It’s probably the most difficult, soul searching and traumatic event in your life, deciding to separate and divorce. If you are the one doing the separating you may be filled with guilt and a sense of failure, and wondering how on earth you are going to get past this, if you have been “separated” you might just be reeling from the powerful sense of trauma and complete lack of control in your life. How do you “get over” this?
The truth is, you might not “get over it”.
What do I mean by this? Divorce is a life event, it’s like having a baby, or getting married or losing a loved one; these are life events that are in turn life defining, in the sense that they change you, grow you up a little bit (sometimes a lot) more. Getting past divorce may be as incongruous as “getting past” the birth of your first child or “getting over” the loss of your first parent-the experience of both in their separate ways can be crucibles for powerful change and maturation inside you-the depth of empathy you can have and the compassion now for somebody else going through divorce, born out of your own suffering, can in turn be deeply alleviating to them; you can in turn recognise in you another layer or level that didn’t seem to be present before all this. Divorce is painful, but pain wakes us up to unmet parts of us; it can be ensouling, or soul deepening.
Quite simply, divorce can, and probably will, leave its mark, and perhaps we shouldn’t expect it not to. We can change society’s perspective on divorce (e.g. a no-fault divorce, which appears to be in the pipeline) but changing the way we feel about what we’re going through is another thing entirely. You won’t “get over it” by magic, you will need help and a conscious effort will have to made to heal. Healing after divorce won’t happen accidently-or at least if it does, getting help will make you more “accident prone”.
So, divorce will mark you, as all difficult and often painful life events do. You’ve lost someone you once loved, or maybe still “love” but are not “in love” with. There is a grieving process to be done, much like you would experience it if a loved one had died. You might feel angry, sad or have a feeling of denying it’s all over-low mood might hit you like a sledgehammer. You are mourning the loss, the promise of a future. It’s over. You need to feel this, fully, in order for it to pass.
It can seem like a really good idea to suppress your feelings, but this seldom works, chances are it will just return-suppression is like pushing a ball underwater in a swimming pool, it takes a huge amount of energy to do this, and it returns back up with some force.
Anybody who “becomes” divorced i.e. didn’t ask for it (and I’m not sure anybody really does ask for it) might feel more angry- at an ex-partner, and at everything and everyone. You may distance or withdraw, isolate yourself in an attempt to self-protect. Your ex is someone you were once intimately attached to at a very deep and rooted level; give yourself time to adjust then adapt to that loss. Don’t push yourself to get over it quickly. And don’t compare yourself to your ex: does it seem that they are moving forwards? They might be smiling and having holidays aboard and living with a new lover and planning, but don’t confuse that possible skimming-over-the-surface-of-life with a true “moving on,” or what the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis calls a response to the “summons of the soul”.
The developmental task of heartbreak is to harness the huge amount of pain we are in, and to use it evolve beyond our old painful patterns in love, as well as to awaken us to the power we hold to recreate our lives” -Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling
So, you will get marked in the process of going through a divorce, but you don’t have to get mauled.
“we have never really evolved beyond primitive and destructive ways of separating, yet at a great cost to wellbeing and wholeheartedness-and in many incidences, severely handicapping ourselves, our children, and each other from successfully moving forward in life!” -Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling
For what feels like forever divorce has been pitched as necessarily vicious and adversarial. Once we were lovers, now we are enemies, so now we maul each other in the amphitheatre of legal separation.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can behave with dignity and grace. As a couple therapist it’s been my honour to help couples do just that: pursue a pathway through the emotional and psychological turmoil and confusion of divorce in a considered, remedial and more amicable manner. The pain and suffering involved in the breakup of a marriage cannot at times be overstated; it can be traumatic in a very real way, with feelings of broken concentration, panic, depression and gut-wrenching fear. But, there is life, and in time we are, perhaps, required to focus not just on pain but the life that’s here, the life that might carry us through and into a new future.
Couples often choose to meet in my consulting room every month and spend time doing just that. Couples have shared their losses with each other and been able to see the breakup of their marriage as a new beginning, they have used this therapeutic space and time to create meaning and healing, to end their story well rather than engage in pointless and bloody mauling. As well as mourning the loss of their marriage (which is not the same as the loss of the relationship) they have been able to celebrate 10, 20 or 30 years of success: building a home, raising a family and reviewing their continued involvement with each other other as parents of young children or grandchildren.
How we each negotiate the territory and struggle of losing one life and finding a new one (which really is the central tasks of divorce, grieving, learning, letting go and taking a second chance at life) will be particular to us all; divorce can mean freedom (an unwanted one for some) but with that freedom comes working through fear and loss, and there must be a willingness often to get help, take the necessary time and make deliberate steps to heal.
I wish you well in your divorce journey: may you end one story well and find meaning in your new one.
