wounds of divorce 1
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais Nin (attrib to)
After thirty years of marriage and at the age of fifty-two Barbara and Tony split up. Tony confessed to Barbara an eighteen-month affair, whereupon Barbara asked him to leave the marital home. She fell into a state of devastation at the end of her marriage, mediated more than slightly by a secret she had been keeping, that ten years ago she had her own affair with a works colleague.
She pulled off her wedding ring, conflicted and confused by the many contradictory thoughts and feelings that crowded her mind. She stared numbingly at the groove left by the ring. A thirty-year-old groove that, three years later and long after the divorce, wouldn’t go away.
The process-if we can call it that-of separation and divorce, is most often experienced at the level of what couple therapists are now recognising as relational trauma, and it leaves its mark. Etched into the psyche, often forever, are the scars of betrayal, of hurt and anger, breakdown, guilt and fury, these deep ruptures that are experienced as partners and parents struggle to process what happened and what went wrong; these wounds change us, and often don’t completely go away.
We need to dispel some of the myths of divorce. Firstly, we need to recognise that we often do it in ways that the wound of divorce we create we then in turn tip a barrel load of salt into, again and again. We need to approach divorce and its trauma as just that, and secondly process it as trauma.
Divorce is a smelting process that almost consumes us in its fire. If we get help-a good divorce lawyer and a good couple therapist-we can rise out of the fire; we will get burned; yet our pain and wounds can create within us the ability to grow, to mature, evolve, wake up and create a new life.
