How to deal with the emotions of divorce

If you were the one who was left:

The galore of emotions that are associated with the event of being left are difficult to put in order and deal with, that goes without saying. Disbelief, hurt, shame, fear, betrayal, nostalgia, loss, love, misunderstanding, understanding, respect, disrespect, anger, frustration… All of these and more emotions are trying to one-up each other trying to get the top spot in your mind. You are likely to feel hurt for being left, shame for having trusted and loved the wrong person, shame of not being able to let go, and knowing you should, shame for feeling angry when in fact you know you should just be grown up about it and move on, at the same time you feel nostalgia about the past and loss of the good times you were supposed to have yet, and anger and shame of yourself for feeling that way; you “should be” able to shut off your feelings for a person who treated you this badly and who possibly never really loved you in the first place. The shame of even believing you were loved by them can be overwhelming; How could I have thought so highly of myself that they would love me, and then, who do they think they are not loving me properly, or thinking that I’d be the kind of person they can just marry even though they don’t love you!

The first thing on the to do list for you is to forgive yourself for being so naive, for trying to love someone who didn’t love you as much as you thought, for the shame that you caused to yourself (and your family) for believing yourself to have been loved, and all the mess that happened. You didn’t need to foresee it. People walk into this mess all the time, people who should know better make the same mistake, and you’re just one of the many. Then, you must realize that you weren’t a fool – you were to your ex-spouse someone who was too good to pass off on, even if they knew they weren’t completely in love, in all that they could pin point, you were someone that they couldn’t afford to lose at the time. It took a lot of courage and honesty of them to realize that they weren’t genuinely in love not because you weren’t good enough, but because you were not the right one for them. Not the right one, but too good to pass off on.

If you were cheated on, please be brave and look at the cause behind the cheating: Did they simply fall in love and there was nothing they could do about it or did they want to deliberately hurt you by cheating on you? If it was the first, this had nothing to do with you and it was simply terrible timing… At the time that it happened, they probably pushed you out of their minds as if your marriage wouldn’t even touch their relationship, it would be as if a time sift; this relationship really happened before your marriage or after it, not during it, it was just an unfortunate coincidence it had to happen when your spouse was married to you. If they wanted to deliberately hurt you – at least you mattered! You weren’t a bystander, you were a part of their relationship! There must have been something you managed to stir up in them, and that means you hurt them before they decided to hurt you… What did you do?

Give yourself the permission to keep loving this person, or to not love them, whatever you had together will always be Your Time Together, no matter what it was, and it will always remain that way. It had good days and bad days, it was beautiful and it was ugly, but it was time that you shared. Hopefully there were more good days than bad days, so you can keep that nostalgia alive, without having to cling to it. If you move on from this as friends, at least you made a good friend out of a marriage, and that really isn’t a bad achievement!

Sometimes it helps to take a step back and look at your life from a 3rd person perspective. Imagine your life as a movie, and see if you can see it more clearly. All you need to do is to understand what happened, and the first step to doing so is to forgive yourself for having let this happen in the first place.

What if you deserved it?

If you know you royally fucked up your marriage and divorce was only what was coming to you, it could take years of your life just beating yourself up about it. That won’t work out for you too well however, all you feel is stupid and no good, and why would you want to pose a problem such as yourself onto someone else? That’s not what needs to happen at once, of course, just the fact you know you fucked up is enough to make you a better person, you see, not everyone realizes that much:

There are people who would never admit to having done anything to deserve the divorce papers, even if they cheated on their spouse every day of the week, gambled away all their money and drugged themselves to oblivion with prostitutes every second weekend and called their own daughter a whore and their son a bastard and beat them up to make a lasting impression. A person like this would still be surprised that their wife served them the divorce papers!

If the only sin on your list is being naive, stupid and inconsiderate of your spouse’s feelings, then hell, shit happens. We all have our learning curve. Maybe your spouse had to learn not to be a door mat, or maybe they needed to loosen up a little and you were the perfect teacher. Maybe you needed to learn that what you do matters to people even though you thought nobody would give two s***s about what you do in your spare time. Maybe you had to learn that you need to listen what you have been told point blank, and stop hearing what you want to hear instead of what you’ve been told. Maybe you  had to know that you can’t decide for another person how to run their lives, no matter how well-meaning you were doing it.

If you asked for a divorce:

It depends a lot on how you feel right now on how your ex is feeling right now and for what reason. Are they angry, sad, hurt or brave about it, it will make a massive difference in how you are feeling about what happened.

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