(adapted from Practical Divorce Solutions by Ed Sherman)
Healing starts with a lot of very little changes in your daily habits. If you take charge of the little things, the big ones will soon fall in line. You must see it as a triumph when you learn to do for yourself the little things that you always depended on your spouse to do, or make decisions in areas where you always used to defer to your mate. Take pleasure in your new self-reliance when you learn to cook, take care of business, grow house plants, remember birthdays, mow the lawn, create an enjoyable living space, or keep the checkbook balanced. When you change your daily habits in the small ways, you are on your way up.
One of your great healing strengths is whatever it is that got you this far into the Divorce Helpline web site — your curiosity, your desire to know things, a desire to take control of your life. Think about your other strengths and advantages:
Gratitude.
Another major healing force — one of the most important — is gratitude. This is something you can work on intentionally. Focus on the things in your life that are right at least as much and as often as you dwell on problems. Several times each day, take the time to get quiet inside yourself and think about all the things that you have to be grateful for. Make a list. Try to develop a strong sense of gratitude for your life and its many blessings.
Self-reliance.
Getting divorced means that you will no longer let your mate’s moods and actions dominate your life. You are disentangling yourself from all the old patterns that didn’t work for you. You can’t control your spouse, but you can start to control your own actions. Learn not to react to your spouse’s bad conduct and not to push back when your own buttons get pushed. Take responsibility for your own feelings, for your own life.
Acceptance and forgiveness.
Possibly the most effective way to speed the healing process — the best way to achieve your own health and balance — is to completely accept your loss, feel your pain, and try to forgive your ex-mate and yourself. Guilt and blame are heavy burdens that can only hold you back and drag you down. Not forgiving keeps you stuck in a view of yourself as a victim. For your own sake, let it all go. Letting go is very different from repressing. You can’t heal properly if you deny, avoid or repress your feelings — to the contrary, you want to feel your pain and loss. If you accept your feelings, they will run a natural, healing course; then you can forgive, let go of the past and get on with your life.
Support.
Make an effort to seek out and use the help and comfort that is available from people in your life. You need the support of friends and family. If you can get it, use it. You can also get a lot of help from family services organizations, divorce support groups and single parent support groups. Make the effort to contact them; it may be very valuable and you have nothing to lose. For references, call your local social services or human resources agency or the local courthouse clerks. You can also get references to support groups in your area through a local church or temple. If one group isn’t what you want, try another. Then, there’s the professional support that you can get from working with a good counselor. Chapter 8 of Practical Divorce Solutions discusses how to choose a counselor.
In divorce, your emotional problems (looking backward) often disguise a great opportunity (looking forward). As Nietzsche said, taking a hard line, “That which does not kill us makes us strong.” Another way to look at it is that you can learn a lot about what is really important in life and what your goals really are. At the very least, you need to learn not to create the same old patterns, not to repeat the same mistakes.
