I know how bad this hurts!

Let's face it, when someone says "I know what you're going through", chances are great that they don't really have any idea what you are going through. I won't say I know what YOU are going through, but I know what I went through when my own marriage went bust. I know how deep my own pain went, and how little consolation it was when my (married) friends tried to tell me they knew what I was going through.

So I will not minimize your own personal anguish, but the one thing that I will try to make you believe before our time on this section is complete is that you can get THROUGH this! I know that you may not be able to fathom the thought right now that there will be life after this divorce, and that you'll once again smile, laugh and perhaps even love someone again, but trust me, it is possible -- no, not just possible, but extremely probable! You're probably feeling a whole collection of things right now, pain humiliation, rejection and more, but there can be an end to those feelings. And I honestly believe that you are the one single person in the world who can truly affect how long you feel the bad things, or how soon you work past them to start feeling good again.

What I want to talk about here are some of the things that you can start to focus on, some concrete steps you can take to place yourself on the road to emotional recovery. As always, I'm gonna start with the straight talk. This is no time to beat around the bush.

First - You have to WANT to heal

If you ask anyone who is in pain if they want to stay in pain, they'll answer NO. But from my own personal experience, I'm convinced that sometimes our mind plays a little trick on us, a trick which actually serves to keep us mired in the trouble longer than we should be. I'll explain.

When you are in a good relationship, there's plenty of emotion to go around, good emotions, happiness, joy, etc., with the occasional negative emotion tossed on the pile for good measure. Let's face it, once in a while almost everyone finds a fight to be pretty stimulating emotionally. What I mean by that is that negative emotions can be just as strong and stimulating as positive emotions. So there we are, going along living on a diet of mostly positive emotions and then our marriage blows up. Now all the emotions are negative. We run the full range, we might scream, fight, cry or whatever. I believe humans have a deep need to feel some sort of emotions, and if we are in a situation of prolonged negative emotion, we can grow to need that constant supply of raw emotion just as we get used to the positive emotions when times are good.

I think it's important to understand that it's possible to get sort of fixated on the negative, and that it's up to us to make a conscious choice to get rid of the negative and replace it with positive. In other words, you have to want to be happy more than you want to continue being mad. I've met people who have been divorced for years, but for whom their spouse still makes up a large portion of their emotional life. They still maintain anger at their spouse, years after that person should really have been mostly removed from the day to day emotional equation of their life. It's like they never really released that person from being what I think of as an "emotional player" in their life, they've just switched the role for that person from being a constant source or positive emotions to that of being a constant source of negative emotions. But I think that real emotional health and well being comes only when a disassociated spouse doesn't play ANY emotional role in your life, or at least as minimal a role as possible.

My position is this. If a former spouse has chosen to leave the relationship, they should be marginalized as much as possible from your life. Your goal should be not to be mad at them at all, but simple to interact with them on the necessary things such as shared parenting and such, and anything beyond that, well, let's just say I don't think they deserve to be a part of your life anymore, emotional or otherwise. Let's look at this another way. If you lose your job, you shouldn't continue to visit the old workplace, going in and hanging out, compaining about how wrong it was that you got fired. You should go out and dump all your energies into getting a new job and putting the old failure behind you as completely as possible, right? Same goes for a divorced spouse. If you can truly make the choice to stop wasting any emotions on this person, you can truly leave them behind in your life and move on to someone else or to your own brand of happiness.

Second - You may have to look beyond your own world a bit

Think you've got it rough right now? You bet you do! Right? You're going through a living hell! You're crying yourself to sleep at night. Things are just about as bad as they could possibly be! -- Or maybe they're not!

You heard me! This isn't the end of the world. You're probably not going to die from your marriage going bust. Again, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but I want you to keep this in perspective. While things are tough right now, my guess is that if you seriously looked around, you would have no trouble at all finding someone who did truly have things worse than you. Again, don't misunderstand me, I am NOT trying to minimize what you are going through, I am only trying to force you to change your perspective on the situation so that you can begin to see it as less than the end of the world. You can get through this!

Over my life, I've had a couple of experiences that truly brought the old adage "Things could always be worse" home to me. Just before my own divorce, an acquaintance of mine died of a brain tumor. He was a wonderful guy, great sense of humor, sharp mind and I can still recall the last time I spoke with him. He knew his days were numbered, he was going home to spend his last days with family, and I remember how there was NO self-pity in him at all as he faced the prospect of his own death. So when I felt myself starting to wallow in self-pity, I forced myself to ponder his fate, to compare my own experience against his and I would be forced to understand that indeed, things could really be worse.

So if you take nothing else away from what I'm saying here, take those five simple words. Things could really be worse. This isn't the worse possible thing that could happen to you, and so you should be making every effort to keep this time of your life in perspective. Once you can see it as something that perhaps can be manageable emotionally, you're already on your way to getting the healing started and moving past this terrible time in your life.

Now at this point, I'll once again make an appeal for you to visit our forum and talk back. I truly think we all have something to offer as we help each other get our lives back on track, and our forum is the place for you to have your say.