Separated But Thriving - Coping With Separation

Separated But Thriving

By Rob Hadley

This information is provided to assist anyone going through separation or divorce. Feel free to reproduce it and use it where you choose, on condition that you include the credit “by Rob Hadley, www.VancouverHypnotherapy.Org”.

Part 2

Ooops . . . I think we just broke up.

At the moment of separation, a host of feelings sweep through you. These feelings can include panic, a terrible sense of loss, and a crushing urge to be able to turn the clock back just a few moments, to somehow change things. The realization that things have gone over a line from which there seems to be no pulling back is the single greatest feeling. Perhaps it is the moment you actually feel your heart break.

There are also sometimes feelings of relief. There can be feelings of invincibility and euphoria. For the person involved in an abusive physical relationship, there is a sense that the nightmare is over.

All these feelings seem tied to a moment. And for many people that moment can be pinned to the moving hands of a clock and they know exactly when it has happened. On later reflection, the moment your marriage ended may be slightly different.

Was it when the two of you sat down and faced up to some hard realities, or was it the day 3 months before that you began to feel attracted to someone else? Or perhaps a day a couple of years ago that you felt particularly distant and had reached out to your spouse—and found there was no response from him or her.

Or maybe it was a day several years ago when he or she came home smelling of drink and denied having been out. Your spouse was caught in an obvious lie.

Perhaps it was that moment shortly after you were married, when your spouse said something unnecessary and hurtful that you’d never experienced before, and you suddenly felt perhaps you’d made a terrible mistake.

One problem with human beings is their amazing ability to delude themselves. We can sometimes see a situation, instinctively know the outcome, yet deny it to ourselves for months or years before the inevitable happens. We’ll even say, “Gee, I never saw that coming . . .”

It’s as if we can somehow hold things together through our sheer willpower.

This quality can move mountains or somehow see us through times of terrible difficulty. What a magnificent ability.

It can also be a curse. Denying that we are, in fact, living a life that fails to fulfill us may be a way to cope, but is not particularly healthy. If we were to find ourselves on our deathbed following such a period and we were able to say, “Wow, we managed to delude ourselves into thinking our life was alright for years!” we would not have achieved a great deal.

And yet, we also don’t want to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. It’s disloyal and a course so filled with cowardice that no one could condone it. Marriages are not journeys with days filled with sunshine and never a cross word. Marriages have to be worked at and have their happy moments and their sad moments.

When the marriage comes to an end, however, there often seems to be a moment or an event that seems to be the instant of no return.

The reality of the situation is that the marriage very possibly began an inevitable turn for the worse years before. This is why the issue of guilt or blame is so often entirely misguided. To say “She lied to me; she went off with Mark this afternoon” and use that as the reason the marriage ended is quite meaningless.

The reason the marriage ended really depends on where you stand.

• Is a wife who goes off and has an affair any more guilty than the husband who neglected her and left her needing companionship?
• Does the husband who goes out each night to drink deserve to be blamed more than the wife who failed to see the obvious signs of depression and alcoholism over the years—and didn’t step in to help?

We can imagine nursing our spouse back to health after a terrible illness in which he or she is in a hospital bed and needs our support. Naturally, that’s what a partner-for-life does.

But can we imagine helping our spouse through something less dramatic and more insidious and possibly much more damaging, such as a gradual slide into depression and suicide?

Because it’s less obvious and lacks the dramatic quality of the “instant illness,” it’s harder to grapple with those less dramatic situations. There are very few black and white situations in marriage—or life in general. Blame has no place in the post-marriage landscape.

As we move out of a marriage, we are better advised to take with us the many happy moments and the memory of times that were filled with joy. This is not going to be easy—but it is necessary. The bad times we need to mentally place in a box and seal.

Eventually we’ll sling that box out and forget it. But for now, just close the lid on that box, and spend no more time pondering the sadness. It’s not something that will help you cope or understand or move ahead.

In the immediate moments after separation, it’s very difficult to imagine that quite possibly the person you may perceive as having caused all this pain is in pain, too. And if you can visualize this, there may still be an instinctive reaction to reach out to comfort him or her.

These feelings of wanting to comfort the other person can lead to further rejection and even more bitterness. Those initial moments of separation are the hardest to see through, but they will pass.

If there is something to focus on in these dark moments, it is this: Eventually you and your spouse will probably move into a more stabilize position, where each of you is in a position to make sound decisions. If not both of you, then one of you will. It’s up to you to see that happens as soon as you can.

When you reach a state of mind in which you can make decisions not clouded by anger, guilt, or resentment, you will have reached that stabilized position. At that point you can start putting your life, and that of your former spouse, back on track. It may be the most caring thing that has happened to the two of you in years.

How you manage separation is not just about “getting over it.” It’s about a person you presumably once loved, possibly it’s about your children, and it’s about yourself.

The most selfless act of love you can perform may be to allow the other person to get on with life. As hard as that may seem, that’s a challenge you are going to have to accept before you can find true freedom yourself.

Remember - it is not your job to educate your partner about what they did wrong. That's not important at this point. You now have one job and one job only. Moving forward.