Do you feel…
- Constant nagging questions about what went wrong…
- Fear about the future…
- You were forced into this, you didn’t want a divorce…
- Like a failure..
- It’s about time, I’ve hated him/her for years…
- Diminished feeling of self-worth…
- Hate for your ex…
- You want to get back at them…
- Ashamed…
- Injury to the ego…
- Like you don’t know where to turn for support…
- HURT!
It’s OK to hurt!
Have you ever felt like your stomach was going to implode from hunger? If you have never experienced this, you might want to check your pulse. Most of the time, when you experience these things, your body is telling you something. The stomachache is a fairly natural way of your body saying you need to eat. When you feel that hunger in your stomach, what do you do? You eat.
After your recent divorce, how do you feel? Are you angry? Do you feel sad? Do you feel hurt? Is it difficult to pinpoint exactly what you’re feeling? Join the crowd. Divorce results in a melting pot of various types of pain afflicted on our bodies, minds and spirits. How do you answer this pain though? According to Dr. Bruce Fisher, “pain is nature’s way of telling us that something in us needs to be healed,” so why shouldn’t we heal the pain that divorce causes?
So you’ve had a divorce. In your community, do you feel like theodd person out? Do you feel like you’re the only divorced person with a failed marriage under your belt? You’re not.
Getting divorced isn’t easy, especially when you feel completely isolated from married friends who don’t understand, your children who are acting out, and your parents who you feel think that you’ve failed. Whether you’ve been married to a person for 20 years or 2 years, divorce can have the same detrimental effect on your ego, happiness, body, spirit, work, and relationships. Once we accept how hurtful divorce can be on nearly every aspect of our lives, then we can move forward and learn to how to rebuild, starting at the foundation. “Rebuilding means climbing that mountain, and for most of us it’s a difficult journey. (Dr. Bruce Fisher)”
The first 2 of the 19 specific feelings and attitudes in the Rebuilding Mountain are:
1. Denial: “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”
- Pain that is too great is put into our “denial bag” and held until we are strong enough to experience and learn from it.
- Some of us experience so much denial that we are reluctant to attempt recovery to climb the mountain.
- “If I took the divorce seminar, it would mean that my marriage is over, and I don’t want to accept that yet.”
2. Fear: I have lots of it!
- Have you ever not told someone how you really felt?
- Have you been hesitant to express what you really want or need?
- These are all expressions of fear, whether they seem obvious or not.
- We hesitate to express what we need or want because we are afraid of the outcome.
- How do you handle your fears? What do you do when you discover your fears have paralyzed you?
- Each fear you overcome gives you strength and courage to continue your journey through life.