What Makes Grief After Divorce So Hard?

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January 5, 2015

The surprising reason is happiness.

A divorce can feel like a tornado has come through and wiped from the face of the earth everything you thought your life was. You’re walking around in a state of shock trying to make sense of what has happened. And you’re just not finding much of anything to rebuild your life upon. The grief can simply be overwhelming.

Why is it like this? Why do divorces hurt so much?

As odd as it may sound, we experience such profound grief after divorce because of our search for happiness. The search for happiness is in our DNA. It’s one of our primal drives. We’ll find temporary highs of happiness through movies, TV shows, thrills, adventure vacations, and even songs. But none of these totally satisfy our drive. The real path to happiness is both much simpler and more complex than that.

Relationships — profoundly meaningful relationships — according to a 2012 AARP Survey, are a key enabler for happiness. Seligman, the author of Flourish, further states that positive relationships are not only key to happiness, but well-being in general. And yet different types of relationships provide us with different types of happiness. Obviously, this begs the questions: What are the most meaningful and…

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How To Deal With Loneliness Of Divorce

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January 6, 2014

Your divorce will probably be one of the most intense emotional experiences you’ll ever face. It sure was for me. I had all these powerful emotions hit me one after another, often in a confusing and frightening way.

Sound familiar?

The world of divorce can feel like a tornado has come through your life and wiped away all that was familiar and safe. I thought of it as being tied up, blind-folded and stuffed into the front seat of a runaway roller coaster. I never knew when I was going to be slammed to the left or right by a sharp turn and I dreaded any slow upward movement because I knew that at some point I would drop down into depths I couldn’t imagine or be thrown into a loop-de-loop or even be caught up in a corkscrew.

I’ll be honest with you. There were times back then when I thought I might be going insane.

What I’ve found out since my divorce in 2002 is that the emotions of divorce are intense and change rapidly for most people. These emotions often include denial, fear, hope, anger, loss, guilt, confusion, rejection and loneliness.

I think the loneliness was the hardest for me and that’s…

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What Are You Bringing to Your Divorce?

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March 23, 2014

Whatever you bring with you to your divorce will color your experience. Make sure you’re bringing what you want to have!

My husband and I are going through the process of selling our home and buying a new one. If you’ve ever gone through the sale and purchase of a home, you know how stressful this process can be.

We’d been talking about moving for a couple of years, but hadn’t done anything else about it because it was easier to just stay put and complain instead of being willing to do what we knew to be right for us and move.

Luckily, when we were making some minor remodels to our home, we mentioned to our contractor that we were thinking of moving. Well, this woman heard our deep desire for something different and challenged us to put up or shut up.

We rose to the challenge – mostly. We still had some bumps in the road to getting our house ready to put on the market and fully committing to the work necessary on our parts. But, we did get our work done.

And you know what happened? We had a full-price contract on our home within 48 hours of putting it on…

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Divorce Doesn’t Make You A Failure

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October 7, 2013

Divorce changes the trajectory of your life, but it doesn't have to define it.

Dictionary.com’s first definition of failure is “an act or instance of failing or proving unsuccessful; lack of success.” According to this definition, divorce is a failure – the failure of the marriage. Yet what I see in each of my clients (and what I experienced when I got divorced) is that going through divorce can make you feel like a failure, like you’re less than other people and have done something fundamentally wrong that you might even believe you deserve to be punished for. Granted, your divorce may be the result of poor decisions you made, but that’s different from believing that you are fundamentally bad because of the failure of your marriage.

Although believing that you are a failure because your marriage has failed is an almost universal experience, what I want you to know is that this is a flawed belief and points to a fundamental misperception that we are what happens to us along with what we do and have in our lives.

Like so many of my clients, in my first marriage, I let my marriage and all that happened as a result of it define…

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