Emotional Divorce Recovery
Recovering from the struggle to get out of an expired marriage takes places on several different levels. There is the financial recovery where both individuals work out an agreement, usually involving lawyers or mediators. Then there is the recovery that involves reshaping the relationships the divorcing individuals will have with children, relatives, and mutual friends after the divorce. And of course, there is the recovery that involves separating the living spaces both individuals will call home after divorcing. Last, but certainly not lease, and too often forgotten or minimized, is the emotional recovery from divorce.
At first glance, the emotional recovery from divorce is assumed to simply involve recovering the ability to be happy again after the divorce struggle is over. Thinking of oneself as a now liberated single person again is usually the way most people approach this level of emotional divorce recovery. Time is often the primary element. Getting used to living out from under a marriage that proved to be toxic to a couple, or at least one person in the marriage, takes time. For too many individuals, this is the extent of their emotional divorce recovery.
What too often gets overlooked is the high probability of recreating the same toxic love relationship again at some point in the future. The rest of this article will describe how divorced individuals can ensure a recovery on this deeper level of their emotional lives. Let’s start by acknowledging that divorce is one of the greatest learning experiences possible in a person’s life. If you take the time to figure out what you’ll need to change to have a more successful love life going forward, you’ll have learned the lesson your divorce can teach you. If not, repetition is likely.
Let’s assume that you’ve unconsciously learned something about love relationships that inevitably leads to forming an unhealthy love relationship. You don’t know what you’ve learned about love relationships, and what you end up thinking, doing, and feeling in your love relationships seems right and familiar. The problem is, what you’ve learned is unconsciously learned. You don’t know what you’ve learned and you don’t even know that learning has taken place. So the first thing to do is to make conscious what you’ve learned about love relationships. Getting access to this information requires that you first accept the possibility that you’ve learned something unhealthy. From there you can change what you’ve learned to increase the probability of forming and sustaining a healthy love relationship.
We human beings, when injured by love gone bad, usually get defensive to cope with the possibility of hurting ourselves again in the same way in the future. Defenses like not admitting to ourselves that there is something to learn and change in our love lives, or keeping an emotional distance in future relationships, or generating conflict as a way to avoid being vulnerable in a love relationship. We might even try to change the person we fall in love with to avoid the hurts that have occurred in the past (divorce). Then of course, there is avoidance of love relationships altogether to manage the possibility of hurt. When it comes to figuring out what we’ve learned about love relationships that contributed to a divorce, these love life defenses get in the way of finding out what has been unconsciously learned about love relationships.
Let’s assume you’ve come to terms with the fact there is something to learn from your divorce and you’ve put your love life defenses to the side to work on your love life. Now there is a good possibility that something you’ve learned about love relationships is replicating an unhealthy relationship experience from your past in your adult love life. Experiences that we have observed or directly experienced from the beginning of life such as: abandonment, abuse, control, dependency, dishonesty, dominance, exploitation, intrusion, mistrust, neglect, rejection, self-centeredness. These are the unhealthy relationship experiences that have given my patients over the years the greatest amount of heartache. Once identified, you’ll be better able to challenge and correct their unhealthy effects on your love life with much better results.
Comments? Tell me about your love life experience.
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Need help fixing your disappointing love life? Confidential Love Life Consultations available by phone, inquire at drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com or 212-875-0154.