How I Learned to Cope with Divorce

Divorce is never easy, and even when the marriage was bad and you wanted it to end, you may still grieve over the loss. I am living proof that the pain of divorce does heal and the grief does process fade with time. Coping with divorce is a challenge, and in the beginning you may only be thinking in terms of surviving every minute of each day without crumbling, but it does get better.

Coping with divorce is doubly hard if you are the one that didn't want it, or you didn't see it coming. Maybe you wanted to work on your marriage and your estranged partner didn't. The time invested can make a difference on the intensity of the grief you feel. Someone married for 30 years may experience more problems coping than someone married for a year or two. No matter though, divorce is still difficult for everyone involved. The problem with many long term marriages, one or both partners of that union may have built his/her identity around being Mr. or Mrs. "Smith", and they don't know who they are apart from the marriage. My former husband, even though he initiated our divorce, felt lost without marriage. He married 3 more times after our divorce and is divorced again. I though, have remained single. I learned to be comfortable alone.

As a newly divorced person, though, I felt abandoned. I felt like I was thrown away just like an old shoe. My feelings of abandonment threw me into a deep depression. Being married to my husband was my identity on so many levels. I felt there had to be something wrong with me, because if my husband didn't want me, then no one could ever want me either. In a very real way, my grief felt a death. In a way, divorce is a kind of death, because it is an end, but it can also be a new beginning.