Why wanting to go back keeps you stuck in pain “If divorce is so hard, maybe I should have just stayed married”. So many people who initiate their divorces ask this question when they are a year or more down the road. I know this feeling well. I knew that my marriage was no longer sustainable. I knew that staying was going to be painful. And yet, once I was divorced and the pain truly hit me, I couldn’t help but wonder if I should have just stayed and taken that misery over

Shouldn't divorce get easier as time passes? It feels as though the third year after divorce should be easier than the first two, right? You’ve got time behind you. You’ve gotten used to the new routines. You’re supposed to be “moving on”. You’ve survived the initial upheaval and, on the surface at least, life is beginning to feel more normal. And yet, if all of that was true, there wouldn’t be that strange freefall feeling that can happen when you reach the two year mark. I

When the life you lost is still right in front of you It’s hard to pinpoint what makes divorce so damn hard to recover from. It’s loss, yes. It’s grief, yes. But it is a type of loss and grief that doesn’t seem to have a clear ending. Not that grief after losing someone we love has a neat ending either. It doesn’t. But there are often moments, rituals and markers that help us make sense of what has happened. There is a funeral. There are people gathered around you. The

The coping strategies that helped me survive divorce were not the ones that helped me heal. Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash Divorce didn’t just break my heart. It exposed the ways I’d learned to survive when life fell apart. Not straight away. In the beginning I was just getting through the days, doing what I needed to do to survive the shock of it all. But over time, when things quietened down a little, I started to see myself more clearly. The patterns underneath. The

Seeing my part was the beginning of building relationships that could actually last. Photo by Lenin Estrada on Unsplash My biggest struggle after my divorce was loneliness. Not the kind most people imagine. It wasn’t just missing company, wishing I had someone to hug, or noticing that it had been a while since I’d seen friends. It was something harder to describe. It felt like something was constantly missing. A quiet, persistent emptiness that followed me around. I tri

And How Facing It Changed Everything For The Better For a long time after my marriage ended, I felt like I was going nowhere. I was functioning, co-parenting, dating and working. Doing all the things you’re supposed to do. But inside, I felt stuck. The grief didn’t seem to move. The anger and regret kept circling back, even many years later. At the time, I didn’t realise I was protecting myself. After a marriage ends, most of us fall more into one of two places. Either we’re