How to get over divorce: 10 steps to get out of this difficult time

Unhappy endings, like divorce, can be outrageously quite difficult to overcome.

Unfortunately, sometimes going through some momentous loss is inescapable, and we must learn to overcome it if we want to move forward emotionally.

Divorcing from a person you loved, or who you continue to love more with whom you can no longer be with for whatever reason, is very often devastating.

It can feel like being lost in limbo. As if everything they built together suddenly only disintegrated with the wind and, sometimes, that wrong attempt has taken some of the best years of our lives.

Divorcing yourself can mean losing your best friend. It can leave you confused and desperate about the present, the past, and the future. It can cause severe feelings of loneliness, depression, and self-pity.

But, what is worse, is that divorce can lead you to act in very few affirmative ways that can be destructive or irrational. If you let the pain of your divorce start to run your life, you can end up losing your job, your friends, and even your respect for yourself.

To avoid all those dire scenarios, it is essential that you remember from the beginning that divorce is not a death sentence.

Your life does not end even if at that moment you can feel this way, and clearly, you have not lost everything; you still have the most important thing: yourself.

You are simply in a period of transition, as difficult and scary as it may seem, and there will come a time when this stage will be a part of your past.

How long will it take? It is different for each person, but it depends a lot on how prepared you are to face your negative feelings in an affirmative way.

For quite a few people, divorce doesn’t just mean losing someone they love. It also means losing your routine, your way of life, and even your social status.

In certain cases, it is these last factors that have the most weight to provoke negative emotions.

For example, if you and your ex had a lot of shared possessions, like a house, cars, and checking accounts, the process of dividing resources can be not only depressing but also exaggeratedly exhausting.

When there are children in the middle, the situation becomes more difficult, since generally one of the parents must leave the home and get used to seeing them much less frequently.

In short, divorce in general completely changes the landscape of people’s lives. It is never a pleasant situation and truly absolutely no one expects to have to go from there.

But not everything is ant-colored. As unpleasant as it may be, in the end, one can decide that their divorce is an occasion to thrive as a human, becoming more independent and learning from the failures of the past.

We must remember that endings are also new beginnings and that it is perfectly natural that a large part of our being wants to hold on to the way things were before.

But this feeling must be transitory, while the need to rebuild and explore the possibilities of life again, must be the one that ends up succeeding.

That’s the essence of getting through a divorce: stop regretting the past, and start being moved by the future.

It sounds considerably simpler said than done, but here are ten steps that specialists estimate can greatly assist people in getting over a separation.

1. Get rid of your ex’s daily reminders

Have you ever wondered what the sensible meaning of wakes is? Really, absolutely nobody, nobody has a good time at a wake; all the opposite, they are spaces only dedicated to mourning and pain.

So why do we keep doing them the moment a person dies? Since by fact that, however painful they are, they help us to establish a symbolic inflection point when we face death, to admit that the person has already left, and to overcome the state of denial.

For divorces and separations we do not have similar rituals, but the closest equivalent is to get rid of each and every one of the things that remind us of our ex-partner.

With all the discomfort and tears that this causes you, you must remove each and every one of the photographs, messages, reminders, and objects that remind you of your ex from your routine life. The faster you do it, the better.

If there are memories or images loaded with sentimental value that you really want to preserve, do so, but leave them in a box at the bottom of the wardrobe until the moment you mourn.

Don’t be tempted to give in to melancholy and see them again.

The same happens with messages and letters. They can be reminders of better seasons, but they are no longer current, and reading them over and over will only cause you enormous superfluous pain.

2. Keep a healthy perspective

Don’t let irrational dark thoughts capture you. Your divorce is not condemning you to lose everything you love or to end up living under a bridge.

It is perfectly normal for these thoughts to appear (we will not deny it).

The issue is not to avoid them, but rather to prevent them from consuming everything else and to be very aware that they are a natural derivative of fear and insecurity, but above all, that we can fight against them.

What are the most common fatalistic thoughts? some of them are:

a) I will never find anyone who loves me / whom I love so much

b) Nothing will be okay again

c) I will spend the rest of my life alone

d) I’m going to be left without friends and without a reason to live

e) It’s too late to rebuild my life

Remember that when you go through a grieving process (due to the fact that divorce is also grieving), you need to force yourself to see things objectively at times.

This does not mean that the pain and fear will disappear immediately, but at least you will not promote them to get bigger.

Your friends, your occupations, your work, and your hobbies are great allies to remind you that you continue to be a whole person and that your life did not depend on marriage.

If you need it, write with some frequency each and every one of the things that you will never leave to allow yourself to lose (your talent, family, goals, personality, and convictions, for example), and you will realize that there are many.

Another good strategy is to visualize how you will feel about your divorce in a year or 2, and you will see that the outlook is not so bad if you remember other times when you have felt devastated, and in what way you finally got over it.

If you could heal then, you can heal now. It is not the end of your happiness, it is only a very difficult moment. Keep this always and in all circumstances present.

3. Focus on the good

When you are going through a divorce process, it is usual for the negative to become the center of your attention. You can experience highs of anger and resentment, even an enormous need to cause harm, in some way, to your ex-partner.

It is perfectly normal that, at the most intense point of pain, the certainty begins to appear that everything was a waste of time with a person who did not quality the pain.

Although your emotions are very real, they are most likely a defense mechanism.

Many people handle anger better than sadness, and when it appears, they try to displace hatred so they do not have to accept how much the loss hurts.

However, on the contrary, intuitive that it may seem to focus on the good moments that we share, this does not really add sadness to the process, due to the fact that it is there in each and every way, although we want to hide it behind a veil. of resentment.

What actually happens is that apologizing becomes considerably easier, and we don’t add an auxiliary burden of anger to the already difficult feelings of the divorce.

Remember that the fact that your relationship will not last forever, does not mean that you have not learned many good moments from it, and above all, many lessons.

Stick with that as a tool for the future, not as a drag that binds you to the past.

4. Transform the experience into an opportunity to grow

Reflecting on your personal development is one of the positive things you can extract from the divorce experience.

Think about everything you learned from your relationship and your marriage. Think about the aspects of yourself and the others that you managed to explore and how these changed your view of life. Think about the person you were before the relationship and the person you are now.

If you have trouble locating the bright side, ask yourself the following questions:

1) What things are possible now that were not possible before?

2) Have you altered in any positive way?

3) Have you learned from your failures?

4) Have you learned anything about human relationships that will be useful to you in the future?

5) Are you stronger?

Surely, the answer to practically all these questions is a definite “yes”. You just need to be frank with yourself.

5. Learn to know yourself again

If you have been divorced after being married for a long time, you may feel like you are losing an essential part of yourself.

Being on your own suddenly can be a huge shock after decades or more of being part of a couple.

If you were used to spending every free hour with someone else, you may feel like you’ve forgotten how to be alone without feeling lonely.

It can be distressing to have to face life without your usual partner and in all circumstances. But it is also an enormous opportunity to become more autonomous, courageous, and also independent.

When you feel like being alone, be it in a social event or simply at the moment of going to bed, remind yourself that being in a relationship does not define you.

You are a complete human as well as an individual, even if your ex is no longer around.

It is always quite difficult to settle into a new routine, but you can also get positive things out of something in this way, such as starting to direct your time based on what you want.

Focus on the things you love and start discovering who you are because of you. Stop worrying if you are not very clear where to start, simply adopt a positive and open attitude to change.

Give yourself the opportunity to return to learn how to be single or single. Rediscover the things you stopped doing and discover each and every one of the things you can do now.

Listen to music, return to that sport or hobby that you liked so much, resume contact with the friends you stopped seeing.

At the end of the day, you have 2 alternative options, either you let yourself be overcome by loneliness and dedicate yourself to regretting, or else face reality and squeeze all the juice you can.

6. Give yourself the chance to feel bad

A divorce practically always and in all circumstances hurts, and a lot, regardless of the context in which it occurs. There are some situations that exacerbate everything, such as infidelity, abandonment, or endless fights over the division of resources.

The pain of loss is one of the most difficult emotions that we must face. Dealing with loss can be exhausting, leading to depression, isolation, and self-boycott.

Grief is an experience that varies enormously between people, hence there are truly no adequate or incorrect ways of dealing with it.

Some people recover from losses with apparent speed and simplicity, while others find it particularly difficult, some, even more, may end up clinging to them. It depends on the personality and the context.

In the end, what we can generalize is that the duel is not easy, but it is essential that you give yourself the opportunity to go through it from beginning to end if you really want to overcome it.

Be patient throughout this process. Do not demand more than the account and if you need to complain or be “out of service” for a moment, do it without self-reproach.

At the end of the day, a divorce is a serious blow, and while you won’t get stuck in the negative feelings it provokes, there is no good reason to think that you can simply run away from them.

7. Do not forget why you separated

Rest assured that, throughout the grief of your divorce, you will go through certain moments in which your only desire will be to run back into the arms of your ex-partner.

It is possible that this deSeo is sustained permanently and also intense throughout your entire process. It is not a feeling that is simple to deal with, and more than one person has led her to seek to re-establish contact or even reconciliation.

You may feel truly devastated or devastated by the loss, you may feel that you hit rock bottom and that you have let go of the only good thing in your life. You may come to think that you made the biggest mistake by letting go of that person.

Don’t worry, it’s normal, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

When these irrational thoughts attack you, you need to find a way to objectively recall why you made the resolution to separate. And if that resolution has been made by the other person, you need to remember that your dignity comes first.

It doesn’t make sense for you to fight to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with you, right?

When things are over, they are over, period.

We do not want to say that each and every divorce case is insurmountable, perhaps there are certain caveats, but normally, there is no reason to think that 2 people who decided not to be together can return to commit deeply to each other.

We just don’t work this way. The most we will achieve by forcing a reunion or reconciliation is a delusion that everything is fine, only to have to go through a process of loss again from the beginning.

Interestingly, the best way to discover if what you are experiencing is an irrational panic in the face of loss is precisely the intensity of your feelings.

If you feel an unstoppable emergency of looking for your ex-, or a deep desolation accompanied by the certainty that you made the worst mistake of your life, it is most likely that it is an irrational and natural symptom of the grieving process and not of objective reality.

8. Learn to love the good things in your life

When you feel sad, or you are in a mood that is not the best, it is simple that you let yourself be carried away by thoughts about each and every one of the things that you no longer have after a divorce.

You may miss your home, your customs, coexistence, small family traditions, etc.

Every marriage is different, and each person loses something different when it ends. But that does not mean that a divorce is only about losses, much less than we are losing everything.

It may seem that the things you “lost” are considerably more essential, momentous or indispensable than they really are, but if you think about it, you were perfectly fine without them before you met your ex.

The point is to try to focus our attention on the good things that we still have that depend on absolutely no one but ourselves.

Getting divorced is already painful enough to let us add auxiliary suffering by maximizing the relevance of the details that were left.

Look around you and learn to recognize the achievements you have made on your own.

People who love you and who try you for who you are, and not because of the relationship you had. Look into the speculum what a complete human you are.

A great exercise is to take ten minutes to consciously list each and every one of the great things that we have left, from the mere fact of existing and breathing to the support that our family and friends show us.

 9. Do not forget that time helps to heal wounds

Just as it is naive to think that wounds only need time to heal, it is naive to think that they will not heal one bit with the passing of it.

Think of the time, not as the absolute responsible for you overcoming your divorce, but rather a huge ally that little by little will make you stronger and will also make it easier for you to take care of yourself to heal.

Right now, it might seem like you’re never going to get over your divorce, but the pain isn’t going to last forever. In truth, it will last a lot less than you think now.

You have experienced other losses in your life that have also made you feel like all was lost. Do not get carried away by that feeling and try to visualize your future, who will be handling the situation much better.

Do you still feel as bad as how you felt then? Most likely not.

Even, it is really possible that you feel stronger, or with more learning precisely because you had to go through those quite difficult moments.

Perhaps, and with good reason, you consider that none of the losses of your previous life were as great or as essential as the one involved in separating from your partner, but that is a part of growing in life.

In fact, many studies prove that humans are stronger when we have suffered. It’s going to take time, but one day you’re going to get up and see that the sun is shining. Just try to be patient with you.

10. Keep your faith in others

After a divorce, the planet can seem like a place where there is no one to trust.

Loving someone and having to leave him for whatever reason makes our conception of love and trust completely falter.

When you trusted someone and that person would either let you down or betrayed you, it can be devastating. Especially when it’s someone you care about more than everyone else, and it’s hard enough to imagine that we’ll ever trust love again.

They have hurt you and it is totally natural that part of you resists going back to feeling fragile, and hence it tries to emotionally close itself to the rest as a defense mechanism to avoid going through the same thing again.

Perhaps you are going through a stage where you just want to separate yourself from each and every person.

As always and at all times, it is not wrong, and it is valid to do it for a while if you need it in this way, but you cannot get stuck there.

You should not give up, nor generalize what you went through with your ex-partner to everyone on the planet.

Remember that we are all different and that you now have more tools than ever before to build a more successful relationship.

Don’t let the pain that one person caused you to hurt your romantic relationships. The experience should help us to grow and be more reflective in the future, not to shut us down completely.

Many people on the planet find the joy and love of their life after one or even a series of affectionate setbacks. We are human and failure, learning, and new opportunities are a part of our integral development.

If you allow yourself to be carried away by the urge to arm your heart, you run the risk of becoming an insolent and withdrawn person. If you made a mistake, give yourself the opportunity to try it again, instead of giving it up for loss.

If you made a bad resolution, give yourself a chance to let it go and make better resolutions in the future. If someone lets you down, it is the other person’s inconvenience, not yours, and it is not irrefutable proof that everything always and at all times must end badly.

Finally, we must add that, although for most people divorce is a fairly difficult blow to overcome, not each and everyone goes through tremendous sensitive pain.

Some are still relieved when they manage to let go of a relationship that they were not entirely comfortable with, or that was still causing them real suffering. If you are one of those people, don’t feel guilty, there is nothing wrong with it.

Remember that there are no recipes or set rules to overcome a divorce. At best, we can say that self-love, time, and the will to heal are the best recipe for you to go through your individual process in the healthiest way possible.

Never discount the help of mental health professionals. A psychologist, therapist, or even a life coach can greatly assist you in overcoming the negative and supposedly inescapable emotions that accompany the grief of a separation.

Just as you go to the doctor when you are going through a health crisis, you have the possibility of turning to a therapist when you are going through a sensitive crisis. Not only is it perfectly valid, but it is also highly recommended.

Do not forget to share this information with each and every one of the people close to you who are going through a very difficult process of divorce.