BY CATHY MEYER
A couple of weeks ago I saw the post below go through my Facebook newsfeed. It was written by a newly divorced Mom who had learned five realities of divorce while attempting to sell a home and raise her children on her own.
No one tells you divorce makes you an outcast. No one tells you people really do take sides, & they will do it in your face. No one tells you how to learn to get over it. How to sit with your grief. No one tells you how vulnerable you’ll be & how everything feels shitty. No one tells you you’ll look back at the calendar with disbelief at how long divorce takes and the disentangling and how suddenly the people you thought you knew best…are total strangers. Ghosts.
This Mom is wrong, those things have been told. They’ve been told by experts, they’ve been told by other women who’ve gone through a divorce.
She didn’t discover some dark hidden truth about divorce, she just came face to face with the realities of divorce. Because who pays attention to other people’s problems until they are faced with those same problems?
The realities of divorce will be quite different from what you’ve imagined divorce to be. Don’t be caught off-guard like this woman!
I write about it and other divorce experts share the ugly side of divorce in books and articles daily online. The problem is, the experts aren’t being read or, if they are, folks reading our advice think, “That couldn’t happen to me, my situation is different.”
And, nothing stands in the way of a newly divorced person moving forward and creating a satisfying life more than the “I’m different” thought process. The idea that bad divorces only happen to other people. Or, the belief that people who experience pain and suffering after divorce do so because they did something wrong. These are thought processes that are prevalent among those deciding on and going through a divorce.
Most are under the illusion that divorce is the road to happiness and when faced with the realities of divorce are lost at how to process it and use it to their own advantage. Divorce is not the road to happiness, divorce is hard, harder than most bad marriages and when it turns your world upside down it’s in your best interest to be mentally prepared or you will drown in the “no one told me” pity party.