Yes, you are divorced now. After going through the intensity of resolving your separation and starting the shared custody of kids you should feel great, right? Instead, you feel lost and are still in pain? Do you feel like a failure because your marriage ended? It’s normal. Be kind to yourself and give yourself permission to feel this way. You’ve been in a marriage for years and after divorcing you’re single again but everything is different. You have kids now, and an ex-husband and you just moved into your new house maybe and it’s all on you. It can feel overwhelming.
But let me tell you something, you are on top of the list of priorities, after your kids, nobody else. And there’s tons of accomplishments to build up your new self-confidence and self-esteem:
- Reconnect with yourself, as a woman, as a girlfriend, as a person: take this part as an adventure, find old picture of your younger self and connect with your energy and your capacity for dreaming big. You’re still the same girl, just more experienced. Which means you’ll make better decisions in the future.
- Friends and family are your support group, talk to them: this one can feel obvious but sometimes we forget that telling our story to someone that loves us is liberating and makes it easier to move on. Beware of the people in your life that won’t be ready to help you yet. Sometimes, people have weird reactions to a divorce, they feel it’s about them or that they can judge you. Stay away from them, at least for now.
- Take time to think, feel, enjoy, cry: a big part of being able to move on is to mourn the end of your marriage. It was a project you had in common with your ex and it didn’t work out. Feel sad about it, it’s ok. You can revisit why it didn’t work, how you felt when things were going down. But all in all, make it about scanning it to learn from it. We can choose to feel like a victim and be helpless or feel like we did our best and even if it didn’t work, it was worth it
- Find out what you love, wish, dream of, miss, will fight for: soon you’ll be ready to take on new challenges, have fun thinking about what excited you before getting married, what were your craziest dreams, what did you look forward during your marriage that didn’t work because of him. Again, take the time to think, really think about your likes, your wishes and have fun imagining the wildest possibilities.
What’s important at this point is for you to be patient with yourself and start finding the fun of reconnecting with yourself and discovering what will be your next steps. Eventually, you’ll start feeling amazing and even want to date again. But don’t rush into anything, taking the time to reconnect and feel good again will pay off big time!
Val Maurer Coach 