After Divorce Coaching

Take Time To Heal

After going through a divorce, many individuals decide to rebound immediately by jumping into another relationship. The person starts a new relationship while still carrying a lot of baggage from their failed marriage. If you do this, not only are you adding more baggage to your life, but you are also dumping your old baggage into the new person’s life. If this becomes a pattern, you will find yourself weighed down with so much emotional baggage that you can become dysfunctional, depressed and even suicidal.

Take time to heal after your divorce. You should never act as if it didn’t happen to you. It did. And because it did, you have been wounded in ways that need to be tended to.

Reflect on Yourself

After going through a divorce, it is so easy to rehash everything, from the outside, that caused the divorce. For example, you think about what your spouse did to you, whether it was infidelity, abuse or putting his or her career before your marriage. Looking at things that happened on the outside will not benefit you; what has been done is done. Dwelling on what your spouse did will cause you to become bitter instead of better. But reflecting on your inner person, the real you, can aid in the healing process. Through self-reflection, you can ponder the lessons you learned about yourself through the marriage and divorce process.

Not only can you learn things about yourself, but you can also think about what lessons you learned that you can teach somebody else. For example, during the self-reflection process, if you realize that you weren’t truly there for your spouse as you should have been or if you were rarely affectionate, you can teach these lessons to someone else whose marriage is in trouble. You can tell them your experience and advise them not to go down the same road you have traveled. In self-reflection, you can become a sort of role model to others because you have spit out the bad and kept the good. If the example of your failure can cause another marriage to be saved, then yours wasn’t a total loss.

Deal With It

Don’t pretend that the traumatic experience you have gone through did not hurt. If you are hurting, don’t bury the hurt. Let it out in a way that will bring forth healing. One way to acknowledge the hurt is to write down everything that has hurt you concerning the divorce. Write down things that happened during the marriage that caused you pain and heartache. By writing the things down, it is like pulling a bandage off an old wound that has been covered up for a long time, but one that never completely healed. As you write down those painful memories, recall how you felt when it happened. Allow yourself to cry. Tears alone can be a form of healing. It’s like cleansing your inner person, your soul and your spirit.

After writing it down and crying about it, you have to eventually let go and move forward. As a symbol of your decision to move forward, burn up the piece of paper that contains the experiences. Watch the paper turn to ashes. As the paper turns to ashes, see yourself moving forward. You can’t move forward while looking backward. Refuse to look back on the failed marriage. Every time the memories begin to resurface, just tell yourself, “I’ve buried that. I’m moving forward.”

Forgive

There is no way you can truly move forward after a divorce until you forgive yourself and your spouse for anything either of you may have done to contribute to the divorce. As long as you are walking in unforgiving, you are not truly healed. As long as you are unforgiving toward the person, he or she still has control over you. Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a choice. When you choose to forgive, even though you might not feel like it, then true healing will slowly come from within your inner person.

Take Care of Yourself

Sometimes when people experience divorce, they tend to stop taking care of themselves. You should take a day every week to celebrate yourself. Do something special for yourself. Go to a bookstore or cafe to sit down and read a book while enjoying your favorite cup of coffee. Go to the beach or park to enjoy the land and water. Take yourself to the movies. Get used to doing things by yourself instead of being depressed because you no longer have a spouse to go out with.

Groom yourself well. Fix your hair up. Put on the stilettos. Put on the suit. Look like a million bucks when you walk out of your home, instead of walking around looking like a train wreck. You don’t have to feel like a million bucks to look like a million bucks. But if you keep doing it long enough, you will begin to feel it as well.

Look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself how wonderful you are. Tell yourself how beautiful you are. You might not feel your positive confessions are true when you first start talking to yourself, but after a while you will notice that your positive confessions are building you up on the inside. You will find yourself becoming stronger and stronger. You will see that you can and will survive life after divorce.