How To Best Cope With The Feelings You Experience During And After Your Divorce

How can I best cope with the feelings I experience during and after my divorce?

Because divorce is so overwhelming, you really need support. You need support from family and friends and not support for the divorce or not divorcing, but support for your feelings. If you're feeling sad or overwhelmed or loss of control, that someone is able to listen and say, "it's ok to feel that way" and “you're going to need to feel those feelings before you move into a different stage of feeling” and so you need support. You also need to stop blaming yourself if you feel you that can not be happy in that marriage because if you can't be happy, you're not going to make the other person happy. You need to think about the other person. Staying in a marriage with someone who you truly don't love and want to be with is a cruel thing to do. It's an unfair kind of process that we put people through and it's not a loving gesture, in fact, it's very cold and rejecting although we see it as loving at times. So I think that you have to cope with this myriad of feelings you're going to feel and you're going to need a support system to do so. You're going to need people who listen to you. You're going to go through very different stages at different times of grieving your relationship and not everybody goes through them the same way. It's not a prescription. It's not stage one, stage two, stage three. Divorces are all very different. Once again it depends on, did you want this divorce? Are you someone who wanted divorce, but really doesn't want it for the wrong reasons? Are you someone who feels that you are totally shocked and one day your husband or wife came home and said it's over with and your life all the sudden has no predictive value anymore? You don't know what tomorrow is going to bring and you start losing your sense of self. There's lots of ways to cope with a divorce but unfortunately there's going to be lots of feelings that are continually going to come up for a long time from the beginning to almost the end. With the end being, when it's finally not on you plate every day, when you're not thinking about it every day, when it's not part of your life on a regular basis.