Gleaning the Gold From a Breakup/Divorce
Grief includes all the emotions at one point or another: sorrow, anger, confusion, relief, heartbreak, disgust. (Don't be surprised if your heart/body actually physically hurts-- all the emotion can cause real physical symptoms.) To really process and make it fully to the other side of an attachment loss, we have to feel all the deep feelings that come up in us. Wail and cry. Get angry and frustrated. Let your grief be physical-- pound the floor, run or jump, move, move move. Grief needs a physical expression of the energy.
Let yourself feel the ache of your losses and name them out loud. Tell someone. Write about it. Draw. It is best to do this deep feeling work with another person present, if possible. We are not meant to grieve heavily all alone-- we are wired in our nervous systems to co-regulate with other people and feel their presence with us. This could also be a chance to reach for our friends and community in ways that we never have before, or don't often. This is one part of the gold that can come out of a breakup: connecting to others in a profoundly vulnerable way and letting them be present to our pain. It's so human; and it's a gift to those you let in.
As we're allowing ourselves to fully feel our feelings, we will start to move back and forth from deep sadness to real anger. This healthy anger becomes our guide, because anger is an assertion that says, "I matter. My experience matters." When we feel anger after a breakup, there is a message in it and that message is what we're fighting for in the whole process of grief. We can hear what we deeply need when we listen to our anger.
For example, after a breakup maybe you find yourself replaying scenes where your ex-partner betrayed you, lied or said hurtful things. Initially, maybe these memories made you sad or hurt and even start to ask yourself, "Why didn't they love me? What's wrong with me?" After a while, when you start to get angry with a healthy assertion, you find yourself thinking about these disturbing memories and saying something like, "That was totally unfair. They shouldn't have done that. I deserve better!" The need of your heart is now shining through: you need to feel loved and seen and like you matter, and now you need to give that and find that for yourself. This need you have was always there, but sometimes a relationship can be a convenient place to transfer that need to someone else. Now you're reclaiming it. This is the pure gold. You need to feel loved and seen and appreciated; of course you do. And now the task is to let yourself love yourself with all those qualities, and find loving people in your life and connect with them.
Moving through the grief of a relationship loss is a lot like moving to a new country. You are leaving the old country behind. The journey to the new one is hard and painful, and nobody can tell you exactly how long it will take. But the journey is all about feeling your feelings and letting them help you reclaim your core self, and identify and meet your deep needs. Once you get to the new country (your new life), the old one is totally gone. After a while, when you look back on it, you will feel how foreign it is now. When you really transition out of the old life and into the new, there will also be a sense of seeing it all from a calm, compassionate place. You are much more connected to your core self now. It shines through you.
