Navigating Divorce and Relationship Breakups
The Emotional Impact
If you are struggling with difficult emotions related to issues with your partner, I want to help you. The decision to break up or get a divorce can be a very personal and painful issue. The distress it can cause is often beyond overwhelming. No matter how difficult the relationship, both parties likely feel a sense of loss, pain, guilt, or failure. A common belief that people often express to me is “I have failed.”
Sources of Pain and Uncertainty
Relationship breakups and divorces are often confusing and complex. Going separate ways is hard if you have been broken up with and also hard if you are the one who has initiated it.
- Feeling unloved: Maybe your significant other is the only one who ever made you feel special and loved. Perhaps you gave everything to this person but ended up betrayed, rejected, or abandoned.
- Guilt and worry: If you are the one doing the breaking up, maybe there is guilt that the other won’t be able to manage alone and you’re worried about the aftermath.
The struggle often brings up many issues of uncertainty about the future:
- Financial hardship: Worrying about money is common.
- Loss of social support: There’s likely disappointment over the loss of friends within your social circle, along with pain from losing close family members.
- Impact on children: If you have children, there’s the angst of how to tell them, how they will cope, and the ongoing stress of shared custody.
- Guilt about breaking up the family: Ongoing resentment. The shame of feeling judged and misunderstood by friends, family, or the wider community.
The Trauma of Separation
The decision to separate, break-up completely, and the legal process of divorce itself can be traumatic. Even if it’s amicable, you may feel isolated and have feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety.
Let’s Work Through This Together
If you are going through a breakup or a divorce, let me help you navigate and cope with your decision as well as work through the devastation, grief, and other difficult feelings. It helps to talk to someone privately who is objective and can validate and normalize what you are going through.
As a counselor who has worked with divorce and relationship breakups for over 20 years, I can help you.
