How you may be feeling:
How you may be feeling is like how long is a piece of string, you may be feeling angry, weepy, numb, desperately down, you may be relieved, rejoicing, excited, thankful but the likelihood is even if the marriage wasn’t making you happy and you wanted out, you’re still going to feel an element of sadness, after all you must have felt positive about the union at some point.
So lets look at some of the emotions that you may be experiencing and how best to manage them…
Weeping your way through the day (and night)
I remember doing a lot of crying, a sort of uncontrollable gut wrenching crying especially when driving and the number of times I had to redo my make up on arriving somewhere because I’d cried my eyes out en route, it was like whenever I was alone I’d just break down into tears.
Over time it became less frequent and then, I can’t really remember when but it just stopped, almost for years, it was as if I’d cried out all the tears I could ever cry , I was finally done with crying over what once was.
Recently I split up from a relatively long term boyfriend and the tears seem to come again, the uncontrollable crying and weeping of 2004 but this time I recognised these tears and very much understood them and had the tools to manage them.
I knew the why and that helped , the tears were the sadness that was laying dormant inside of me that had built up over what was a long and toxic relationship- they were detoxing from my system in the form of tears.
My heart was using my body to detox itself of the deep sadnesses that were repressed inside me and all I can say is there must of been a lot of sadness as the tears came thick and fast.
So what did I do, when not crying that is - I observed my emotions and how they were behaving, when the tears came I just let them come and then as if by magic my thought pattern seems to shift and I’d stop crying and get up and make a cup of tea, have a shower or get my laptop out and feel inspired to write, but the most important thing that I didn’t do was I didn’t try and stop the crying.
I knew it was detrimental to my wellbeing to keep all that repressed sadness bottled up inside me so I let them go, all of them and I felt so much better after they left, ironically I always feel a bit less sad after a good cry, go figure !
So if you’re weeping, feel like you need to weep then bloody well weep, its your body telling you it needs to rid itself of repressed sadness so listen to it and get on and have that cry !
So what is it I’m supposed to be doing ?
Allow yourself to feel and acknowledge how you feel, identify it !! and this isn't what you tell people about how you feel, this is actually how you feel when led in your bed alone at night, the scary, teh dark, the selfish, the warped, the messed up- its all ok.
Its really cathartic to write down how you actually feel, no one needs to see this but its important to outwardly acknowledge how you’re feeling, allow your thoughts and feelings to flow and if you’re not comfortable writing just put the words down on a note on your phone, just get it down because when you get it down its like releasing some steam from a pressure cooker.
Writing is a really good way to deal with this overwhelming period of emotion, its a really good idea to get a divorce diary as it will help you to check in daily with your emotions, highs and lows, good and bad, what you think about certain people, certain things you may be experiencing, the important thing is to get it all out of your head, even voice notes if you struggle with writing.
I'd recoomend if you do like writing to buy yourself a Plain page book that you like the look or feel of and just start writing a bit each day about how you feel, its amazing how getting stuff out of your head and onto paper can help with your mental processing of the situation you are in.
I have also in the past written letters to the person or people that I am feeling most aggrieved with, spilling out exactly what I feel about them and the situation, saying all the things I’d loved to say to them, now you don’t necessarily need to send this and in most cases it might be better if you don’t but you can certainly throw it away or burn it, the key thing is bringing up and detoxing repressed or negative emotions.
When you express emotion outwardly it lessens the power it has over you so its very therapeutic to express your emotions as often as you possibly can especially at times when you may be under fire, become friends with your emotions and wave them hello and goodbye just the same.
You may think reading this how can I take notice of someone who admits herself to uncontrollable weeping , well because for one simple reason, I get you and I know that if you let it emotions pass through you’ll get through this, fight or deny them and you’ll become stuck in a very toxic place for a very long time.
We’re all on a journey and its not to a destination of pure and peaceful perfect happiness, we may find it at times along the way and then we’ll lose it only to then find it and then lose it again, happiness really isn’t a destination we suddenly reach in life, its a state of being that we find ourselves experiencing at times along the way just like sadness and grief, contentment and elation, they are all other states we can find ourselves diving in and out of at points in our lives.
So when you find a bit of happiness enjoy it because it will be lost again at some point, that’s the beauty and the beast of life, not a fairytale but a wonderful yet woeful and wildly unpredictable set of experiences that come together to form what we call, our lives.
