Grief Recovery Institute Featured Question - Discovery doesn’t equal recovery. Realizing how we sabotaged our marriages doesn’t bring our former partners back to us. (Published 3/25/2014)

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Discovery doesn’t equal recovery. Realizing how we sabotaged our marriages doesn’t bring our former partners back to us. (Published 3/25/2014)

My husband and I divorced in 2008. I was the spouse who filed. I am feeling increasing despair and sadness as time passes. I am blaming myself for leaving when I loved my ex-husband. I had unknown past baggage from childhood abuse that I now know affected my ability to be in the marriage. Now that I know all this, I can't make peace with the decision I made to leave. I didn't free myself from problems but instead I found out the source. My life is 99.9 % worse since the divorce. Do you have any advice for someone grieving a divorce that they initiated and regret?

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Pam,

Thanks for your note and question.

In grief, as in everything else, the old expression about hindsight being 20-20, is still accurate.

The problem with your new-found awareness of unresolved grief—as in the baggage from earlier in your life sabotaging your marriage—is that discovery does not equal recovery; and discovery usually doesn’t bring our former partners back to us. Most of the time there’s been too much damage for the couple to be repaired.

Also, the issue of who initiated the divorce, while it seems important to you, is not the key element. And blaming yourself for leaving is not helping you recover, in fact, it is making it worse. You just keep confirming your pain by stating that you caused it.

Even though the divorce seems to be the burning issue for you, we will suggest that you first go back and become emotionally complete in your earlier relationships with the people who abused you, and/or the people who didn’t notice you were being abused and come to your aid—or possibly didn’t believe you.

Until you get complete with those people from your past, and the “loss of trust” involved with what happened to you, you will not be able to really get emotionally complete with your ex-husband, or with your self for that matter.

Important note: completion is an indirect action. It is not something you do with the other person/people.

Go to the library or bookstore and get a copy of The Grief Recovery Handbook, also get a copy of Moving On. Use the actions in the Handbook to help you go back and deal with the relationships from your distant past. Then, when you’ve done that, use Moving On to help you deal with the end of your marriage. As you do the work the books ask of you, you’ll finally be able to make peace with everything that has happened, and to be able to restart your life.

From our hearts to yours,

Russell And John

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Discovery doesn’t equal recovery. Realizing how we sabotaged our marriages doesn’t bring our former partners back to us. (Published 3/25/2014)

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