How to Accept and Forgive Yourself After Divorce

Today, I want to talk about the fundamentals of healing and how to accept and forgive yourself after divorce.

Resisting Healing After Divorce

As I was preparing to write about this, I kept circling back to the resistance that comes up as a part of this transformation that you’re in. The resistance you can feel during the process of healing from divorce. We’re going to talk about a lot of “hows” and “whys” today. But the thing I want you to hear in this deep and wide subject is how to shed your resistance.

By resistance, I mean your difficulty accepting that where you are and what is unfolding is perfect and beautiful. Think of it like a caterpillar to a butterfly.

Even when it doesn’t feel okay, the stories you’re telling yourself in your mind are what is creating the resistance.

Resistance is what’s slowing you down. Slowing down is what’s killing your motivation and making it all take longer.

I want you to keep in mind that the goal is to shed resistance, to be okay, and to accept that what’s coming is better than what’s been.

Resist Less, Accept Yourself More

First things first in healing after divorce: Accepting that your marriage is over.

Hearing that can be difficult. I know some of you may have felt your heart skip a beat. Now is not the time to look back.

Everything you want is forward. It’s okay for you to love him and move on. It’s okay if you love him forever. I want you to be able to love him, believe in yourself, and know that you don’t need to build your life around him to be okay.

Accept Your Marriage Is Over

You accept that your marriage is over by finding a way to trust, believe, and have faith that your future can be greater than your past.

If you are invested in believing in him, that your past is everything and your future is bleak, then that is what you will create.

Transform from the Past to Your Beautifully Rich, Abundant Future

The more you second-guess yourself, the more you doubt that you made the right decision, the more you are fearful that you can’t do it without him, and the more that you are insistent that he was your soul mate, it will keep you trapped in a prison.

Soulmates in Your Life

Some of your soul mates are your best friends, they might be your children, it might be a lover, or it might be your husband. There are so many places for you to have a richness of love in your life and your past. The people in your past are not the only conduit to that.

Try to have a wider, more expansive view of what life has to offer you and what you are willing to consider as possible in your own life.

The forwardness of it all, the solution, not the problem. Sometimes, when we women are trying to heal from something major, massive, and deep, we ask a lot of questions that, in the words of Brene Brown, are in an attempt to control and predict.

Where Your Focus Goes Healing Flows

There are a lot of you who Google questions about the stages and length of healing. This is because we don’t like uncertainty, and we don’t like pain. When you find yourself Googling things like, “What are the stages of healing?” or “How long is healing going to take?” I want you to know that those questions are holding you back because you are focused on the wrong thing.

I want you to start asking yourself, “How can I fall more in love with the process of healing and transforming?” and “How can I focus more on what my mind-body is trying to communicate to me?”

So many people come to session each week saying, “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry today.” If you’ve got tears in there, you’ve got tears in there. And trust me, I want to get you through them as efficiently as possible.

I would rather you focus on how you can fall in love with the process of transforming because it is the process of living.

I want you to abandon controlling and try to predict and start appreciating the magic that is coming through you. I want you to stop focusing on what’s going wrong and start noticing what is working in your favor. I want you to stop focusing on getting people on your side and focus on finding joy.

I want you to notice each time you’re tapped into resentment, whether it’s about your ex, his parents, something to do with the kids, or the court.

I want you to turn that resentment into appreciation for what it is molding you into.

What is it about this journey, this transformative journey, that is molding you into something so magical that it makes you more than you ever thought you could be?

Now, I am not in any way minimizing what you’re going through. Let’s assume that I know every nook and cranny of every excruciating moment you feel. It all seems unbearable. However, I know that when we women focus on something unbearable, we end up crossing that line into a dark, heavy place.

Switch Focus from Pain to Light

What may sometimes sound like I am minimizing your pain is me saying, “I’m calling you over here from the light,” because I know that you can’t get to where you want to go when you’re focused on it being unbearable.

When you’re tempted to Google stages and timelines, I want you to come back over here to the light.

I want you to switch your focus. I want you to find some appreciation for the transformation and the journey that you’re on. I want you to get better at defining what you want your future to look like rather than being upset about the past that you’re losing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Your therapist, your coaches, and your healing guides will offer you opportunities to process that pain. And that’s great, but I don’t want you to live there. I don’t want you to live focused on the pain. I want you to say, “I am in a process that is happening for me, and I’m going to find a way to love it a little bit more.”

Make Healing After Divorce Fun

Sometimes, in the healing process, especially with my kid, I have to focus on what isn’t working and what needs transformation – but we don’t stay there.

We focus on it to let the emotion flow through, find a solution, enact that solution, and do it in a way that’s fun, lighthearted, and playful.

Part of all of this is finding forgiveness and appreciation after divorce and in the healing journey. It’s about not taking it so seriously and finding ways to play through your healing.

Heal from a Relationship with a Narcissist

When we’re talking about healing after divorce, one of the most common things that comes up is how to heal after divorcing a narcissist.

When we women choose narcissistic partners, we tend to have come from narcissistic environments.

Just know that the transformational journey you’re on is all about finding your truth, finding a way to forgive yourself, and your inner reality – validating it, celebrating it, and honoring it.

When you have been in a relationship in a narcissistically organized environment, you’ve been so organized around somebody else’s reality that you have shoved down your thoughts, feelings, desires, urges, impulses, and fascinations. You second guess so many of your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. So much of healing from that is about tapping into your inner guidance and wisdom.

Tap Into Your Inner Wisdom

How do you tap into your inner wisdom?

When you feel joy, present, gleeful, inspired, clear, motivated, or any of these words, these are the things that will help you know when you’re tapped into your inner guidance.

When you are feeling heavy, sad, angry, and confused, you are not tapping into your inner guidance. I want you to notice when you have moments of clarity, ambition, and inspiration

When that dance party hits, when you catch that spark, that’s your inner guidance. That’s the truth of who you are surfacing. So when that surfaces, I want you to run with it as long as that wave will carry you.

Find the Truth Within You

You have the truth inside of you. You have everything inside of you. Practice validating that. Practice going with it. Practice leaning into it. When you think you might be tapped into it, write it down.

In writing them down, you are honoring the voice from where they come. And so even if you don’t do anything with them, just write them down in a little booklet, and then you can always come back and say to yourself, “I did know.” And that will be such a rewarding and valuable process.

How to Heal After Divorce

When you’re trying to get to the bottom of how to heal after a divorce, there’s a lot of inquiry and dialogue about how this process of divorce changes a woman.

Knowing that change is unfolding is the beautiful part of it.

So much of what we talk about with divorce healing is with our eyes on the darkness, the suffering that came about or the betrayal, the power struggle, the wrongs, and the injustices. When we’re looking at all of that, we’re not celebrating what’s happening as a result of this.

Transform Your Life After Divorce Into Love

For you, this divorce is going to change you into the most of yourself you’ve ever been.

You are coming through a process that is allowing you to shed layers that do not serve you and build layers that do.

Imagine for a moment what you believe to be your most magnificent version of yourself. That is precisely where this is taking you – so long as you don’t get bogged down trying to control it.

Fall In Love With Yourself

If you find a way to fall in appreciation – I don’t want to say fall in love – fall in appreciation with this process. Your most magnificent self is the only outcome possible. That’s why we women come here, that’s why we talk, and that’s why we share.

Maybe you feel like you are ready to forgive yourself and accept the new you, you feel a bit of inspiration, you feel a bit of confidence, you feel a bit of spark … that’s your inner guidance shining through. That’s you becoming recalibrated to your truth.

All I’m doing is telling you who you are versus who you’re afraid that everybody else told you you were. I’m here to remind you of the truth of who you are.

Healing after a divorce is all about you falling in love with you and then the rest just clicks into place. Stick with the process. Trust the process.

Look for Your Cheerleaders

All of a sudden you’ll one day think, “Look what happened! This is so amazing.” And in the meantime, just keep coming back and just ask for your cheerleaders to cheer you a little bit. Be a little more gentle with yourself.

If you’re not seeing results, it’s probably because you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re focusing too much on the problem. You’re generating too much of your pain rather than believing in yourself, moving forward in faith, hope and joy, knowing that you are a good person.

You’re here to do amazing things. It’s not all or nothing and it doesn’t happen all at once, it happens in stages.

When you get tempted to feel like shit because it’s not fair, because he hurt you, because he betrayed you, because he didn’t uphold his vows, switch your focus.

Switch your focus from needing to heal from the divorce to stepping into your magnificence.

What if we women even stopped calling it healing from divorce? What if we just called it something else, such as, “How do I stop focusing on divorce and realize that I’m here to become more of myself through accepting and forgiving myself?” Start googling: “How do I become more of myself?”

You’ve got this, love. Sending you a huge hug. Talk soon.