Losses and Damage  From Divorce Harlan Jacobsen Copyright © 2003

Divorce Recovery 101

UPSETTING FACTORS       EMOTIONS, ETC.   CONDITION   "INSTEADS" Lost friends   Guilt    Up-tight Psychosomatic illness Loss of identity           Loneliness    Nervous Booze Loss of security  Anxiety about future   Stress      Drugs Loss of sex Fear           Sleeplessnes Workaholic Loss of location   Worry     Weight gain             Promiscuity Unable to cope   Weight loss       Withdrawal     Supermama

Why You need to move on from divorce

The trauma of divorce can be and probably will be the most trying and difficult time of your life.

You can have many upsetting factors in your life, such as the loss of a parent or loved one through death.

These are emotionally upsetting and hard to work through.

Divorce dumps a whole load of loss on you all at the same time. Listed above under Upsetting Factors are just a few of the traumatic losses most have to contend with.

Men, for example, may not lose security but are often put in a financial bind of the most traumatic kind by losing the results of years of labor in a few words from the judge.

He almost always has a loss of stable location, and almost always has a loss of contact with his children.

So both have it nearly equally as bad to work through.

The other always figures their ex has come out of it easier compared to them.

Various emotions (feelings) are set off that tie us up in knots.

Added to our load are loneliness and inability to cope with our new total responsibility for our own life.

We get so tied up in these emotions and new problems, we get hung up in a circle of self-defeating behavior.

We become something different.

A bundle of nerves, an up-tight person that eats like crazy to stop the pain in our stomach and gains twenty pounds or we stop eating because of the pain in our stomach and lose weight.

Our body is under constant stress from our fight or flight emotions and bodily reactions that get turned on but go nowhere.

Some of us cannot sleep regularly, and due to one emotion or another, become not only an emotional mess but a physical wreck.

Instead of dealing with and changing our self-defeating reactions and behaviors, we come up with "Insteads."

One of these is psychosomatic illnesses.

Dr. Benson states in his new book, "The Relaxation Response", that divorced people are twelve times as likely to come down with a major illness as someone the same age not undergoing this emotional trauma.

That widows are twice as likely to die in the first year after their mates' death as someone else the same age.

So "instead" of learning to handle and work through the stress, we do things to our own body unknowingly.

This is one of the reasons we say you just cannot afford to be hung up in the miseries of divorce trauma for any period of time.

Recent research indicates that most cancer patients had the emotional loss of a loved one 18 months before cancer was first diagnosed. Others take up an overindulgence in booze trying to quiet and appease their feelings. They are not drowning their troubles, they are irrigating them.

Many take to drugs as an "instead", either through their doctor giving them some prescription crutch or through the illicit market.

Some are committing suicide slowly since they lack the courage to do it all at once.

Chain smoking becomes sort of a trade mark of the nervous divorced, etc., etc.

Many get so wrapped up in their career and become a workaholic, they have little or no other life.

Going back to college is a good ego patch, but many become schoolaholics as an "instead".

Promiscuity is another "instead" common to newly divorced, often resulting in fragmentation, adding further to an overload of emotional adjustment situations.

Withdrawal from the world is another "instead" that is common.

Some I have met have been withdrawn for up to seven years before really venturing out.

The ones that get hung up there permanently (probably more common than we realize), we never meet.

Then we have the supermama who transfers her life over to living through others, probably the most tragic "instead" of all, both for "themselves" and the "others".

These are not complete lists and I am sure you can add to losses, emotions, insteads, and the whole bit.

We are not going to get into dealing with these things here and now and working through divorce to a happy single life in a short time.

We do that in the over 300 other articles.

 

Related Reading....7 Strategies to Move on, go here


Why You Need To Move on From Divorce