Circling through all the cycles of divorce

MAXINE COHEN

I was at Gulfstream, having lunch with a friend. The place was

jammed, and that’s a big place when you consider all the outside

seating.

I often wonder how all those restaurants and shopping centers can

be so full. I remember when the Bristol Farms shopping center wasn’t

there. I thought we needed another gourmet market like we needed a

hole in our head, and I guess, I was partially right and partially

wrong. It pushed the Farmers Market at Atrium Court out of the

grocery business, but Bristol Farms and the other shops in the center

are certainly busy, as is evident every time I try to find a parking

place.

So, my friend and I were eating lunch when I noticed a couple

being seated at the booth right next to us. Actually, I had a

straight shot since our booth was at the end, and I was sitting in

the corner seat, facing them directly.

I could feel it right away. This was no friendly meeting. The

tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife (sorry about the

cliche, but it’s true).

They spoke in low hissing tones, as if their jaws were clenched or

their teeth were gnashed together. Almost as if they wanted to spit

on each other had they not been in a public place. And maybe that was

the point, to be in a public place so neither one of them could lose

it and things would not get out of hand.

From what I heard, she was upset with him for not picking up and

delivering the children on time, and he was upset that she was not

adhering to the visitation schedule that they’d agreed on. Round and

round they went, making little if any progress, which was no big

surprise, given how they’d felt to me.

Clearly, this couple is in the throes of a divorce. I can’t

imagine why they would think they could resolve anything face to

face. That has certainly not been my experience of couples who are

divorcing. They just go round and round, doing the same relationship

dance they danced in the marriage, now in the divorce.

The divorce rate has been remarkably stable for years, not that

that’s good news since it hovers around 50%. That means one out of

every two marriages will dissolve. And even scarier than that is the

fact that marriages of less than one year’s duration have a 67%

chance of failing.

Getting divorced is a horrendous life passage. When it happens to

you, it feels like you’ve been thrust on a journey with no map to

find your way and no one to come to your rescue when you need help.

There is one unanticipated horrid surprise after another, and the

very person you used to rely on and trust is now your adversary, if

not your outright enemy. The journey is longer and harder than you’d

ever imagined, given how many people go on it and seem to survive,

and it feels like there’s never going to be any light at the end of

the tunnel.

So, just how do you get through a divorce? In its simplest form,

you grieve. No two ways about it. For the family constellation as it

has been, your hopes and dreams for the future, the myth of what

family should be like, holiday celebrations, the marital

relationship, your children and their loss and pain, and for your

shattered sense of fairness and integrity. These are huge losses,

compounded by the fact that whatever goodness was left in the

marriage, even if very little by the end, it is way more than you’ve

got right now, plus an adversary to boot.

The first stage of grieving is shock and denial. The shock is that

this is happening and to you. The denial takes two forms. If you’re

the person who initiated the breakup, you feel relief; you’ve finally

done it after years of misery. If you’re the other spouse, you can’t

believe that your wife/husband has changed so much and really wants

to divorce you.

Next comes anger, and there’s usually lots of it. It takes the

form of blaming your spouse for all the things he/she did that

wrecked the marriage and that are now making the divorce a living

hell. There is little attention paid to looking at yourself, the

injury runs so deep.

This is squarely where our dining couple was. Each faulting the

other for minor infractions, probably designed to get the other’s

goat anyway.

This is a hard stage, and it can go on for a long time. It’s the

marital dance, being danced still, and with a vengeance, in the

divorce. For the ways in which you and your spouse respond to one

another are deeply ingrained and not easily amenable to change,

married or not. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that anger forces each spouse to create

psychological distance from the other and to make decisions that are

good for him/herself, rather than considering what’s good for the

couple.

The next stage is ambivalence and this is the hallmark of divorce.

For there are always ways in which the marriage was good, or it

wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. Ambivalence is a

back-and-forth process of vacillating between wanting to end the

marriage and hoping that you could get back together and it’d work

given all the ways in which you can see that your spouse has already

changed.

Being in limbo is the most painful part of the passage, and it

lasts the longest. Not knowing whether you’re really going to have to

take the loss stalls the grieving and keeps people stuck in it.

Depression comes next. This is loss, massive loss, which can no

longer be denied. The feelings of sadness and despair cannot be kept

at bay. You cry and cry and can’t stop. Life feels beyond hard,

possibly without hope that it’ll ever feel good again, and there

seems no end in sight.

Depression, though painful, is useful because it makes you look at

yourself and the part you played in wrecking the marriage. It forces

you to stop blaming your spouse. This is where most of the inner work

takes place so that you can learn who you are and from that

knowledge, learn to trust yourself so that you can risk being in

another relationship and not be overwhelmed with fear that you will

wreck the new one, too, in ways that you don’t understand.

The final stage is acceptance. Yes, we’re getting divorced. Yes,

we will all survive and rebuild. Yes, life can be good again. There

is hope.

The process of moving through these five stages is not linear. You

cycle back and forth through them, and you can be in more than one

stage at the same time. Finally, though, as you truly move through

the emotions, you will reach a place inside of yourself where you

feel calm and peaceful and hopeful about the future. Because in the

final analysis, whether you remarry or not doesn’t matter. What

matters is that you build a new life for yourself that fits who you

are becoming. It’s the level of satisfaction that you derive from

that that will determine your recovery from the divorce.

Being truly divorced is not about the legal dissolution of the

union. Some couples remain emotionally married years after their

official divorce date. Being truly divorced is about letting go of

the marital dance. It’s about not responding to your ex in the same

way when he/she does the same old thing which used to drive you

skyward. No, you’re not in love anymore. But the opposite of love

isn’t hate. It’s indifference.

The couple lunching at Gulfstream was far from indifferent.

Clenched jaws and hissed words do not speak indifference. They were

squarely in the anger stage and also in the ambivalence, or they

wouldn’t have met face to face. It will be a long road, but hopefully

they will arrive at a place where they can dance together differently

as a way of honoring what they have meant to each other and for the

sake of those they both love.

* MAXINE COHEN is a Corona del Mar resident and a marriage and

family therapist practicing in Newport Beach whose column will appear

regularly. She can be reached at maxinecohen@adelphia.net or (949)

644-6435.