Love Coach Blog

Divorce can be a devastating ordeal, and recovering from divorce can be a difficult, treacherous road. Sometimes people don’t recover at all. Others, although appearing to be past their divorce, still carry the pain of the breakup and the fear of getting close to a partner again.

A breakup of a non marital relationship can be just as devastating as a divorce. The pain can be intense even if the relationship did not last a long time.

Below are 10 ways to help you recover from a divorce or breakup, get your life back on track, and guarantee a bright relationship future for yourself. These steps will show you how to heal deeply and re-create your life and your relationships to be far more fulfilling then before the breakup.

1. Grieve deeply and completely.

Many times people are terrified of their dark feelings, such as sadness, depression, anger, etc. The intensity of these feelings can seem strong enough to take hold of your soul completely. But you need to know that although these feelings are indeed strong, they will not last forever. Nor will feeling these feelings in some way damage you or destroy you. You will feel better once you allow yourself to feel.

On the other hand, if you do not feel the dark feelings arising in you as a result of the breakup, they will last forever and will deeply affect your life and future relationships.

Go ahead and feel your feelings. Feel the anger, the sadness, the betrayal, the confusion. Avoid going into your head and obsessing instead of feeling. Avoid overeating or using other addictions to escape your feelings.

This is your dark night of the soul, the time to dip into your feelings. Feel your feelings now, and you will be free to move on with your life post-divorce or post-breakup.

2. Grieve for the future of your marriage/relationship, which now will never be.

When people come together in a commitment, many dreams and hopes are created. These are not simple to let go of, because we use dreams and hopes to guide us to our future. Look into what dreams and hopes you had created for your relationship. Then separately grieve for each one.
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If you read Robert Bly and Robert Moore, you will learn that men need to go on a hero’s quest to claim their full masculinity.

These two insightful authors and countless others perceive the problems of men in our society as a lack of opportunity to grow up. There are no longer quests to fulfill. Men are no longer asked to grow in valor and strength of character, and they are no longer asked to mature emotionally.

I believe the current problems of men and women in relationships have something to do with a lack of hero’s journey in men’s lives. Not that women are completely innocent, as you will see as you read this article.

Women think nothing of pursuing men, putting up with bad relationship behavior. Women excuse men for being emotionally distant, physically and emotionally evasive, abusive, workaholic, unskilled relationally and generally hard to be in a love relationship with. Granted, not all men are hard to love, but many are, and many women and families, including men themselves, are suffering because of this and seeking a way to fix their relationship.

One of the things that would help men be more relational and create happier relationships would be to undertake a hero’s journey to intimacy.

Single Man’s Hero Journey

What can you do if you are a single man who’s been unlucky in love?

A single man’s hero journey to intimacy
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A client of mine was going through a very rough patch in her relationship. She wanted deep soulful connection and true partnership. He ran from the connection and she was angry with that most of the time. Even though this was a very obvious issue in the relationship, the man she was dating kept telling her that they just needed to “try to get along.”

They went to therapy to try to save the relationship, but he refused to look into his past for any clues as to why just getting along was enough and why he was refusing and running from the deep connection she was wanting. Because of this they tried to use the therapy to help them get along more and it didn’t help much.

This is how many people try to save their relationship – by trying harder to get along. What they don’t realize is that trying harder to get along does not work. Good intentions to get along or do better won’t work until both people stop and address the real issues in their relationship. The real issues in relationships are typically about not enough connection and always have their genesis in the past of each person.

So what do you do if you are struggling in your relationship, if you go from good to bad and back again, if you are trying to be connected and work it out, but can’t?

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Lately I have been struck by how much we let our interpretation of love and life rather than the facts guide our lives. Let me give you some examples. Many of these will not be about love or relationships, but bare with me and I will bring all this around to love:

• A business owner is struggling to make ends meet. He has more clients then ever on a client roster, but they are not using his services. A suggestion is made that he come up with alternative services or products that people on his client roster would buy. He laughs it off. He says he must be tired and that is why his clients are not coming in. Reality says one thing but, not wanting to face reality, he comes up with an explanation that will give him something to do but will not give him a solution.

• A retainer client of a business owner starts to use much more time than the retainer covers. The business owner gently asks for either a reduction of time or an increase in the retainer. The client thinks he is being taken advantage of, gets angry and leaves. In reality the business owner was trying to take care of the client, but the client’s mistaken interpretation wins and he ends up without the services he was benefiting from.

• A woman believes that she is not as good as others. No matter how many people tell her how wonderful she is, this belief persists and colors her life. Even faced with overwhelming evidence that she is desirable, she tends to cling to her belief. This costs her time, happiness and connections with people who care about her.

• A sleep-deprived man who does not like to go to sleep early finds nightly excuses to stay up. His health, his relationships, his sense of well being and ability function suffer greatly. Yet nightly he still finds reasons to stay up, caught in the perpetual illusion that he is getting things done while staying up. In interpreting events to fit what he wants – to stay up - with each night’s loss of sleep he is less healthy, less productive and more alone.

• A man continues to pressure a woman to resume a relationship she ended with him a year earlier. He initiates all the contact; she barely responds. Occasionally they meet for lunch, but most of the time she avoids him. He reinterprets each contact, initiated by him, as her wanting to be connected to him. As a result, he remains trapped in a non-existent relationship while his life is passing him by.

• A woman dates emotionally shut-down men, hoping each time that the man will warm up and open up once he falls in love with her. The men continue to be shut down and emotionally unavailable, and yet she still keeps the hope. Her misinterpretation that the emotional shut down would go away with time keeps her trapped in relationships that will never give her the love and closeness she wants.

I could go on and on, giving example after example of people making choices according to their interpretation of events, while reality is screaming loudly in their ear to wake up and make different choices. This is especially true in love,
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