Feeling stuck after divorce rarely has anything to do with the paperwork; it happens when the marriage is legally over, but your heart and your head are still living inside it.
One of the interesting things about marriages is that there are actually two endings. There is the official ending, the divorce, when the agreements are completed, documents are signed, finances are separated, attorneys are paid, and eventually you realize there are no more decisions to negotiate. Then there is the other ending, the one that can be much harder to recognize, when you finally stop living emotionally and mentally inside the “what could have been” fantasy of the relationship.
For some women, those two endings happen fairly close together. For others, they can be years apart, and this gap creates a post-divorce crisis that prevents you from moving on with life.
I see this particularly with women who have spent a long time trying to understand what happened, and that makes complete sense because reflection after divorce can be incredibly valuable. You may need time to understand the choices you made, the things you tolerated, the warning signs you missed, or the ways you changed yourself to make the marriage work. There are lessons in all of that, and I would never suggest that the answer is simply to forget about the past and move on.
When Reflection Turns Into Feeling Stuck After Divorce
The problem comes when reflection starts to become the status quo in your life.
You probably know the place I mean. It is the land of “coulda, woulda, shoulda,” where you replay conversations and think about what you should have said, what you could have done differently, or what you wish you had understood ten years earlier. You look back at decisions you made when you were thirty-five or forty-five using everything you now know at fifty or sixty and wonder how you could possibly have made those choices.
Stop Putting Your Younger Self On Trial
The reality is you did the best you could with what you had at the time. You didn’t have the lived experience, life lessons, or perhaps the support you have now.
I often ask women to consider this because we can be remarkably unfair to our younger selves. We expect her to have known things she couldn’t possibly have known, to have recognized patterns she had never experienced before, and to have made decisions using wisdom she hadn’t had the opportunity to develop. If there are lessons to take from those experiences, absolutely take them, but there comes a point when continuing to put your past decisions on trial isn’t helping you create anything new.
Making The Shift
The more interesting question then becomes what you are going to do with everything you know now.
This is where I think life after divorce can become much more interesting, because one of the biggest challenges isn’t simply letting go of the marriage. It is recognizing how many limiting and negative beliefs about yourself may have come out of that marriage with you.
The Limiting Beliefs You Carried Out Of Your Marriage
Maybe you spent years believing you weren’t good with money because your husband always handled the finances. Perhaps you were told you were too emotional, too demanding, too independent, not independent enough, bad at making decisions, difficult to please, or incapable of doing certain things without someone else’s help. Maybe nobody said those things directly, or maybe they repeated them over and over, but you learned to keep the peace, second-guess yourself, avoid conflict, or make everyone else’s needs more important than your own.
How Playing Small Keeps You Stuck
This is where I see women unintentionally begin to play small in their new lives; they have not let go of all that crap. An opportunity comes along, and the first thought is, “I can’t do that.” They think about traveling somewhere on their own, changing careers, starting a business, moving to a different city, going back to school, dating again, deciding they don’t want to date at all, or simply doing something completely different because it sounds interesting, and almost immediately another voice starts screaming in their head all the reasons it isn’t practical.
Our Blind Spots
Those negative voices in our heads can be extremely convincing. This is also why I believe it can be so difficult to make this transition entirely by yourself. We all have blind spots, and we are especially good at defending the beliefs we have carried for a long time. What sounds completely logical inside our own heads may sound very different when someone sitting across from us asks, “But is that actually true?”
What A Good Divorce Coach Actually Does
That is one of the things I value most about coaching. A good coach isn’t there to tell you what your new life should look like or hand you a checklist for becoming some fabulous post-divorce version of yourself. She is there to listen closely enough to notice when you keep repeating the same story and to care enough to ask whether that story still deserves to be running your life.
Sometimes that means asking where a belief came from or whether it still fits the woman you are today. Sometimes it means asking what you would choose if you weren’t worried about disappointing someone or what you might try if you weren’t so focused on getting it right the first time.
Moving Out Of Victim Mode Without Minimizing Your Pain
And yes, sometimes it means gently challenging you when you get stuck in victim mode.
I know that phrase can make people uncomfortable, because there are women who have been genuinely victimized in their marriages and divorces. There may have been betrayal, financial abuse, manipulation, infidelity, coercion, or years of high conflict, and acknowledging what happened is an important part of understanding your experience. Moving forward does not require you to minimize any of it, excuse anyone’s behavior, or pretend something wasn’t painful when it absolutely was.
Looking Forward Instead Of Backward
There are opportunities you may not even notice when most of your attention is directed backward. There are people you haven’t met yet, places you haven’t been, things you haven’t tried, and parts of yourself you haven’t had a reason to discover. Some of those things may be significant, while others may be wonderfully ordinary, but you can’t fully explore them if you are still measuring everything against the life you thought you were going to have.
I think this is where divorce has the potential to become something more than simply a painful event you survived. I don’t believe we need to call divorce a gift or insist that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes difficult things happen and we would have been perfectly happy not to experience them.
What Your Divorce Taught You About Yourself
What we do get to decide is what we are going to do with the experience now that it is part of our story. If you do the work, you will know things about yourself today that you didn’t know before. You have made difficult decisions, handled uncomfortable conversations, lived through uncertainty, and probably discovered both strengths and vulnerabilities you hadn’t fully recognized. Your priorities may have changed, your tolerance for certain behaviors may be very different, and the things that once seemed incredibly important may not matter nearly as much anymore.
Who Am I Now, And Where Do I Want To Go From Here?
So rather than spending all your energy asking how you can get your old life back, I believe there is a more useful question to explore. It is simple, but very powerful, and I will leave you with it today.
Who am I now, and where do I want to go from here?
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About the Author:
Mardi Winder-Adams is an Executive and Leadership Coach, Certified Divorce Transition Coach, and a Credentialed Distinguished Mediator in Texas. She has experienced her own divorce, moved to a new country and started her own business, and worked through the challenges of being a caregiver and managing the loss of a spouse.
Handling life transitions and pivots is her specialty! In her professional role as a divorce coach, Mardi has helped hundreds of women before, during, and after divorce to reduce the emotional and financial costs of the process. She is the founder of Positive Communication Systems, LLC.
