Sally knew her marriage wasn’t working and her spouse agreed to a three-month separation that turned into two years. She did go back to the marriage briefly but then decided to divorce knowing it was a huge risk…
Whatever you do is a huge risk. In my case, I divorced my husband but I still really loved him. There was a lot of love between us and I kept thinking, ‘How can this not work? What could work if love this strong can’t survive?’ Well, it wasn’t working and for a long time I was tormented by that. Then I came to accept that you say yes to something, you close doors to something. You say no to something, doors are going to eventually open elsewhere in inadvertent and unexpected ways.
What I learned was you have to trust that you jump off a cliff and there’s going to be some safety net. It wasn’t as though I had a certainty that there would be another man in my life or that I would be OK emotionally but somehow just trusting that even though I couldn’t explain it, I would be OK. It was trusting that if I did the best I could at that the time, then things would work out. I think a lot of it was just relaxing into whatever was to come ahead, without certainty.
Pema Chodron’s book, When Things Fall Apart definitely helped clarify my decision. And it helped bring a sense of an inner rudder, an inner wisdom which cultivated more trust in the sense that the universe provides.
The Divorce Coach Says
Believing in yourself, trusting that you will find your path is a common theme I hear from women after their divorce. And when Sally talked about finding her inner rudder I was reminded of Melanie Mulhall who talked about our Inner Guidance System. If you don’t know what this is then hop over to Melanie’s blog and read her post Internal Guidance System. It’s worth the few minutes you’ll spend. We all have an Internal Guidance System – we just don’t always know it’s there or really listen to it. I’ve been working at trusting mine more and more.