Have you visited T’s Quest For T blog yet? She has a great recent post about Divorce, In-laws and Facebook – made me scratch my head that her sister-in-law didn’t know she’d been an ex-sister-in-law for over three years! Well, anyway, more about T’s story. Yesterday T talked about finding her spirituality after her divorce. In our interview, she also told me that related to that was her feeling that to get past her divorce she had forgive and here’s how she learned to do that.
I felt that forgiveness would be the greatest help in getting past my marriage but I didn’t know how to do it. I can’t blindly let things go because I need to know why, it needs to feel good to me.
Well, many years ago, a friend had told me about a spiritual text called A Course in Miracles. I picked it up but it didn’t make one lick of sense to me so I put it back down and didn’t think about it again. When I was going through my divorce, the same friend told me there was a study group for A Course in Miracles and invited me along. I thought I’d try it.
The main tenet behind A Course in Miracles is peace, some sort of inner peace through forgiveness. I went to the group and started reading the book again and this time it all made sense. I think things show up in your life exactly when you need them. I think I couldn’t force it earlier – it didn’t fit me earlier but when I was at the lowest of the low and needed to heal, the option of forgiveness was huge and I’m very thankful for it.
There was a lot I needed to let go. I recognized at the end of my marriage that I was still very angry with at my father. He left my mom for another woman a good 14 years earlier and I thought I had let it go. But no. I’d just stuffed it down and ignored it. It came roaring back at the end of my marriage when my dad was trying to be supportive. I lashed out at him and I didn’t want anything to do with him. I had to revisit all of the pain I had stuffed so deeply within me and learn to forgive.
The Divorce Coach Says
I haven’t read A Course in Miracles, but I know from my own experience there’s forgiveness that has to happen. There were issues in my marriage in the very early years that I didn’t confront because I thought they would go away and I didn’t want to endanger the marriage. Those issues didn’t go away, surprise, surprise, and I was angry with myself. I needed to examine my reasons for choosing not to deal with those issues and most of all, I needed to stop beating myself up. I wrote in A Refrigerator List about the Dixie Chicks’ song, Not Ready To Make Nice being a strong motivator for me at the time of my break up. The song starts off,
Forgive, sounds good,
Forget, I don’t think I could ..