Your divorce has thrown you into a very lonely place full of conflicted feelings of rejection and longing, love and hate, remorse and rage, not to mention sadness and relief. While you used to have a counterpart to help you through hard times, now you are on your own without a solid grasp on who you are as an individual. This is what I refer to as the “Panic of the I.”
Rediscovering your sense of SELF after a divorce can be one of the most vital and challenging journeys that you will experience. In your marriage, you may have relied on your “we”, your partnership, to such a degree that your sense of SELF, or your “I” took a backseat.
During marriage, there may be the assumption, conscious or unconscious, that you can be “saved” by your spouse. When a marriage dissolves, that safe harbor is lost with it. If your value and sense of security was too dependent on your attachment to your spouse, it can be very frightening to envision life on your own.
In order to, heal and rebuild your identity, you must gain the courage to take responsibility for your own life and you underdeveloped independence.
The collapse of your marriage is not an accident. In order to understand it you must view it from the perspective of a greater purpose and not just an event to “get over.” The pain that you are experiencing should be used as a catalyst to reinvent your SELF.
Ultimately the process of rediscovering your “I” will get you from ruin to renewal, but it requires a significant amount of introspection, which may stem as far back as the parent/child relationship where you learned the basic concepts of love.
In my next blog post, I’ll dig deeper into some common reasons for your underdeveloped “I”.
Visit at – drdeborahhecker.com