Two Things My Divorce DIDN’T Mean
By Rae Gaelyn Emerson, CPLC, CCRC, CDRC, MCC, CMC, CPC-S
Once upon a time, I felt LOTS of relief and gratitude about the state of my recovering marriage. We’d survived a solid decade of therapy and recovery, and we were healing together from the relational impact of sex addiction and betrayal trauma.
So when our marriage ended ten years into our recovery timeline, it’s fair to say “that wasn’t on my bingo card.” Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of having my second marriage end in divorce, and it took me longer than I’d hoped (we’re talking years) to finally feel like a whole living person again.
During those early post-divorce years, I found myself sorting through cognitive distortions about nearly everything—including countless beliefs I’d held about addiction, recovery and relationships. As I bravely challenged (and often changed) those beliefs over time, several rose to the top as powerful realizations, points that served to reframe some of the most painful perspectives I suffered during and after my divorce.
Today, it’s my privilege to share just two of these beloved reframes with you. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, feeling or believing these cognitive distortions about divorce—either your own or somebody else’s—I hope that you will join me in considering a different perspective.
#1: My divorce DIDN’T mean that I didn’t fight hard enough.
Let’s begin with a moment of truth: I fought long and hard for my marriage.
If anything, I fought too hard and too long. I fought even when doing so involved sacrificing myself. I fought when those I loved and trusted suggested that perhaps I shouldn’t continue the fight. I fought the day I stood in my attorney’s office, desperate to give our marriage every last chance at survival, deciding (against my attorney’s advice) to request “legal separation” instead of “dissolution of marriage.” And as strange as it still sounds (even to me), I fought for our marriage one final time as I stared at my reflection in our bathroom mirror, 48 hours after learning that he’d chosen divorce; on that day I vowed to myself, “I will do this divorce with dignity,” using a permanent marker to scrawl that statement boldly across the mirror, determined to honor my commitment and conviction to the very end.
Frankly, if my “fight” alone could have saved us, I’d likely still be married, because (a) I was never someone who avoided tough battles, and (b) I believe that “together, we can do hard things.”
In the end, I found myself facing the painful reality that “fighting harder” was NOT the answer; if any way forward existed for us as a couple, that solution needed to involve my husband fighting our battles himself for a while, allowing me to rest and recover from years of overexertion. But ultimately, that’s not what happened. Instead, the end of our marriage underscored an uncomfortable fact, one I’d previously known but had temporarily forgotten: while it takes TWO people to mutually create and sustain a healthy relationship, it only takes ONE person to progressively decimate and unilaterally terminate it.
Like trying to squeeze water from a time-hardened rock, “fighting harder” wouldn’t have changed the outcome for my marriage; it only would have rendered my own hands more bruised, broken and bloody from my relentless effort. In the end, I stopped trying to achieve a two-person result with one-person capacity. That new approach didn’t save my marriage, but it DID eventually save me.
#2: My divorce DIDN’T mean that I wasn’t worth keeping.
This one really challenged my capacity for logic! After all, what was I supposed to think when my husband decided to call it quits? Despite an historically strong sense of self-love and self-esteem, I struggled to bridge an apparent gap between his subjective actions (that implied I must be worth discarding), and my prevailing hope (that insisted I must be worth keeping).
It would have been easy to presume that I was the problem—that something about me was obviously lacking, or I wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a divorce I desperately didn’t, losing a man whom I still deeply loved. It would have been easy to accept this development as an automatic reduction in my personhood, my switch from an identity I’d long treasured (my husband’s wife) to one I’d long dreaded (a double divorcée). It would have been easy to believe the lie that I just don’t have that “special something” it takes to make a marriage successful, that vague sense of “staying power” others seemed to possess and manifest within their still-surviving relationships.
All of that would have been easy, but it wouldn’t have been RIGHT.
And that’s where my sense of “fight” took a different and dramatic turn. Still aching with the pain of my husband’s abandonment, I realized that if I wanted to survive the vacancy I felt in his wake, I’d need to get serious about building a new life that I loved with as much passion as I’d once loved him. I needed to evolve into someone I knew *I* would never abandon—someone who would always deserve and desire my own love and fidelity.
So I rolled up my proverbial sleeves and got to work, resurrecting that depleted idea of “fighting like hell” for someone I cherished. But this time, I made MYSELF the sole beneficiary of that intention and investment. I dove headlong into self-rediscovery, supplementing my admittedly limited energy with a surprisingly limitless supply of courage. I measured my progress exclusively in increments of my own authentic wellbeing, and I enhanced my journey through connections with others who honored my process instead of undermining it. I invited their observations and appreciated their involvement, but I never prioritized their instincts or insights above my own, lest I risk repeating a pattern I didn’t dare perpetuate.
It didn’t happen overnight, nor is there a definite line of demarcation between then and now. But ultimately, inspired by my commitment to rebuild my life, I have embraced the conclusion that I am indeed a woman worth keeping. Divorce will always be part of my story, but it isn’t a reflection on my value. Divorce meant that my marriage ended (no more and no less), but it didn’t mean that I failed at marriage. And today my life is an experience I’m thrilled to continue exploring, one day at a time, regardless of my relationship status.
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Are there beliefs YOU struggle to reframe about betrayal-related divorce? If so, I want to hear about them! Email me at [email protected], or visit me online at www.healingtalksback.com.
Originally written for Turning to Peace Magazine, published by Ellia Marcum of Moodwell Coaching