When your life is falling apart from divorce: how to heal now

Parinaz Shams

Sit down, get your journal open, and take a breath because we are getting DEEP.

Let’s find out what's really going on when it feels like your life is falling apart after a bad divorce or a break-up with a partner, spouse, even a close friend.

Now, this is something near and dear to me. I have experienced more than once the feeling like my entire life was fully being pulled apart at the seams because of my relationship.

And if you are someone who has gone through this or is currently going through this I want you to pause, take a deep breath. Trust that you are okay and you are not alone.

My personal ambition for this blog post is to bring you some clarity. Also, you can listen to this topic on my Podcast. Now, Let's dive in.

When your life is falling apart, it's undeniably a very disorienting, very scary, and uncomfortable place to be because everything you've worked so hard for, everything that you've been putting in place, is not working.

It makes the rest of your life feel like it’s about to snap, too. Your job performance. Relationship with friends, other family members. Kids if it applies. It all goes on ice.

Here are the 2 main reasons your life feels like it's about to snap in the midst of a relationship ending:

1. You’ve given your heart, your trust, loyalty, and time to another person only to find out:

• Your relationship isn't what you thought it was.

• The person that you committed yourself to has now turned their back on you.

• The person you love, the person you share yourself with turns out to be something other than what you expected.

2. The reality that YOU created and chose for yourself now feels like a lie, which makes you mistrust + judge yourself.

When kindness escapes other people, you feel like they betrayed your trust in them.

You say, “How can this person suddenly be so cold, so heartless, and no longer care for me at all?”

What I’ve found to be true, is although that person’s sudden ice shoulder does hurt you,

the actual pain you feel deep down in your gut is because you feel that you have betrayed YOURSELF.

As you watch your former partner/spouse turn cold, you realize you chose them.

This means you must have missed something along the way, which then means you let yourself down along the way, knowingly or unknowingly.

And you beat yourself up by saying, “How could I have been so stupid?” “What is WRONG with me?!”

Then the shame, self-blame, and guilt set in….

Am I right? Have you felt that before?

This is where we start to mistrust ourselves…

We walk around after the relationship wounded...saying things like:

“I don’t trust men.” or “All women are crazy."

But really what's going on is that we can’t make sense of our own feelings of self-betrayal.

So, we don’t date. We self-medicate. We hold back. We shut down….

But if you can get honest with yourself…really see that your pain is not the other person at all, but it's your need to forgive yourself for the mistake you think you made, you’re ready to heal.

In that same moment, you’re ready to love again.

But, what if that moment of seeing yourself and moving beyond the hurt and the anger feels really far away?

Well, that's ok. I've been there, too. Wanting to not be angry and closed off, but feeling so hurt and exhausted I didn't know what else to do.

As you're sitting there emotionally exhausted, wounded, and wondering how you got here….

Feeling so unclear as to how it started and where you went wrong...

That is called being "pinned to the wall by life."

This is a moment we absolutely DREAD.

We have to start over, but we aren't sure we know how. We don't trust our own choices + intuition and we live in fear of the past repeating.

We have to reshape reality and it doesn’t seem fair or even possible because of how deserted + depleted we feel at the moment.

Sound like you? Like somewhere you’ve been?

As I said, me too. My relationships have fallen apart more than once. It was a pattern in my life, actually for a long time,

Before I understood what it actually meant when things fall apart.

One romantic partner after another would end in lying, deceit, heart-breaking anger + bitterness.

Every time my relationship would fall apart and I would feel bruised, belittled, judged, and alone, I thought the world was out to get me. I thought men were bad. I thought this was life…shitty people doing shitty things for no real reason.

What I didn’t know then...

And what I had to discover for myself - was that every time I was pinned to the wall by life, I was standing at a fork in the path of my life.

I could stay closed off and only date on a superficial level, holding onto blame and mistrust, or...

I could see this falling apart as the universe working in my favor. Showing me the parts of myself that need to be healed, clarified, and revisited with more honest eyes so that I can move forward and find love that does serve me.

Here's the punch-line:

You're being invited by the universe to rebuild your relationship with yourself when life with another falls apart.

Take a moment and invite in the possibility that maybe your path is also starting to unfold from a much bigger perspective.

When things are falling apart, you are being shown exactly what you really need to thrive, to love, and to be happy.

In other words, things MUST break apart to make space for what you're really meant for, for what really serves you, and what's really going to inspire you in life.

There's a Rumi poem that I want to share:

“ I say to my heart,

'not again, not a new love, all that suffering'.

The friend, who is also my heart, says,

'I bring you new wonders and beauty.

This hesitation is simply your pride'.”

This poem, I think, encapsulates what goes on when we feel like life is falling apart, we're starting to say,

"No, no, no, no, not that this is the thing I've worked so hard for!"

And something else within us is saying, “No, you DO need to let this go. This has to dissolve.”

That wiser, calmer part of you knows that this relationship was started - to some degree - out of expectation, comparison, and judgment of yourself or others.

It was started from your mind, verses from your awareness.

So it's time now to rebuild a relationship with your awareness. Your inner wisdom. Your true self.

How?

Let me show you by telling you a story about my client Stacey who experienced exactly this.

Stacey came to me because she just felt alone and unhappy with her life.