My Marriage Counselor Was Right About One Little Thing
The trauma from my divorce left me feeling dead inside.
Maria Surtu | Shutterstock “Welcome back,” says my friend.
We are chatting on the phone the night before we are all supposed to meet and go out. At first, I’m not sure what she means and then a few minutes later she says it again.
“Colleen,” she says. “Welcome back my friend.”
“I am starting to feel like myself again,” I say.
“You are yourself again,” she says.
Not long before this conversation, I had FaceTimed my niece. My sister came into the frame.
“Oh my gosh,” she says. “You look like you. You look like yourself. You look like Colleen again. You’re back.”
I hear my sister but I attribute it to losing some of the divorce weight. And getting my hair cut like I used to. Even I can see the physical resemblance to my old self.
Scratch that.
I don’t want to phrase it that way. I’m tired of talking about myself in a before and after. The kind that a divorce creates. The one that leaves you straddling between two worlds. There is no old and new me or back to-myself me.
There is just me. One who can see the physical shedding of a traumatic and abusive divorce. The weight loss is restoring the natural shape of my face. Not the inflated sadness of divorce.
It took a night out and a conversation with a friend to realize how often I hear people tell me I look and sound like me again. They tell me I’m that — overly happy big joy of life girl — who is always smiling and laughing again.
They tell me how much they’ve missed her. It surprises me a bit. Because I have felt happy these past several years. At the same time, I know they are right. There is something different about me: an unexpected restoration.
It’s not only the weight and the hair. I had walled a part of myself off from the world. I no longer loved being in the middle of the crowd. I no longer wanted to go out. I limited myself socially. It was unnatural for this overly social youngest of five. But I convinced myself it was. I told myself I couldn’t afford to do everything I used to do. I told myself it was OK I just wasn’t who I used to be anymore. I told myself it made sense. I told myself I had outgrown some of what I used to have boundless interest and energy in.
But a large part of me was dead inside. I had closed myself off. And I had become content with that. I had surrendered to a "before and after" Colleen. Call it what you will — an attempt to recover from a long and traumatic divorce. A desire to heal from a man who wanted to destroy me, not divorce me. A sense of relief that I could live a solitary life because I had finally freed myself from a man.
Call it a coping mechanism. Call it a desire to avoid future heartache.
The girl who loved people didn’t love people anymore. She just wanted to get through her day. She just wanted to figure out her problems. She just wanted to financially support herself. She just wanted to be independent again. She just wanted to focus on her children.
But then she met a guy. At the same moment, she was physically reclaiming herself. It was the perfect timing. And she no longer felt dead inside.
“Isn’t great to know you were always still in there,” says another one of my friends. “I knew you were even though you protested. I knew you were always the same girl. You were just temporarily dormant after all that you’ve been through but you’re back.”
I think that’s a good way to put it. I felt dead inside. But I wasn’t. I was dormant and lying in wait.
As my marriage counselor once told me, “Colleen your rose-colored glasses have turned black. But once a core confident happy girl, always a happy girl. The pendulum has just swung very far to one side but one day it will shift back to the center.”
It took a very long time. But my marriage counselor was right.
Colleen Sheehy Orme is a national relationship columnist, journalist, and former business columnist. She writes about love, life, relationships, family, parenting, divorce, and narcissism.