How To Move On After Divorce & The Most Important Quality You Need To Find Happiness
Do this for yourself.
unsplash/Larm Rmah Figuring out how to move on after divorce is really challenging because the end of your marriage itself is so traumatic.
Loneliness takes over and your life gets ripped apart all at once and again and again. You struggle to find happiness, a new equilibrium, and a new way of living — on your own.
Dealing with divorce is kind of like facing a huge, catastrophic earthquake followed by all these aftershocks of varying intensities (like a nasty text from your ex, selling your home, or paying child support instead of living with your children every day).
But, eventually, you'll be able to complete your healing and move on from the end of your marriage. Post-divorce care is essential for you to have a happy life once more.
You might believe that your divorce recovery is subject to the whims of others like your ex, your attorney, the judge, or even your kids. And you’d be right, but only partially and only slightly.
The biggest determining factor in your healing after divorce is your peaceful core.
A peaceful core is that place you can go to on the inside where you feel calm and powerful. Nothing can shake you when you’re at this place of peace.
You can often discover new ideas to help you on your healing journey when you regularly spend time with your inner calm.
In his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale writes, "A peaceful mind generates power."
And I completely agree with him.
It’s only when you remove yourself from the distractions of all the aftershocks of your divorce that you’ll find the powerful thoughts that will help you speed your healing after divorce.
Are you worried that you aren’t sure how to reach your peaceful core or if you even have one?
Here’s a great exercise I learned from John Addison of Success Magazine that will help you get in touch with your inner calm:
Close your eyes and picture a moment when you were at complete peace. It could be a time when you were 5 years old or just last week. The when doesn’t matter. What does matter is the experience and how vividly you can remember it.
Now, I’ll bet that if you really let yourself fully relive just that moment of complete peace you’ve got a smile on your face.
This place of pure contented peace is your peaceful core.
Since you now know what your peaceful core is, you can purposefully build it.
By doing so, you’ll find it to be the bedrock of strength you can call on to help you recover from your divorce and move on with your life no matter what challenges you face along the way.
You’re probably wondering how to build that inner bedrock of strength so you can live a happier life after divorce.
You do it by creating more experiences of complete peace and there are 5 ways to do it.
1. Regularly spend time enjoying a calming and rejuvenating hobby
Some hobbies are stressful or frustrating.
If you have any stressful hobbies that you enjoy, it's great to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone — they lead to improved self-confidence when you become proficient at them.
But they’re different from the hobbies I’m talking about. These recreational activities are the ones you can lose yourself in and feel completely at peace doing.
Gardening, dancing, stamp collecting, and writing are examples of hobbies that I’ve heard some people say they can lose themselves in. (Dancing and gardening both work for me, personally.)
2. Enjoy nature
Spending time outside listening to the birds singing, watching the clouds move leisurely across the sky, or feeling the grass beneath your feet are all ways to disconnect from the hectic pace of divorce and slow things down.
Nature has a way of healing bodies, minds, and souls that most of us don’t take advantage of often enough. Who knows, your next experience of calm could be waiting for you right now just outside your front door.
3. Meditate or pray
These practices are all about creating peace and have been advocated as doing so for thousands of years. (There’s plenty of current research that supports this.)
If you need some suggestions for how to get started with meditation, you can check out YouTube or listen to this 2-minute guided meditation I’ve put together.
4. Listen to a particular song or type of music
Music can completely transport you. I listen to music to help me express emotions or just to relax. (I love to listen to Mozart when I want to happily relax.)
What music can you completely lose yourself in? Listen to more of it to build your peaceful core.
5. Develop an attitude conducive to peace
This includes genuine happiness, gratitude, and perspective. It’s really hard to be peaceful if you’re consistently feeling attached or miserable.
However, if you can shift your perspectives to ones of happiness, gratitude and thoughtful responsiveness instead of reactivity you’ll discover that peace comes more naturally to you.
Yes, I know I might be starting a bit of a chicken-or-egg discussion here, but does it really matter? I don’t think so.
The goal is to increase your experiences of peace. So do what you can whenever you can to shift your attitude toward peace.
(Once I got past the chicken-or-egg nature of this suggestion, I was able to create a whole lot more calm in my life by shifting my attitude.)
Moving on after the divorce process can be a struggle. And just because you develop the skill of experiencing your peaceful core doesn’t mean that you’ll never lose touch with it again as you continue your healing after divorce.
What it does mean is that the inevitable aftershocks won’t throw your equilibrium off as a must. You’ll find it easier to deal with and move forward from whatever challenges you face.
And before you know it you’ll be living a new life as a confident, calm recently single person instead of a frazzled recently divorced one.
Dr. Karen Finn is a divorce coach helping clients with their challenges surviving infidelity. If you want help understanding what to do next to overcome your challenges, reach out to Karen by emailing her for a private discussion about the best next steps for you to take.
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