Time Will Not Heal Your Divorce Wounds
Expecting time to heal all of your divorce wounds is not a long term strategy. It’s like noticing you have a flat tire and saying, “Well, time will fix it.” Time alone won’t fix broken things.
We steer ourselves in the wrong direction by paying attention only to our feelings when it comes to time and healing. We feel bad, and we want to feel better. We feel angry, and we want to feel gracious. We feel betrayed, and we want to feel noticed. We feel overwhelmed, and we want to feel in control. Our friends reassure us by saying you’ll feel better in time. Our hearts just plead with time to pass faster.
So if time won't fix the brokenness, what will?
Your brokenness will start to heal when you take your time and put it to good use.
How do you put your time to good use? It takes equal parts of your thinking, feeling, and acting working together in supportive ways.
Thinking starts the think, feel, act cycle and a close examination of your thoughts on a regular basis will help you use your time well. Our subconscious chatter is often derailing us; allowing our thoughts into our consciousness and eliminating thoughts that throw us off is a great start. The best way to stay on top of your thoughts is through a daily bullet journal process each morning. Answer these questions and prompts as often as possible to get your thinking headed in a supportive direction:
What do I need today?
What truth am I possibly forgetting about today?
I want to welcome...
I am grateful for...
Hope today to me means...
One area where I need to seek help is...
What do I need to affirm in myself today?
What situation is standing on tiptoe asking for my attention?
Where do I need to offer myself grace?
How am I contributing to my own unhappiness?
With conscious thoughts drawn out in a way we can actually see them, the feelings will then flow from there. Feelings are driven by thoughts.
All feelings can be traced back to a thought.
I’m feeling sad because I am thinking I’ll never get better. If I think I will get better as I continue to pursue healing, I will start to feel hopeful. When you are feeling down, ask yourself, what am I thinking that is contributing to this feeling? Tracing the feeling back to a thought puts you more in the driver’s seat with your time. If you spend several months thinking you will never feel better, you will likely feel despair for just as long. If you can redirect your thought in even 1% more of a supportive direction, you can allow new feelings to emerge. This puts your time to good use.
Our actions are driven by our feelings. I start dancing because I feel good. I feel good because I think I’m actually going to make it. I get in bed for a day because I feel hopeless. My hopelessness is driven by the thought that I cannot possibly pull a new post-divorce life together. If I can make this thought 1% better by saying “I’m open to the fact that I might figure this out,” I create space for 1% better feelings to emerge and 1% better actions to follow.
Your think, feel, act train is simple, but it doesn’t mean it is easy. You cannot throw positive thoughts on yourself that don’t generate from an authentic place in you. That’s why we start with the 1% challenge. You can’t (and shouldn’t) go from dark despair to elated joy in the course of one thought change. But you can use time to become more conscious of your self-talk and your self-thought and carefully select the thoughts to keep that further stronger, more healed, and more empowered feelings and actions.
The fullness of your awareness as you move through time will heal you. Often our impulse is to numb out and hope that time does its part while we cry in a corner. Take your time; cry in the corner. And when you want to take the steps toward healing, put your time to good use. Bring mindfulness and awareness to your healing, and you’ll be grateful for the results.
Want to make sure you’re putting your healing time to good use? Schedule a complimentary strategy call with me here.
