How to Deal with Guilt in a Divorce?

A divorce brings in its wake a whole array of negative emotions – apart from the grief which a person may be feeling at the loss of a loved one, he/she may be wracked by fear as to what the future holds. Loneliness, anxiety, doubt and regrets are likewise many emotions which assail those recently divorced. However the most debilitating of these is perhaps guilt, which not only accentuates the grief and sadness but prevents one from moving on in life.

Why you may feel guilt in the aftermath of a divorce

No matter what role you had to play in the breakdown of your marriage, feelings of guilt are likely to overwhelm you in the aftermath of a divorce. On one hand, you may feel that you did not do enough for your spouse or enough to save the marriage while on the other you may feel convinced that something you did led to your divorce. You may feel that you let your friends, and family, down by getting a divorce. Worst of all, you may feel that you are solely responsible for your children’s pain over your divorce. Such feelings of guilt have far-reaching consequences – they not only keep you chained to the past, thus keeping you from looking forward but in the immediate context make the emotions of loss and loneliness almost impossible to bear.

Break the cycle of negative emotions

Guilt often strikes as part of a chain of other negative motions like doubt and regret about the decision to divorce. Once the seeds of doubt are embedded in your mind, you begin to wonder if you did the right thing by going ahead with the divorce; soon this gives way to regret that you did not do enough or something different to save your marriage and before long you are blaming yourself for the divorce thinking you should have done something to prevent the divorce. So one of the first things you need to do is to break this cycle of negative thoughts – stamp out the beginnings of doubt as soon as they emerge in your mind by practicing positive thinking and telling yourself that more likely the doubts have been put there by other people or because things have not gone to plan.

Accept what has happened

However sometimes it may be that your doubts are confirmed and you realize that there were things you could or should have done to save your marriage. This is may lead to an intensification of guilt feelings and you may castigate yourself behaving or not behaving in a particular way to avoid the divorce. Here the only way to cope with guilt is to accept the finality of what has happened. What's done, is done and no amount of wringing your hands can undo the facts. You cannot change the past but you definitely can choose whether to stay stuck in it or learn from it and move on.

Forgive yourself

If you objectively think  - and not merely feel subjectively – that the divorce is a direct or indirect consequence of something you did or did not do, then try to find the grace to forgive yourself. It is human nature to make mistakes – everyone makes them. Your mistakes which are responsible for the breakup may have been the result of a weakness or simply because you didn’t know better at the time. Whatever the cause, find it in your heart to forgive yourself by seeing that each mistake offers the opportunity to learn and become wiser and stronger as a result. But this can happen only when you wash away the guilt from your heart and look ahead in life

It takes two

No matter what your role may have been in the dissolution of your marriage, consider the truth that it is unlikely to have been caused only by you. A divorce is rarely the consequence of just once action; it is usually the culmination of a series of negative actions that have been building up over time. For instance if one of you cheated in marriage and this led to divorce, the very fact of one spouse succumbing to adultery was a symptom that love, trust and communication was breaking down in the relationship. So Just as it takes two to make a marriage work, it takes two to bring it to an end. Tell yourself that, no matter what you did, you did not bring this marriage to an end by yourself. Your ex-spouse is equally responsible, directly or indirectly.

Kids will be fine

The biggest source of guilt in a divorce is perhaps the realization that kids from the marriage are going to be negatively affected by the divorce. No parent would like to put his/her kids through pain and it is only natural that they would do everything possible to save them from such an ordeal. But does this include staying on in an unhappy marriage and exposing your kids to daily conflicts between you and your spouse? So before you blame yourself for having inflicted the pain of a broken family on the kids, know that in the long run it may prove to be a wiser decision. Even though they will feel pain for awhile, their parents’ getting a divorce and being happy about it will ultimately be a whole lot better than them staying together in a toxic home environment. Considered from this angle, getting a divorce is a more positive step than staying together for your children would have been and eventually your children are sure to realize this.

Your loved ones will come around

In some cultures a divorce is associated with shame and a moral lapse; it is as though by dissolving a marriage – no matter how unhappy – the partners have reneged on a moral commandment. Thus you may be exposed to overt or subtle accusations from family members, friends and others of your social and religious community for going through a divorce. At such times tell yourself that you did the best you could but ultimately you are responsible for your own well-being. What’s more, though people seem strange for awhile, they will slowly but steadily adjust to this change just as you will.