Few people enjoy going through a divorce, but there are ways that a divorce can be less painful and easier to deal with. Here, trained counselor Linda Miller-deBerard discusses how therapy can help both partners recover. She runs her own practice, Confidential Care Professional Counseling, based in Colleyville, Texas.
Divorce recovery can be expedited by having a cordial divorce. But even in a cordial divorce, people go through the grieving process. They go through denial, anger, bargaining, and then acceptance.
During the divorce recovery process, there is also a lot of sadness and fear. There is sadness over the dream of what they hoped the marriage would be, and there is a lot of fear over what their future is going to look like.
Therapy can aid that by helping people who are going through a divorce process talk things over with a person who is trained to give them support and encouragement. And who can just allow them to feel that sadness and loss.
Anger Makes it Difficult
Divorce recovery is often made more difficult if a lot of anger is going on in the divorce. And the anger is oftentimes made worse by the current legal system, when people are encouraged to fight for things that may not even be important to them — to fight for their house when they don’t even want it, for example.
It can also be made more difficult by the legal system when they are told they cannot talk to the person he is divorcing about the children, because he is not allowed to speak to each other. When somebody goes through that kind of divorce in particular, he needs therapy to process the trauma that the system of divorce can cause, as well as with the sadness and fear that comes from the divorce by itself.
Time to Heal
One of the important things is that as people don’t begin to look for a new relationship before they have plenty of time to heal. I specifically recommend they wait at least a year before going into a significant relationship.In fact, divorce recovery programs recommend six months for every year of marriage, which is a bit excessive. They recommend a long time.
