My Divorce

I knew it was coming. I thought I was ready for it. Yet when I received the divorce petition, I was floored.  It had been nine years since the ‘break-up’ of the marriage relationship and physical separation. I was in a good place psychologically, or so I thought. 

A marriage does not dissolve on neatly defined lines – it rips apart and leaves jagged edges that hurt and scar. Usually one person will have made the decision to end the relationship, ‘the leaver’, and the other who does not, ‘the leftee’.  This decision by ‘the leaver’ to end the marriage would have been made a long time before the physical separation and so they will be further along in dealing with the emotional fall out. ‘The leftee’, now finding out, is reeling from the shock of what is happening. I was ‘the leftee”.

Now I was angry again. The initial separation was accompanied by feelings of confusion, humiliation, abandonment, loss, powerlessness. I remember the feelings of insecurity and panic at the thought of no longer having the security that comes from being a part of a couple and family. The anger that followed gave me an illusion of control. Slowly and carefully, out of my broken dreams and heart, I found new ways to accept my new identity of ‘single’. Serenity and calmness returned to my life. Now, nine years later, holding this piece of paper that will mark the legal end of a marriage, my world was being rocked again. 

I was grateful that I engaged in the mediation process to negotiate the ending of my marriage and tie up the ‘loose ends’.  I felt empowered and in control of the process and the outcome and was able to negotiate directly for and on behalf of myself. 

Divorce is a major life stressor. One’s psychological state is compromised and yet it is at this time that parties are expected to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. In this volatile emotional state, parties either have to confront each other constructively or cast their fates to the judicial system. 

CHOOSE MEDIATION.