“Those things we can’t find closure on, they haunt us. They pop up in our dreams, and creep into our thoughts in idle moments…” Lisa Unger
Kristen and her husband were together for 11 years. She thought they had a happy life: they had two amazing boys, a beautiful home and both were happy in their careers. Sure, there were times that they were disconnected as a couple, but she never felt like their marriage was in trouble.
Until her husband asked her for a divorce.
He said he didn’t love her anymore. He said there was someone else now. He said he would make the divorce as painless as possible, for the sake of the boys. But what he either couldn’t or wouldn’t say was the answers to why, what, when and how?
Why now? Had she done something wrong? Was there something she should have done that she didn’t do?
How did this happen? When did the marriage become so broken that you sought love outside of our relationship? And what did this woman have that she didn’t have?
After nine long months of moving through the dissolution of their marriage, Kristen was left without answers to those important questions.
She kept going over and over them in her mind, robbing her of sleep at night and depriving her from being able to focus during the day. She was going through the motions of her life and remaining stuck in pain searching for the answers to what had gone wrong….and how she got to this place.
When our minds don’t know the answer to an important question, it loves to make up stories. It loves to fill-in the blank for you:
Maybe he never really loved you.
You should have seem this coming.
The other woman makes him happy and all you ever made him was stressed out and feeling inadequate.
Our minds love to fill-in the empty spaces, to fill-in the reasons why and it’s often not a gentle or kind reason. It fills in the blanks with hurtful stories and painful untruths.
And since we’re not the ones making that decision, we actually have NO WAY of knowing the reasons why or how…..this is where many women stay stuck.
The single most important question I had to ask Kristen was, “Are you willing to move on without ever having closure?”
Because it is a choice.
She can remain stuck looking for answers that he may not even know how to articulate.
She can remain stuck, allowing her mind to make-up painful stories about how she somehow caused this, when maybe it was never about her.
Or she could make the deliberate choice of moving forward without ever really knowing the truth or having the answers…without ever having closure.
And it is just a choice.
It is a conscious choice to live in the unknown of why people do what they do (and why they can’t explain it to you in a way that you can understand).
It is a choice to move forward and not stay stuck.
It is a choice to choose future happiness or past despair.
It is a choice to assume the best in ourselves, rather than the worst.
It is a choice to choose our futures over our pasts.
If you’re finding it much more difficult than you thought to move on after a divorce, here’s what one of my clients in that exact situation had to say about our work together:
“My work with Sharon has been unlike any other. The focus is different. There is a depth to our work – that gets to the core of who I am and what I want going forward. Sharon takes a caring, compassionate approach, tempered with accountability and honesty. She…asks questions I have never been asked before, triggering thoughts and insights that I have not experienced previously. I’m now moving forward with peace.”