Healing

Abstract

The loss of a love relationship arouses your most primitive instincts. It overloads your emotional circuits. It taxes the capacity for rational thought. It puts you face-to-face with pain you didn’t know existed. However, with pain comes choices. What kind of survivor are you going to be? What path will you choose to make your way through this period? Whenever we face a crisis, we all have choices about whether to draw on the survivor or victim tendencies within ourselves, whether to put our energies into self-healing or hurting back. There are going to be times when you will feel sorry for yourself, times when you will blame your spouse for your misery, times when you will feel defeated by the weight of a lost dream, by how hard it all is, and by how alone you feel. But there can be no recovery if you succumb to the role of pure victim. Ultimately, you have to stop and ask yourself how you want to see this period of your life when you look back on it. Do you want to feel ashamed over your immature and destructive behavior? Do you want your children angry at you when they become adults for estranging them from the other parent? Or do you want to look back and say, “I handled this crisis with integrity.”

That which does not kill me, makes me strong.

Friedrich Nietzsche