8 Tips for Healing After Divorce

Divorce isn’t something you can generalize. Each person has their own unique situation, personal reactions, and timelines.

Still, we can compassionately offer some tips that may help you during these hard times.

Keep reading to find out 10 ways to start healing after divorce.

1. Build a Support Team

You don’t want to do it alone — it will be much harder.

First, you’ll want to re-establish a strong inner circle of people you can rely on. If all of your friends are shared friends between you and your ex, perhaps you can find strong bonds in old friendships, family members, neighbors, or by meeting new friends.

You want to be careful who you trust, as you are going through sensitive stuff, so refrain from over-exposing what you’re going through on social media.

In addition to leaning on your inner circle, you should contract some professional help for your situations. People like these divorce attorneys, therapists, and financial advisors can clear up confusion and make the logistical aspects of divorce easier.

2. Make Important Lists

Divorce is often filled with many unknowns, causing stress and anxiety.

To help you focus on what you can do rather than how much you have to do, consider making a few different lists of your needs and questions.

Make one for financial concerns, another for legal issues, and another for logistical problems, such as finding a place to live.

Putting it on paper helps get it out of your head and into the physical realm. Make your needs and questions simple and concise.

Then, work with one at a time to find a solution. This may mean getting professional help.
Breaking up your plan into digestible parts allows you to feel like you’re in control and also provides time and space for you to heal yourself mentally and emotionally.

3. Give Yourself Time

What we mean by this is give yourself time to heal and to figure everything out. While it’s not pleasant to be in this situation, accepting that it’s a process allows you to take some of the pressure off of yourself to resolve all of the issues.

A part of this is giving yourself time to grieve. There are typically 5 stages of grief, ultimately ending in acceptance of the situation.

It takes everybody different amounts of time to get to acceptance, so be easy on yourself. Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling, even as you deal with the logistical aspects of divorce.

4. Confess Your Fears to Yourself

This may seem counteractive to feeling better, but hear us out.

Confessing your fears to yourself allows you to have clarity on why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.

Ultimately, nobody can control how they feel. We all can, however, control how we act out our feelings.

If we have a greater understanding of where our feelings come from (i.e. from our fears), it will help us be able to see how we can heal and how we can act in a graceful way.

Try this. Write down everything you’re feeling. You can sum it up in simplified words, like “lonely”, “angry”, or “anxious”.

Then, write exactly why you feel that way. For example, if you feel anxious, you might say the reason is that you’re fearing the unknown.

Working with one confession at a time, imagine if you actually felt the opposite of how you feel. So if you feel anxious, imagine if you felt calm instead.

Really imagine what the opposite, more positive state feels and looks like. If you can, visualize what that looks like for you.

After you’ve sat with that feeling for a while, ask yourself, “what do I need to change in my life to feel this way?” Continuing with the anxiety example, a solution to help get you closer to feeling calm may be creating a plan and executing it.

Going through this practice allows you to identify feelings and come up with a concrete plan on how you can transform that feeling into something else.

5. Tune Into Your Body

Each one of us has a mind-body connection — where your mental or emotional state manifests in your body. You’ve experienced it in one way or another in your life.

An example of this is when your throat feels tight when you’re emotional. Another is when you are in a fight-or-flight situation and you feel adrenaline coarse through your body.

By paying attention to your body during this time of healing, you may be able to identify areas and times when you’re holding tension.

Notice when you’re clenching your jaw and when you’re slumping your shoulders. Notice if when you’re feeling an emotion you feel it somewhere in your body.

Then, you can actively relax into that part of your body by breathing. This will ease your physical stress, resulting in your mental and emotional stress loosening, too.

6. Healing After Divorce Means Taking Care of Yourself

Self-care is essential for you during this time. This means going to doctors’ appointments and actively doing anything that nurtures your mental, emotional, and physical self.

Set aside time to things you want to do and not things you have to do. This could be art, exercise, cooking, or anything that brings you happiness.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean caving into self-medication. If you are or begin to suffer from substance misuse or any other form of addiction due to your sensitive situation, reach out for help.

It also doesn’t mean making radical decisions. Take it slow and easy.

7. Embrace Being Alone

Don’t completely isolate yourself.

Rather, begin to learn again the joys of being with yourself. Rebuild your relationship with yourself and your confidence in alone-ness.

Treat yourself to solo dates and activities. Find a piece of your day, even during work, where you can shut out the world for 15 minutes and be in your own bubble.

It may be hard at first, but over time you may begin to learn to enjoy your own company and solitude.

8. Practice Positivity

It may seem impossible at first, but try to shift some of your thoughts so that they are optimistic.

For example, rather than thinking “why is this happening to me”, you can rephrase it as “I’m learning something new that I’ve never experienced before”.

It may feel forced at first — fake it ’til you make it.

With practicing positivity comes practicing forgiveness and compassion for yourself and others involved. The goal of healing from divorce is to eventually let go and move on.

Part of this requires forgiving yourself and your ex for what happened. That doesn’t mean allowing it or saying it’s okay.

Rather, forgiveness means to let go of resentment so that you aren’t weighed down by those heavy, negative feelings anymore.

It’s Okay to Not Be Okay

It’s okay not to have all of the answers for healing after divorce. The process is different for everyone and it’s not something that you can put a timeline on.

Still, you may follow some of these tips to help you on your journey.

Take care of yourself and honor your feelings. For more information on well-being, keep reading our blog.