Dear Therapist,

My husband and I are getting a divorce. I'm heartbroken and in shock. This wasn't my choice and I never thought I'd find myself here. I was so sure I had learned the lessons from my parents' very troubled relationship and messy divorce - that I would 'do things better.' Yet here I am. What worries me most now is seeing how my mother never really moved on from her divorce - decades later the anger is still there and she remains defiantly single but I sense is very lonely - and I don't want the same to be true for me. I want to learn and grow from this loss rather than get stuck in it. How not to repeat at least that part of the history?

Signed,

Heart that wants to Heal

Dear Heart,

I'm so sorry. Divorce can be utterly devastating, an emotional earthquake that causes us to question our entire framework for understanding our lives, our place in the world, even our intrinsic self-worth.

Given the history of your parents' divorce, your present situation also likely brings emotions associated with that earlier experience to the surface. It is a lot to process. I hear your desire not to get 'frozen' in the heartbreak. It is important to hold that intention of making it through the pain, but in my experience another way people can inadvertently get stuck is by trying to move too quickly, or to leapfrog the difficult emotions all together in an attempt to just get to the other side. Painful feelings buried alive have a tendency to linger 'What we resist, persists' in therapy-speak . So I encourage you to accept there is a difficult period of metabolising the emotions ahead, all the while remembering that the story doesn't end there. Resilience is both a process and an outcome.

When we think about working with trauma and divorce is traumatic for many , we can address three general spheres:

• resourcing and supporting ourselves
• processing the traumatic material
• integrating the experiences into new meaning, growth and relationships.