Divorce is frequently compared with death. That is, the pain of death is compared to the pain of divorce. In the comparison, there is an attempt to describe the deep pain involved in the divorce. The testimony of many divorced persons will quickly affirm that divorce is more painful than death. I have been told this by many divorced persons. Now I believe it.
The pain persons encounter in both death and divorce is grief.
Many know grief as that sore and sour spot in the belly that comes when a loved one dies. From an unknown past, forever it seems, pastors and chaplains have made a profession out of helping the grieving. Statistics show that when someone encounters a major loss, more often than not he or she will at some time go to a spiritual advisor, to a trusted mentor, pastor or priest.
Over the last several decades much work has been done on grief. There are several journals and a multitude of books‑‑both popular and professional‑‑that explore the various aspects of grief. There are almost as many conferences and workshops. For over a decade, the King's College in Ontario, Canada, has hosted an annual international conference on "Death, Dying, and Bereavement."
There are many workshops and books just like this one that focus in on a specialized area of grief. See the suggested reading in the back of the book. Your loss and your pain in divorce are common experiences. Your pain in divorce is a grief very similar to the grief experienced in the death of a loved one. Similar, yet different.
I have said all of this to convey that you and I have predecessors and comrades in pain. Whether friends or strangers, there are many who have come close to feeling as you did or do. You may not sense or feel like it. Nevertheless, you must realize that many have had feelings similar to yours. Not exactly, but very similar. Important, crucial to your fragile and vulnerable self, is the knowledge that there are others who have walked a path much like yours. In that sense, you are not alone.
Yet‑‑doing an abrupt reversal‑‑you are alone. Very alone. Just like in a death, your divorce is peculiar to you. Yes, indeed, you are very, very alone in may ways.
In summary then, your "loneliness" and "pain" in loss are feelings that you share with many, even though your grief is yours and yours alone. You have predecessors and comrades in your unique and special kind loneliness and pain.
God knows too: Psalms 22, 23, 46, 102, 121, 139.
"Grief" is the name for the whole experience that a person goes through in a loss. Any and every loss brings grief. Furthermore, the greater the loss encountered, the greater the grief experienced: the more meaning and value of the loved one, the greater the pain.
Essentially, we grieve and experience pain in proportion to how much the loss meant to us, meant to our inner selves. In proportion to how many needs the departed met.
The first task of healthy grief is to find the nature of the loss, to find out what the departed meant to me, meant to me deep down. I need to find the binding ties. What needs evolved? What needs were met? What values accrued? The good meaning she had for me. Or discover the illusory meaning and come to terms with reality. Ouch.
Easier said than done. The task will in all likelihood last several years. Something of the loved one will always remain. With the discovery of what she meant to me, there will be a self-discovery. With the meaning, I will discover some my needs that she met.
The second task of grief is to release or set the departed free from the needs he or she met in our life. We need to set them free from our needs without necessarily changing the good meaning the departed had created. We need to loosen the binding ties.
1st
Task: Identifying the Needs the
Departed Met
--The
Binding Ties
2nd Task: Setting Them Free from the
Needs
--Loosening
the Binding Ties
With the release of the departed from meeting my needs, I will be emotional free. Like the letting loose of ballasts, I will float to a more mature level of relating. I will be able to think more clearly without a constant (or unconscious) attention to how I can get my departed love to meet those needs. By freeing the departed from meeting my needs, I will be able to renegotiate my marriage with the departed more substantially and with clearer expectations. Or I will be able to negotiate a future without the departed. Or I will be able to negotiate remarriage to another and be more informed.
On a couple of occasions, I have lost my wallet or a tool. I lost my wallet at a supermarket once. Several times I have misplaced a tool I was using to repair my car or my house. Oh, I grieved and fretted. When I found it, I was very relieved. I have lost other things, had several things stolen. I grieved. These things "meant" a lot to me . . . or so I thought.
When I lost a friend or family member to death, I grieved a lot more. The loss of a personal friend had little comparison to the loss of things. Since there was no recovery of the dead, coming to terms with what the loss meant to me and setting the dead free from the needs were considerably more difficult. So much more meaning was present. So many more needs of mine were met.
You know the experience. Nothing new about this.
When I lost my father, I denied the loss for a long time. Only later and after much difficulty did I finally discover what my father meant to me, what needs he met and did not meet‑‑how I had gotten others to fill the needs I wished he could have met. How I loved him. How I missed him.
I still miss him. He never saw many accomplishments. He never met or advised me on my ex-wife. He never saw where I have come in my schooling and vocation. No matter that he never saw, I still did some things to please him. I still do.
Oh, this is hard to describe. How can one paint the whirlwind? How can one put love and devotion on paper? It is so impossible to frame and color the insecurity I felt. Though it is a lot easier to picture the compensations, like adulating a college professor and sometimes seeing my father in them.
The same difficulty was faced in my divorce. I lost another loved one. She met many needs I did not even know I had till she left. How I wanted her to keep meeting those needs. For a long time, I did not even want to set her free‑‑I could not. Love persisted.
Identifying the needs that she met and that had evolved in our relationship is a key to setting her free. Otherwise, I could blame her for my bad feelings and be angry, or I might blame myself for failure and continue to slay my own self-esteem.
My needs and her ability to meet them became binding ties. The invisible ties that bind do not loosen easily, nor do they loosen without considerable pain. The hardest part is this: if the pain is to ease or cease, one has to take some kind of responsibility in discovering the needs and loosening the binding ties.
Easier said than done. Being so physically orientated, when I open my hand and let go of something, it drops to the ground. Why can't I just let go of my ex-wife that way? Or others for that matter?
If you love someone, you just have trouble letting go (1 Cor. 13). (Or if you are obsessed, you cannot respect the departed's freedom.) If you truly loved someone, then some part of that relationship will always be cherished. (In obsession you will hate.)
In sum, my first task in grief is to find what the departed meant to me, to identify the needs and other binding ties. In identifying what the departed meant, there will be a self-discovery of the needs the departed met. More on this in Chapter X.
The second task of grief is to free the departed from the needs that they met in my life, that is, to loosen the binding ties. This is the hardest part of all. How do I let go of someone of whom I cannot let go? What an impossible statement. What a contradiction. This is precisely what makes divorce so painful and confusing. The struggle to let go is a problem for the inner person of every good man or woman. Love is powerful.
Love will not let go. Because of the eternal nature of true love, the second task of grief becomes the greatest challenge. The challenge of the heart is to distinguish between the love that will remain and how one will set the departed free from the needs he or she met. The challenge is how to let loose of the needs while continuing to love the departed.
The hardest part of all is the beginning, when you first begin to loosen the binding ties.
But let me interject this loud and clear: when we loosen the binding ties, we are not letting go of love. True love does not die. We are not setting about to forget or deny or push from consciousness our love for the departed. Instead, what we are attempting to do is loosen the departed from our needs.
While we acknowledge the love, we are setting the departed free from however he or she met our needs: needs like worth, comfort, support. Even though the other person is gone‑‑free as it were‑‑within our heart we still have not set them free. From two sides we hang onto them:
1.
Our eternal love is steadfast, and
2. Our needs cry for attention.
As in the case of divorce, among the ties we loosen, we are setting the other person free from meeting our need to be loved (even though we might still love them [or they us]). We are setting the other person free from meeting our need for warmth, comfort, sex. We are setting the other person free from meeting our need of affirmation.
What makes this the hardest part is that this is never accomplished with the simple decision to make it so. This is never accomplished with the simple choice, never done solely with the mere force of the will. Though your will power plays a part, it is the heart through time and expression that must free the ex-spouse from our need for their love, from my need and from your need for their love. Warmth. Comfort. Embrace.
What were the needs you needed most?
The mind and will-power play a part. But the mind can so easily push the BrokenHearted into one extreme or another, into self-pitying inadequacy or bitterness or arrogant denial. With a focus on the heart, the hardest part is to express the feelings therein and to do this in a healthy manner: to allow the pendulum of pain to swing and express its extremes in a safe environment. This expression is allowing the mainspring of our heart and soul to drive the lever and fulcrum between inward and outward expression.
This is grieving and healing. With the broken limb or amputation, the healing forces are biological. With death and divorce, the healing forces are self-discovery and expression, and this takes place within a community. The healing forces in can never be rushed, anymore than one can rush the healing of a wound.
In the loosening, through time and expression, you and I must be given room to breathe. Room to sing, write, sew, or scream. Unless your heart does the releasing of the binding ties, there will be no release.
No easy task. Love took a long time to cultivate. The more I (you) fed on that love, the harder the task will be for the heart to free the departed from my (your) need of their love. Not only does my love cling, but my needs cry for attention.
Let me interject something else that has a bearing on all of the loosening. Our concept and understanding of love began long before we met our spouses. Love began in each lover at birth and what love meant to the heart developed throughout their lives. Though the "time" that the two lovers spent together certainly played a part in the pain of divorce, the "time" two lovers spent together is only relevant to the "love" they shared.
When love sprang from our hearts (yours), all of our prior understanding and feelings about life and love began to affirm that love spring. So a divorce between two lovers divided and separated two persons. At one time, these two were not only united through a developed and mutual affection‑‑love‑‑they were united with each other in their feeling of love that was part of the core of their being. Since their inner selves and cores of being had developed throughout the totality of their life-experiences, the divorce separated two persons who had come to share much more than the totality of time they had spent with each other. That is, the divorce separated two people who had developed meanings and affections throughout courtship and marriage, certainly; but the divorce also separated two people who had bonded together through understandings and meanings of love and commitment that had developed earlier in their lives (long before they had even met).
This of course assumes no compartmentalization. This assumes that each party gave to the other their whole being, all of who they are. That is, the two just did not relate to each other on one or two levels: sexual, intellectual, mutual task commitment, raising kids, financial convenience, job or home security, prestige, etc. This assumes that the two lovers related to each other on most of the levels and not just two or three.
This relating together shared many factors, not just their own individual histories, but also included a developing understanding of just what love, commitment, marriage are about. When two commit to each other with their whole selves, on many levels, then a marriage relationship not only builds upon new understandings of shared experiences and feelings, but also builds upon all of the lives of each party.
For instance, if a person marries for money, sex or power, when those cease to be what they once were, the relationship will most likely deteriorate. But when a relationship begins with the probing of mutually shared values and a kindred faith, that rather new relationship develops upon a foundation that is already somewhat firm.
What is new about that?
Back to the pain of divorce. In this light, divorce separated two persons who had come together and loved each other with a love that had begun in early childhood.
So the healing forces of self-discovery and expression must not only reach into the love between the couple themselves, but the healing forces must also reach into every fiber of personhood of each party. Anything else is too shallow. The wound will become infected and could lead to a deadly social cancer.
So though Viktor Frankl was only married to his wife for such a short time, his love for his wife became an awesome and life-giving force of survival throughout his years in a Nazi concentration camp. Throughout torture. Throughout constant death and the threat of death. Love became so life-giving because the love he and his wife shared was intrinsically tied to what love meant and had come to mean to them throughout their entire lives.