The Heaviness Nobody Warned Us About

No one tells you how much divorce actually WEIGHS. So often we talk about what we are shedding. Some of us even joke about “losing 200 pounds in our divorce.”

But oh, the weight of the things that you pick up and carry…

• Devastation
• Loneliness
• Guilt
• Fear
• Bitterness
• Insert your own here.

These can all be so heavy that they feel like they will just crush you and swallow you up.  Not to mention that you are now carrying the weight of keeping up your entire household by yourself in this “new normal.”

Normal. There’s a word. There is nothing normal about this. Webster says that “normal” means expected, usual, or healthy. I don’t know about you, but for me, going through a divorce did not feel like any of that.

Instead, I felt like I was dragging this massive weight behind me, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. The weight of loneliness, the fear of being alone forever, and oh my goodness the guilt. The shouting in my head of ...

I know how shattered a woman can be when her dreams die in divorce. I also know how ashamed she can feel. Or how liberated she may feel without yet realizing how much grief still needs to be processed.

I know because I have been divorced. More than once. Ugh. Just typing it and knowing this is being shared with the world still gives me a little knot in my stomach, but I have to share it. Because YOU are my why.

This pic is the poster hanging in my office that reminds me every day of the women I can help.

You who are going through it right now.

You who have gone through in the past.

You may be stuck in sadness. Or anger. Or anxiety. Or bitterness.

You see, I learned (the hard way, of course… because I am stubborn) how to really deal with these things and heal them. It took a lot of prayer, a lot of therapy and a lot of journaling, but on the other side has been so much freedom, peace and joy that I never thought I could have again.

I want to walk through your grief with you and h...

You have probably heard it said, “Time heals all wounds. That saying has been around for so long that I cannot even find on Google who said it originally. Our culture wants to tell us that time is the only thing we need to be emotionally healed. Is it just me, or would we all actually love for that to be true? I mean, doing the hard work of healing doesn’t seem fair. When you are the one who has been wounded, shouldn’t you get to relinquish responsibility for the healing of a wound that someone else inflicted?! If we could simply give our heartaches some time and they would be magically healed… doesn’t that just work better for you? Yeah, me, too.

I remember literally begging God to let me go to sleep for a year in the throes of my most painful moments because I thought that if I could just have that much time pass over me, then the pain would not be so paralyzingly excruciating. I am so glad that He didn’t answer that prayer.

Because the unfortunate and painful truth is that time, i...