When we get to the end of a relationship and either one or the other party has found someone new, or it’s just simply run out of steam, our gut response is to blame each other for our distressing feelings.  It’s nice and cosy to be able to lick our wounds while exorcising all our pent up anger and frustrations at the ‘offending’ party.   And in fact, it’s human nature.  It’s our fight/flight response doing exactly what it’s meant to be doing.  Protecting us against hurt and pain.  

Separating from someone leaves a huge gap in our lives and whether we are happy or not to be apart, at some stage it’ll feel like we have been through a bereavement.   All our routines change, our homes change, our relationships change with other people, sometimes for the worst as they only knew us as part of a couple, and even our looks change as we either smarten up or dumb ourselves down.

Separation and divorce can be seen as an opportunity however.  It is an opportunity, after the initial shock or change, to assess what we really want from life and whether the way we’ve been going about it, is actually creating what we want.  If your relationship was tired, how were you contributing to it?  If your relationship was one sided, what did you need to add or take to balance it out?  If your relationship was lacking intimacy, what did you need to do or not do to get your needs met?  You may find that your partner in life was as much responding to what you were giving out as they were contributing to the impasse.  Perhaps you have both learned the steps to a dance that only you two knew how to do, and to change that dance routine is going to take you to step back and each learn new, more intricate and adventurous steps.  Do you have the courage to do that?

Because to have courage means to admit that perhaps you were partly responsible.  To have courage means to back down and be prepared to look at what you brought.  And you may do that within your tired old relationship, or in a new one.  But before you completely scrap any idea that your old relationship is salvageable, take an inventory of what you brought and ask yourself if, whatever you had at the beginning, is worth the hard work of relearning your dance steps together.

And I’ll tell you why I’m writing this today.  My ex partner and I are back together again after nearly a year’s separation.  We have been with other, what we thought would be more exciting or caring people, only to find that we really wanted to work on what was going wrong with us.  And both of us have taken an inventory of what we brought to our tired old relationship, and we are working on relearning our steps and challenging what used to make us unhappy.  That means all those times we used to just not say how we felt, or bite down our frustrations, or sacrifice this or that aspect of our relationship for a quiet life, are now being discussed and, amazingly, resolved!  The journey is bringing us closer together in a way that was completely unimaginable in the past.

So I now have a blueprint for working on a relationship that has gone wrong and knowing, in practice, not just in theory,  that it can be put right again.  But it really does take both parties to have the courage to look at their own failings and to resolve to admit to and work on them – together.

If you want to do something about that, you know where I am.  Just reply to this email or call me on 01371 859994.

Tags: couples counselling, divorce, Relationships, separation