Emotional Squatters, Re-writing History and The Benefits of Therapy During (and AFTER!) Divorce

Therapy is a great thing. It’s something that I wish that I taken advantage of earlier in my divorce experience. Things would have gone much smoother if I had a qualified someone to talk me out of my tree once or twice a week…or day.

One of the most important lessons or tools that I eventually took away from therapy was the ability to re-write history. I know, I know…everyone says that you can’t change the past and that you shouldn’t dwell on it, or re-live it, or Oh My Goodness some might even say that you shouldn’t even think about it.

But it’s okay to ‘go there.’ It’s okay to re-live a hurtful experience. It’s okay to think about something that previously made your blood boil or made you cry or brought you shame. There’s a catch though…you have to bring the right tools to the return trip.

The expression, ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’ is used to describe someone who wasn’t well equipped for any given situation because they brought inadequate tools. I’ll add to that and flip the expression to ‘bringing a gun to a knife fight’. In either scenario the playing fields are uneven. You either weren’t prepared to fight the fight or you showed up with a Bazooka.

After my divorce (and after lots of therapy), I started to mentally revisit situations that I had previously tucked away in a part of my brain where I store all things ‘unbearable.” Things that were just too painful to think about. Things where one or both of us brought the gun to the knife fight and said things, seemingly unforgivable things, to each other that stayed with us long after the fight was over.

I started to look at these experiences differently. I started to understand why we fought the way we did…why we said the things we said. More importantly, I started to realize how much power I was giving to these memories. Even though I wasn’t thinking about them on a daily basis, they were still taking up real estate in my head – valuable space that needed to be used by other, more suitable tenants. They were squatters. Emotional squatters.

Eviction

Therapy helped me with the eviction process. It gave me the proper tools to not only examine each memory, but more importantly to view them differently.

In many cases I was able to separate the experience from the emotion of the experience, like a surgeon, expertly and precisely cutting away the offending cells. Or in some cases more subtlety, like a baker gently rolling the egg back and forth between the broken shells until all that’s left is the yolk, allowing me to decide how to proceed. Do I store the yolks to use later or am I ready to throw them away and make a healthier meal.

The end result was freeing. It took the power away from the experience and gave it back to me. I saw the situation for what it was…good, bad, ugly or in many, many cases, insignificant. It’s such a liberating feeling to revisit a memory through different, healthier eyes and drain power out of it simply by saying, “That moment didn’t define me”, “That’s a silly thing to have worried about for all these years”, or perhaps the best one of all, “I’m going to learn from that moment today and choose to grow from here.”

So while you may not be able to actually re-write the experience as it happened, you are able to re-write the way you experience it today. You are able to evolve and create future paths that will allow you to avoid re-creating the same bad habits or behaviors or relationships.

And believe me…that’s way more empowering.