When I separated and divorced from my ex-husband a few years back, I also left my corporate career and sprang into coaching and freelance writing, destabilizing my financial security along the way. My first-ever therapist advised me against this career pivot, but I fired her and jumped ship anyway.
I’m not the only person who has completely uprooted their life this way. I’ve met a lot of people who have moved countries while getting a divorce and starting a business. There’s something appealing (and a bit cruel and self-sabotaging) about ripping off a band-aid like this, or a few band-aids simultaneously. It’s like challenging a nonswimmer to sink or swim, not caring about what actually ends up happening, while wishing and demanding that they damn well learn to swim quickly.
For me, the pattern of throwing myself into work is a coping mechanism I picked up as a teenager. I used to stay after school hours for many and varied extracurricular activities so I could stay out of my parents’ wrath, so much so that once my dad himself told me that I have to learn to say no and set better boundaries. (But with only other people.)
My ex-husband and I met at university during our Bachelor’s. Our friendship soon developed into something more. We have worked in many companies together and gotten degrees from the same universities in Sri Lanka (where we’re from) and the US. We crossed seas together and immigrated to two countries. We had hiked in National Parks in Utah and chased Northern Lights in Alaska together. I took him to the ER, and he took me to a breast ultrasound, long before these ultrasounds became the norm in my 40s. In short, we built interlocking lives together, and by the time we tied the knot, we had been dating for ten years.
You know how people become more united when they have a common enemy – a phenomenon commonly used by politicians and businessmen alike to rejuvenate and motivate people? We, too, had a common “enemy” in our parents, who opposed our interfaith union. My parents eventually came around, although his mother never did. Either way, we batted on and on, just to prove them all wrong.
When our marriage fell apart, as the initiator of the divorce, I went numb. I circumstantially made myself so busy with work that I didn’t have the time to grieve. I put all our wedding and other mutual paraphernalia into an Amazon box and pushed it under my bed. It would have broken me open if I had grieved us then. This was a man whom I thought I was going to grow old with. We had joked about how I wanted to live until 100, and how he wanted to be gone by 65.
I did go to my first therapist as I was going through the divorce, but the work was mainly to understand why my marriage didn’t work, to see what parent I had created in my marriage unconsciously. It is a well-known fact in psychology that we create parallels to the relationship we have with the parent, with whom we have the most unfinished business. But that’s where the work stopped; I didn’t want to know anything beyond that.
As a result, I ended up repeating the same parental pattern (more or less) with someone else after a couple of years. Luckily for me, this pattern was short-lived, but it broke my heart just the same. This is when I went back to the therapy couch. But by this time, I was an experienced coach and had more knowledge about what worked best in healing childhood trauma. So, I looked for a therapist trained in EMDR.
After this more effective therapy treatment and years of personal growth work, I finally felt ready to drag out the Amazon box from under my bed. Because I knew that I could not avoid the box forever. If I had tried to, my next relationship would also be the same old mess of a pattern. And who wants that?
