Divorce leaves everyone, at some point, awash in self doubt.
We wonder, "How am I going to deal with this? Can I deal with this? Will I get through it without life-long scars? What gives me the confidence to believe I can really pull this off?" "Been There, Done That" - The Key to Building Confidence for Handling Life Changes "Been there, done that.
" The message is, if I have done it before, certainly I can do it again.
But what if I haven't done it before? What if I am being asked to do something that is brand new, unique, foreign, strange, unwanted, even surreal?Such is the experience of divorce for many of us, as well as its sequel, recovery from divorce.
We never planned to get divorced.
We never received training in school in how to recover from divorce.
In fact, we often thought divorce was something that happened to "other people.
" However, here we are, knee-deep in our stuff, trying to make a recovery from divorce, and wondering: "Can I really do this?" Blessings in Disguise - The Source of Confidence for Making a Divorce Recovery It turns out, "Been there, done that" is good news for anyone wanting to make a recovery from divorce.
Even though we may not realize it, we have "been there, done that" - even if we've never been divorced before.
Our life experiences teach us how to make it through major change.
Whether it is getting over our awkward first love affair in junior high school, making a comeback after getting downsized, changing careers, etc.
- everyone has gone through unwanted change and eventually has come out the other side.
Almost always we are able to acknowledge we learned something valuable about ourselves we would otherwise never known.
We call it a "Blessing in Disguise.
" A "blessing in disguise" is a change we did not want to go through, but did anyway, after which we realized that we derived some good for going through the experience.
Acknowledging blessings born by change gives us confidence to face other life changes, including recovery from divorce.
An Example of How Your Blessings in Disguise Can Help You Recover from Divorce Sally's life was turned upside down when her husband of 10 years filed for divorce.
She felt adrift, powerless, and relatively hopeless.
She was all but paralyzed in making her recovery from divorce.
Then it was pointed out that she has made it through a setback in a successful career, a long-term recovery from a chemical dependency, and the death of a child.
These difficult life experiences had given her the blessing of knowing she was very capable of successfully handling difficult, unwanted, major changes in her life.
And, that dealing with her recovery from her divorce was not that much different from what she had already weathered.
Within weeks her attitude shifted and she began to thrive in her new life after divorce.