The importance of healing yourself when your marriage is over
By Orit Krug | March 25th, 2022
The level of despair and grief can feel unbearable when a marriage is over.
Even if it was fully your choice, it still feels horrible to end your marriage.
Even when you know that it’s not your fault, you can blame yourself far too much.
You may feel like damaged goods, unable to keep a lasting loving relationship in your life.
It’s important during these times not to beat yourself up, even when you know you did everything you possibly could to save your relationship.
Try to be kind to yourself. Acknowledge that you’re going through a deep period of loss and heartbreak. Something you once had high hopes for is now in shambles. You must allow yourself the time and space to grieve.
5 signs of trauma after your relationship ends
Divorce is widely recognized as the top 5 stressors any human can endure in life.
When we experience this intense stress, it often creates trauma in our nervous systems and bodies.
Plus, if you already experienced trauma before your divorce, you risk storing even more trauma in your body and brain.
What does it actually mean to have ‘trauma’? Trauma means that there’s a disruption to your nervous system functioning.
Your nervous system is your survival system that automatically detects danger in your environment. It helps you stay alive and safe in risky situations. It tells your body when and how to act through the fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown responses.
Here are 5 signs of trauma after your relationship ends.
1. Your anxiety is through the roof.
After experiencing trauma, most situations and relationships feel risky, dangerous, and life-threatening. Even when your logical brain knows you’re fine and safe. You may experience this through intrusive thoughts, rapid heartbeat, shallow breathing, body tension, and more.
Your anxiety is your nervous system and body telling you that you’re not safe. This could be a result of fresh trauma from the divorce, or even more likely, retriggering an old wound of rejection or abandonment.
Now that your relationship is over, you may feel the anxiety of, “I’m going to be alone forever. I’m going to die alone. I’m worthless.” This is a sign of trauma because of the intense anxiety that accompanies these thoughts.
It’s normal to have these worries pass by as your marriage is over. But if it’s intrusive, pervasive, and causing you serious physical distress, it’s a manifestation of trauma.
2. You make “bad decisions.”
You call an ex who cheated on you or you have a one-night stand without protection. Your behavior is impulsive and careless. This may sound like a judgment, but it’s not a reflection of your character. It’s trauma hijacking your nervous system.
When your nervous system endures higher levels of emotional dysregulation, you may engage in risky, impulsive behaviors as an attempt to regulate. In other words, when you feel like sh*t, you chase a temporary high as a way to activate feel-good hormones and chemicals. This may happen through drugs, a new relationship, sex, and more.
As we know, those temporary highs never last. They end up making us feel even worse and more dysregulated after the high wears off.
3. You shut everyone out.
Your loved ones are available to support you emotionally but you turn them away. You may feel undeserving of love and attention. You may feel angry that they’re not offering you the “right” attention so you push it away completely. Perhaps you feel an ambivalence of wanting and not wanting their support simultaneously.
Physically, you isolate yourself in bed, on the couch, or elsewhere. You feel stuck and can’t move. Sometimes it feels like you’re not really even “there.” This resembles the “freeze” response, where your nervous system and body are coping with the trauma by dissociating, numbing, and isolating yourself from everyone.
4. You attempt to repair the relationship.
If your entire body and soul KNOWS that your relationship is over, but you still try to salvage it at its final stage, this may be a sign of trauma. This can result from feeling unsafe to be on your own, emotionally, physically, and financially. The danger of being alone feels greater than the danger of being in your broken relationship, so your nervous system does whatever it needs to find “safety.” Even when it’s not safe.
This may not be a sign of trauma if you made the decision to split too soon. You may realize you didn’t try hard enough to repair or improve the relationship with professional support. This will probably show up in feelings of regret.
However, if your decision to repair the relationship feels full of anxiety, fear, and an intuitive sense that it’s the wrong decision, it’s probably trauma.
5. You swear off relationships.
This can be an aligned lifestyle choice for some people, but most of the time, it’s trauma. As human beings, we are biologically wired to be intimately connected to other human beings. The desire for romantic relationships is natural. Swearing off relationships isn’t.
Even after your marriage has been over for a period of time and you meet someone new, you notice you have trust issues, jealousy, fear of intimacy, and sabotaging behaviors. Your mind may say that you’re ready for a relationship, but your nervous system is still traumatized and won’t let love in.
This is a strong indication that you haven’t healed from your previous breakups. Until you do, you’ll keep projecting old fears and traumas onto your new relationships.
The importance of healing yourself when a marriage is over
We’ve worked with many clients who’ve already been through multiple marriages and divorces. Most of the time, each marriage ends for the same reasons.
They felt trapped, they lost the spark, they weren’t getting their needs met, etc.
Take my client Linda, for example. She brought her trauma and fear of abandonment into every new relationship. She was intensely afraid of rejection, so she avoided expressing her real needs and did not speak up for herself.
Her relationship foundations often built on her partner’s needs and none of hers. She often used to say, “No problem!” Or “I’ll do whatever you want!” as she buried her own voice.
As she became more comfortable to be herself, she began to feel really frustrated. It was always at that point she finally felt the courage to use her voice and contribute her opinion when she never did before.
Her partners became thrown-off and confused.
“I thought you liked hanging out with my family… now you’re saying you don’t want to see them anymore?” One of her past partners said.
She felt they were seeing his family a bit too much, but she never voiced that before. She wanted to please him and make sure he thought, “She’s a keeper.”
He got hurt because she suddenly changed her feelings about spending time with his loved ones.
She got hurt because he wasn’t respecting her needs.
This dynamic bled into their everyday life and tasks. She made increasingly more requests of how she wanted the relationship to be different. She wanted him to go to bed at the same time and eat dinner together every night. But that’s not how they were doing things for years.
Some of these requests were not aligned with her ex’s lifestyle. He was a night owl and liked his quiet time after she went to sleep. This made Linda often feel like, how could she stay in a relationship where her partner didn’t care about her needs? She ended up unsatisfied and hurt. She had no other choice but to end the relationship.
And that’s how all the other ones ended, too.
I’m not trying to say this was Linda’s fault. Linda took full ownership of her part when she came to work with us. She knew she created a self-fulfilling prophecy in her relationships that confirmed her needs were not important. This was a repetition of her trauma of abandonment, which she perpetuated in each new relationship.
However, her awareness wasn’t enough to stop the pattern sneaking into every relationship.
Whatever trauma you endured in your life will continue to bleed into your relationships until it is resolved through the BODY and nervous system. Conscious and subconscious unhealthy patterns will make you feel like your love life is a broken record, until they are released.
It’s friggin’ exhausting and frustrating because it feels like nothing changes no matter how much awareness you already have.
How to heal and become ready for future relationships
True, lasting healing for healthy relationships is about rewiring your nervous system to feel safe with love, intimacy, and conflict.
If none of those things feel safe to your body, then you’ll continue to react impulsively and shut down in relationships.
If you’re like many of my clients, you’ve already done so much cognitive & mindset work, and therapy. You may have even dabbled in alternative healing like energy work and EMDR. But you’re still feeling stuck or worse.
It’s NOT because you’re broken or damaged goods. The missing ingredient is movement. Intentional movement of your body is a necessary element to release trauma and create healthy relationship patterns.
We store trauma and subconscious habitual patterns inside our bodies, and the language of the body is movement. Thus, if you want to access and release trauma, you must connect safety to your body through movement.
This may sound a little woo-woo, but it’s scientifically valid.
The logical and verbal part of our brains go offline during trauma and extreme stress. Thus, memories associated with trauma are not stored in words. They are stored non-verbally as fragments of sensations felt within the body.
Movement of the body stirs up different sensations tied to trauma memories, from which we have an opportunity to work with them through movement.
One of our former clients, Mara, stirred up old trauma by embodying slower movements in session with my Embodiment Coach, Sarah.
This felt extremely unsafe for Mara because her first trauma was being abandoned in a house fire. She would have literally died back then, if she moved slowly.
When this came up in session, Sarah was able to help Mara regulate her emotions and nervous system through this fear. This helped Mara stay connected to her body and the therapeutic relationship, instead of dissociating and reacting like she usually does in her real-life relationship.
This was transformational for Mara’s relationship because her reactions with her partner were quick, reactive and impulsive. She did not previously know how or feel safe to slow down her emotions.
Now, she is able to feel her emotions as they arise and slow them down, which helps her CHOOSE a healthier way to respond to her partner instead of pushing him away.
It’s incredible how transformation in the body mirrors a direct transformation in healing and relationships!
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
