How Not to Have a Victim Mentality Although You’ve Been Victimized
Once you have mastered the Stoic approach, rather than bemoaning things that happen to you that you may label as bad or unfortunate, you’ll learn to welcome them as an opportunity to hone your ability to create value from adversity . . .
The other day, at my divorce recovery retreat called A Course on Happiness, the women attending learned to activate their superpowers. Everyone at the online retreat had been left by their husband from what they believed to have been a secure committed marriage till the day he left out-of-the-blue, morphing dramatically into an angry stranger.
The first workshop I presented at the retreat is called The Obstacle is the Way, based on a book by Ryan Holiday. The workshop describes the philosophy of Stoicism which, in a nutshell, teaches that if you can view any setback as an opportunity to grow and develop skills, you’ll strengthen your character, making you better able to handle anything life sends your way.
Once you have mastered the Stoic approach, rather than bemoaning things that happen to you that you may label as bad or unfortunate (i.e. your husband leaving), you’ll learn to welcome them as a chance to hone your ability to create value from adversity (e.g., training your thinking to look for things you can feel gratitude about). A simple cliche to describe Stoic thought is turning lemons into lemonade.
Women who are struggling to rebuild their lives after Wife Abandonment have a lot of emotional work to do in order to regain a sense of peace and meaning in life.
They have to figure out how to stop their mind from whirring obsessively about their ex.
They have to learn to stop regretting and blaming themselves.
They have to banish the sense of shame that many feel for being single.
They have to grieve all they have lost.
They have to train their thinking in order to envision a new and different future.
Time heals to some extent but it’s what you do with the time that makes the difference. That’s where the work comes in.
After your husband leaves and when you are over the initial trauma, you essentially have two choices.
You can wrap yourself in the cloak of victimhood, explaining to everyone who comes near how unjust it is and how unfair he was, attempting to elicit sympathy, or
You can work through the perfectly normal grief (this might take time) but eventually develop a defiant attitude that says, “I’m not going to let his leaving ruin the rest of my life.”
The Stoic approach would guide you, perhaps, to practice doing things when you’re really down that you really don’t feel like doing, although you know they’re good for you, like going for a walk or cooking yourself a healthy meal. Getting yourself to do those things takes emotional work but the more you do them, the easier they become and the better you start to feel. And along the way, you develop the skill of good self-care.
In Runaway Husbands, I offer this piece of advice: “Don’t press ‘send’ when you’re still in your pajamas!” By that I mean, although you may want to send a begging, pleading email to your ex in the middle of the night, it might not look like the best idea in the cold light of day. If you can practice the skill of self-control and wait a day, you’ll probably be glad you didn’t humiliate yourself by “pressing send”.
The fact that your husband left forces you to struggle to do the thing that’s in your best interest even though it’s hard. This will strengthen your character and you will grow from it. The more you practice self-control, for example, the easier it will become and you can add it to your list of superpowers!
So, what skills do you need to apply to achieve the items on the list above?
To stop obsessing, you can use your determination to stop yourself from ruminating and instead, distract yourself. When you see that you're on that mental hamster wheel, turn on a documentary about Italy or listen to some beautiful music to help your mind rest.
To stop regretting or blaming yourself, you can read the work of Dr. Kristen Neff and learn to practice self-compassion.
To banish shame, exercise the courage to join a single women’s MeetUp group and go together with your new single friends to activities.
To grieve, permit yourself to feel the pain without fearing that it will overtake you.
To envision a new future, encourage yourself to explore new things, no matter how small, that you can incorporate into your life.
You can change your perspective to look at this huge setback as an opportunity for you to challenge yourself, turning it into multiple lessons on living. It's all about appreciating your life, no matter what form it’s in at the moment and in the end, you'll be proud of how mighty you’ve become!
So, when you encounter anything hard in life, try to look at it differently. View it as an opportunity for you to reach down and bring up your best stuff so you can face down the situation with courage, patience, self-love, determination or resilience. There will be no lack of opportunities in life for you to rise to the challenge and put your Stoic skills in practice.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Why did it hurt so bad when your husband left?
Rejection, betrayal and the loss of the dream of your future all figure into why it hurts so bad, but there is an even deeper reason. Attachment injury touches you in a primal place making that sudden loss of attachment feel like a physical assault.
In the study that I conducted before writing Runaway Husbands, I asked women whose husbands left out-of-the-blue what the moment felt like when he told her it was over and here are their actual words:
It was like someone had stuck a knife in my stomach and turned it
I felt like someone had stepped on my chest and emptied my lungs of air
I felt like someone punched me in the gut
I felt crushed, steamrollered, and then I felt as if I was falling off a cliff
If he had ripped my arm out, it wouldn’t have hurt as much
I felt like I had stepped on a landmine
I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks
I had a strange physical sensation - like my brain had been shot with a stun gun
If we pay close attention to the words describing what it felt like, we understand why it hurts so much - being left in a cold, uncaring way when you had no idea that it was even remotely possible, feels like a physical assault.
In the weeks and months after the husband leaves, the wife obsesses, replaying that moment over and over in an effort to understand how someone who had loved her so much could so casually, but callously hurt her. The fact that she experienced the rupture of the marriage as a physical assault leaves her with pain in her body that she can’t think away because it’s not rational. It touches her on a gut level at some primal place inside.
What factors go into the depth of the pain?
Rejection - her husband has decided that she is not what he wants and he’s discarding her, often for someone else. He’s made an assessment of her, the wife he knows so well, and he doesn’t want her anymore.
Betrayal - he didn’t let her in on his growing discontent about the marriage. He deprived her of any sense of agency in her own life, making a unilateral decision and then springing it on her when there was nothing she could do about it. He broke the bone deep trust she had built with him.
Destruction of her vision of her future - her plans for her future, which she may have been carefully constructing her whole life, are destroyed like a house that’s been hit with a wrecking ball and she’s left unable to envision what her life is going to be like.
Attachment Injury
However, the animal cry we heard in the women’s statements above come from a deeper place, the place of attachment injury. The bond that is built within a long term marriage is more complex than just love - it’s attachment. Imperceptibly, day after day within a marriage, we are melding our identity with our partner, who we turn to in a fundamental way for support and safety like we may have done with our parents in childhood.
If we were lucky enough to have had dedicated, caring parents, we replicate in our intimate relationship the seamless sense of protection we experienced growing up. For many people, there was zero possibility that one day their mother would turn her back and walk away saying, “I don’t care about you anymore.” So when the husband does just that, it’s equally unthinkable.
For those women who grew up in an unstable or unsafe childhood home and then with great courage and hope, allowed themselves to open up and trust their husband and then he leaves, it’s even more damaging. It confirms the fear that people are not safe and not to be trusted, which is a hard way to maneuver through life.
While you’re recovering from the sudden loss of a spouse, you need to recognize that it’s not just a process of thinking and thinking and then eventually figuring out how someone who once loved you could hurt you, so that you can heal and move on. There is a concurrent process going on of soothing the emotional wound of the loss of attachment. That requires that you work towards accepting the fact that your suffering is normal and that having been attached is a good thing. It means you had the courage to let someone into your heart.
As the pain starts to diminish, and it will, you’ll find that you can feel safe and protected even without that other person because you can learn to love and protect yourself. Once you know you can protect yourself, it will be safer for you to attach to someone else because if that person leaves, you now know you will never lose the one you need the most - yourself.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Hi! I’m Vikki and I'll be your guide in your recovery process from Wife Abandonment Syndrome. I’m a therapist but also an abandoned wife like yourself and I know what it feels like. I want to help you not only bounce back, but to discover a new you in the process.
