Four Practices to Help You Feel Better: reflections from my week at a yoga retreat
A couple of weeks ago, I took myself off to spend a week at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas. The retreat was at an ashram and along with lots of yoga, I did daily meditation and attended workshops on a bunch of topics, from mindfulness to forgiveness. I so often thought about you, always looking for things to bring back, like a mother bird flying around looking for worms to take back to the nest . . .
A couple of weeks ago, I took myself off to spend a week at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas. The retreat was at an ashram and along with lots of yoga, I did daily meditation and attended workshops on a bunch of topics, from mindfulness to forgiveness. I so often thought about you, always looking for things to bring back, like a mother bird flying around looking for worms to take back to the nest. The retreat was great for me and I feel changed by it - calmer, more steady and optimistic about the future.
So I’m bringing back to you some thoughts that originated at the retreat and also in discussion with the women in the current Hearts & Minds online divorce recovery group. Here are four practices for your reflection:
Detachment
Aren’t we all suffering because we can’t detach from our ex-husbands? Hasn’t thoughts of him colonized your mind, maybe tormenting you day and night if you’re in the early phases of recovery? Aren’t there hooks that keep you connected to him, ruminating about everything? Are you ready to untie those bonds?
There’s always a lot of ambivalence about detaching from him; it’s loaded with significance. It means that you fully accept that it’s over - and that’s huge. It may feel like you’re letting him off the hook. As long as you’re still grieving, in some cosmic way, you’re holding his feet to the fire, keep him responsible. And there’s a feeling of emptiness that you can avoid as long as he is firmly in your mind.
Detachment is a big task and cannot be accomplished in the early phases, but at some point, you’ll need to accept that it is over, release your grip and let it all drift back into your past. When you’re able to detach, you’ll free your mind and heal your heart. It means turning your vision from the past to your future. You can do that!
Resilience
We all have a natural bouyancy. When we sink to the bottom of the pool, we’ll naturally float back up. The body is programmed to heal - your cut finger will eventually be as good as new - it knows how to repair even without you doing anything about it.
Resilience means you have the capacity to recover, to bounce back. It doesn’t mean that you’ll bounce back right away as if nothing awful had happened, but it means that, in your heart, you know that you will. Eventually. It’s the expectation that this too shall pass - that you may not know what shape your life will take but you believe that whatever it is, you’ll be okay. You know you have the capacity to heal.
Rewiring
Rewiring means that you will need to challenge the thoughts that keep you stuck. This is where you shape some new neural pathways and fight against negativity. Science has shown that you can lift your mood just by changing your expression. When you smile even if you don’t feel pleased about anything, the body doesn’t know that the gesture is not genuine - the smile just naturally lifts your mood.
Another experiment showed that if you lift your arms in the air in a triumphant pose as if you’d just won a race, even if you don’t feel triumphant at all, you’ll be more likely to do well on a job interview than if you’d not. What you do and say, even if it’s not heartfelt, will bring you closer to those positive emotions. They rewire new neural pathways - it’s the “fake it till you make it” theory and it holds water. What you practice grows stronger.
So if an acquaintance at work asks how you are and rather than say, “miserable”, you say, “I’m okay” (even when you’re not), you’re making a cause to be one step closer to actually being okay at some point in the future. Just save the truth for those close to you who want to help.
Self-care
There’s a lot you can do to grow from this trauma but it means that you work on it in a consistent way and that requires self-care. I’d love to see you adopt some daily practices that will strengthen your spirit inch by inch. The effects of trauma get lodged in the body so you need to do healthy body practices to release it.
An example would be to do ten minutes of meditation every morning. If it’s too hard to sit quietly and focus on your breath, you can easily use an app that offers guided meditations of any length. If just sitting at all is too hard, how about a meditative walk around the block, where you notice the light, colors, trees, snow, whatever?
Other self care practices include yoga, t’ai chi, stretching exercises, singing, playing the piano, running - anything you do for yourself (you moms of young kids may need to get up 15 minutes earlier to carve out that time for yourself). It means putting some thought into doing something that you know is healthy for you, even if you don’t feel like it. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Recovery comes in tiny increments and sometimes, you can’t see that it’s happening, but if you do something positive for yourself, it will add up and you’ll be headed in the right direction.
I hope these four concepts offer you food for thought (that mother bird again!) and that they help you access the hidden opportunity in what you are going through. You are being forced to work on yourself and develop self-healing and self-care practices that will serve you well no matter what you have to face in life in the future.
And, as always, let me know your reactions to all this below in the comments.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
When His Eyes Turn Cold
Although there are many aspects to wife abandonment, the primary one which every woman struggles with is understanding how someone who cared for her so profoundly could just stop loving. How could that light go out of his eye? . . .
My husband left me the day I returned from twenty-three days on the road for a book tour for my first book. I had driven all alone from Boston to Atlanta, across the midwest and then from San Francisco to San Diego, giving readings at bookstores in towns along the way, on the move, day after day after day. It was rough.
When it was over, I took the red eye back from San Diego. My husband picked me up at the airport and I fell in his arms in relief. I remember the softness of his brown leather jacket caressing my cheek as I hugged him tight; secure in his love, I was so happy to see him.
He dropped me off at home and went to work. When he walked in the door that evening, my world as I knew it shattered. He had an odd expression on his face and muttered, “It’s over”. I was mystified. He repeated, “It’s over and I’m leaving you right now for another woman.”
I stared at his face and was shocked to realize that I didn’t recognize it. It was as if his familiar features had rearranged themselves and hardened. The light had gone out of his eyes and instead, they had turned cold. Later, I sat on the bed crying hysterically as he threw his stuff from the closet into plastic bags. He seemed unfazed. He really seemed not to care.
Where had the man I had known gone? The one who grabbed my hand whenever we were walking down the street. The one who showered me with love and affection. Who had written me a card on our anniversary a few months earlier that read, “You are my rock, you are my life!”
That was more than a decade ago and since then, I have dedicated my life to helping women who are going through the same trauma that I experienced. I guide them from ground zero through their painful obsessing, numbness and grief, till they can reach the other side of this nightmare and rebuild their lives.
Although there are many aspects to wife abandonment, the primary one which every woman struggles with is understanding how someone who cared for her so profoundly could just stop loving. How could that light go out of his eye? How could he disconnect so completely? It is very troubling and scary because if someone you felt so close to can turn against you so categorically, how can you trust anyone? It redefines the nature of all relationships and leaves you alone, not only in the physical sense, but also existentially. And that is why Wife Abandonment Syndrome is so devastating.
When I was studying psychology, I learned of an experiment by psychologist Dr. Edward Tronick, director of UMass Boston's Infant-Parent Mental Health Program, called the Still Face Experiment. In the experiment, a mother warmly interacts with her one-year-old baby girl and the baby responds delightedly. Then the mother assumes a still face and no matter what the baby does to engage her, the mother doesn’t respond. The baby becomes more and more agitated, screeching, arching her back and reaching for her mother wildly.
Watching it now moves me profoundly because that baby is us. Our loss of our sense of safety and the security of knowing what to expect from a person we depend on completely who then stops responding and gives us a still face stirs a panic inside. The world temporarily stops making sense.
During those early months post-abandonment, women obsess endlessly about how this could have happened. How could he change and not care? The primary task of recovery is to answer that question for herself. She needs to understand the flaw in the personality of her particular husband that permitted him to have been attached for so long and then so cavalierly detach from her and typically jump to another as if she and the affair partner were interchangeable. He focuses on getting his needs of the moment met without regard for the damage done.
I understand that sometimes marriages fall apart for all sorts of reasons and can accept that men or women feel the need to leave. The unique aspect of Wife Abandonment Syndrome however is that in leaving, the husband turns against his wife with disregard for her distress. His eyes turn cold.
The task then for the wife in recovery is for her to be able to detach eventually but because she doesn’t possess that same internal flaw, for her it is not so easy. Moving on, she will need to find the courage to accept that many other people are capable of making secure lasting attachments even if her husband was not.
Click here to watch the Still Face Experiment and please share with us your own experience of your husband’s eyes turning cold below.
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.
