Some People are Painting Rainbows
Let’s not miss the good in the bad. Let’s use our own creativity and make a souvenir to remember this wild trip by. All the things that seemed unthinkable that have become everyday. We need to write it all down . . .
Do you feel like a pioneer yet? Are you doing things you never thought you would do? Cutting your own hair, home schooling your kids, baking your own bread, making do with whatever you have in the larder? This time is going to go down in history. Let’s not miss the hidden gift.
Alice Sommers, the oldest living Holocaust survivor who died at 106 said, “Even the bad is good if you know where to look for it.” Let’s not be so focused on the bad that we miss the opportunity to experience the good. The universe has pressed the reset button. Mother Nature has sent us all to our rooms to think about what we are doing to this planet. Let’s not skip that lesson.
This is a time of creativity bursting out everywhere. Some talking dog YouTube videos are so funny that people are laughing till they cry. I was invited to an international dance party. People are writing songs. Balconies are the new concert halls. Here in Montreal, we stood on our balconies and sang Leonard Cohen songs. In Italy, they’re singing the national anthem and playing accordion for the neighbors. People are cooking. My friend heard of a woman who is drawing a flower every day. I heard that kids are painting rainbows and sticking them in the front windows.
People are resilient, self-reliant, resourceful. We’re not bothering our doctors with small issues, our dentists’ offices are closed except for emergencies. We’re figuring work-arounds to make things happen. The organic grocer is taking orders, bagging your things and passing the bags to you through the front door. You pay online.
Let’s not miss the good in the bad. Let’s use our own creativity and make a souvenir to remember this wild trip by. All the things that seemed unthinkable that have become everyday. We need to write it all down. The schools are closed, restaurants are closed, we don’t meet our friends, we don’t go into work, Stephen Colbert did the Late Show from his bathtub. We couldn’t have imagined this!
As much as we’re avoiding each other, we’re reaching out to each other. Checking in. We have more time now that we’re not commuting, now that some of us are not working. We can contact our cousin in Tucson. We can have dinner parties with all of the guests eating at home connected by Zoom. Young people are distributing flyers offering to go grocery shopping for old people. We sign our emails to our friends with “Be well and stay safe.”
I honor the check-out workers at the supermarket. I send love to my mailman. I bow down to the nurses, doctors, ICU staff, respiratory therapists. I pay reverence to the hospital cleaners and kitchen staff. I appreciate the public officials who are working hard. The doormen, bus drivers. I don’t forget the garbage men and those that work in the recycling plant. We see you. We honor you. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Namaste.
Families are coming together or exploding apart. People are out strolling in household clusters. Husbands and wives are fighting. The stakes are high. Beautiful moments are experienced with kids. Vicious fights taking place at 4am with everyone listening. When this is all over, the landscape will have changed.
We have more time. The world has become a village. Every day is Shabbat. The skies are fresh and pollution is clearing because people aren’t driving. We’re cleaning our closets. Taking the dog for long walks. Doing Yoga with Adriene. Meditating. Taking up running.
How about keeping a journal on paper so you can remember it all? You can make one if you don’t have an old one in the back of the closet. Keep notes on events and thoughts. How are you feeling today? How did you sleep? Any bizarre dreams? Suffering? What’s the latest unthinkable thing that is happening? What are people saying?
Write it all down and then use your creativity. Put color in it, paste something into it, a quote, make a drawing, insert a photo that you can print on your printer. Make it beautiful, or raw, or painful, or full of fear but express it. And then express it again later in the day or tomorrow.
This is one for the books. Let’s not let it pass us by in a haze of anxiety, selfishness and fear. As Ryan Holiday said, the obstacle is the way. We can use this crisis as a springboard for growth and change, love and kindness, courage and grace. Embrace it. Breathe.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
We Will Muddle Through This Together with Courage and Grace
If you can stay in the present moment, do some exercise, don’t let yourself awfulize and remember that this is not going to last forever, we’ll all muddle through this. You’re going to have to be tough and not spill your worries on your children or any other vulnerable person in your life. You can do this! . . .
I’m struck by how this crazy virus crisis is the same as being hit by Wife Abandonment Syndrome. You’re going along, living your life, unsuspecting, and then something unthinkable happens out-of-the-blue. Your whole pattern of living changes in a short period of time, new revelations unfolding day after day. You keep hoping that it’s not true, that there’s been some mistake, but there’s no turning back.
You think longingly of your secure past, when the world made sense but now you’re living with an uncertain future. You don’t know if your finances will ever recover. You worry about how it’s going to affect your kids. You’re managing a sense of fear and threat all day long. The landscape of your life is unrecognizable.
Whew! Double whammy! For those of you who have newly experienced wife abandonment, I can’t imagine what you’re going through. At least, you know you’re not alone - you and everyone else on this planet are in the same boat! The coronavirus crisis most likely stirred the cauldron of emotion about your husband’s departure. You may be feeling acutely alone and worrying about who will take care of you if you get sick. It may have awoken your anger that he is with someone and has abandoned you to your fate.
Like wife abandonment, in the current crisis there’s no way around it - you have to go through it. It forces you to work on yourself, to be calm and not spiral out of control. It requires that you strengthen your mind and figure out how to tame your emotions.
You need to stay in the present moment. Most probably, if you had never heard of the coronavirus, you’d be more or less fine (okay - just dealing with the runaway husband). It’s spring and the trees are budding, the flowers are coming out here in the northern hemisphere. We worry about what will happen but if we could just stay in the here and now, it would help. We’ll deal with whatever will come when it comes. Like they say in AA - one day at a time.
This is how I’m coping. I’m quarantined and working remotely with clients so I’m pretty much home most of the time other than taking the dog for a walk. So I start the day early with a half hour meditation and that’s very important. It’s a mini-vacation for my mind.
During that half hour, I try to keep my focus on the meditation and as my mind wanders away like a frisky puppy, I summon it back. Some days it’s easier than others but I always feel better after meditating. And, by the way, there are sometimes other women from our Community meditating at the same time using Insight Timer (the link is on the Runaway Husbands website) and I love that! If you want to join, you don’t need to commit to a half hour. Start with ten minutes and slowly work up over a few weeks. Just do it every day. It will do you good.
Another thing I’m doing is some form of exercise - usually yoga. I tune into a YouTube channel called Yoga with Adriene. She’s a sweetheart yoga teacher who lives in Austin, Texas and has dozens of classes of all different levels and durations. It’s very low tech and you know she’s a good person. Her dog, Benji, is often just lying around near her yoga mat. So there’s another hour when I’m not thinking about the coronavirus.
I’m cooking good food and walking in the sun and I’m more in touch (remotely) with family and friends than I typically have time for. And, of course, I’m lucky because I’m very busy with work.
If you can stay in the present moment, do some exercise, don’t let yourself awfulize and remember that this is not going to last forever, we will all muddle through this. You’re going to have to be tough and not spill your worries on your children and any other vulnerable person in your life. You can do this!
It’s always important to strengthen your health, don’t eat or drink too much and quit smoking, if you smoke. And at some point in the future, you’ll say, “Remember that crazy time in 2020 when the world was reeling from the coronavirus? Wow! That was intense.” And life will go on.
Just know that I’m thinking about you. If you’re on our Runaway Husbands Community Facebook page, tune in to my Facebook live Q&A (7:30pm eastern on Wednesdays), when I answer questions and just connect with you. We’re a community and now, more than ever, we need to support each other with loving kindness.
Stay well and share your thoughts below.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
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.
Better, Not Bitter: How being abandoned changes you
The trick is to allow yourself to feel the injustice and anger - to feel the bitterness - but to pass through it eventually and develop that zen acceptance at what life has sent your way. So that, in time, you’ll heal and end up better, not bitter . . .
We had a great session of the Hearts & Minds Recovery Group (an online therapy group) and the conversation shifted to a discussion of how what happened to us has changed us. Penny and Lilly were talking about how they packed up all their husband’s belongings so carefully and thoroughly and then Marianne questioned why we all had to be such good girls in our marriages even as it was dissolving. Lilly said that all the sacrifices make sense if the marriage is ongoing but once it falls apart, they lose their meaning.
Marianne talked about zen acceptance - should we just move on with what life offers us, but Suzanne said that she’s bewildered and anxious. She worked her whole life to get to this stage where she’s retired and has put aside a certain amount of money, and now, she has to split it in half and is looking at the prospect of perhaps needing a mortgage again. It’s just not fair!
I struggled with the conversation because I felt that, of course, everyone needs to air their anger and frustration, but I worry that sometimes women get stuck in bitterness and never again feel happy and free, even in spite of what has happened.
Cherie responded that bitterness is a stage that you have to go through, like the grief and anger. She resents it when people say “Get over it” when they haven’t been through it and don’t know what it’s like. Then she said that we are all going to be changed but who is the person who comes out the other side?
Suzanne shared how she’s changed. She said that she used to be a cardboard cut-out who shut down when anything got too emotional. She was agreeable and avoided conflict and was uncomfortable asking for what she wanted. Since her husband left, she’s been in therapy and is learning to express herself and feel things. It’s a new world for her and she’s happy about the change.
So I suppose the trick is to allow yourself to feel the injustice and anger - to feel the bitterness - but to pass through it eventually and develop that zen acceptance at what life has sent your way. So that, in time, you will heal and end up better, not bitter.
Join in the conversation below and tell us what you think!
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.
