Surviving divorce: Some guiding metaphors
Divorce is something that happens to other people.
We never imagine it’ll happen to us. And when it does, it's devastating. Even if you wanted the divorce, it can wipe away all your sense of who and where you are. And if you didn't want it, well, it shatters your life.
You feel like you’re going to explode into a million tiny pieces. You spend all day coping, and then at night you collapse. You consult with attorneys, work out your finances, argue about custody, put the house on the market. You’re fighting to survive.
And then, one day, the dust settles, the chaos is over, and there’s just you, standing amidst the debris of what used to be your life. You’re no longer battling to survive. The adrenalin has left your body. Nothing is happening. It’s over, and you know it.
The swampland of the soul
This is the low point. There’s no pleasure, no energy. Either you lie down in the mud and give up, or you panic. You’re aware that you have to rebuild your life, but the task seems overwhelming. Jungian analyst James Hollis called this ‘the swamplands of the soul.’ The swamplands are awful, but they're also a crucial pivot point; the space between who you used to be, and who you will be. Between the past that's gone, and the future that you haven't yet imagined. So how do you survive in the swamplands?
Surviving in the wilderness
In his book ‘Deep Survival’, Laurence Gonzales describes what it’s like to be lost in a wilderness, and how to survive. Here are the stages he identifies:
1. You’re lost, but persist in thinking that everything will work out just fine if you continue along the same path. (Sound familiar? We entered this stage with the first uncomfortable internal whispers that something was wrong in our marriage.)
2. You realize you’re lost, but you don’t have a clue what to do, so you continue on the wrong path, hoping that home will be just over the next hill. (Remember that? That was the period of desperately trying to make things better, even when in retrospect, it was too late for the marriage to be redeemed.)
3. The knowledge that you are finally, irredeemably and undeniably lost makes you panic and run desperately through scrub and trees, burning yourself up, getting even more lost. (This stage spans the panic of the separation, the acrimony of the divorce, and the period of ‘temporary insanity’ that has so often has us frenziedly dating, trying to replace what we’ve lost so we don’t have to feel the grief.)
4. Exhausted by panic, you stop. You realize that wherever you are, you’re somewhere. You sit down where you are and take stock, making wherever you are your temporary home.
5. You rest, and take stock of the resources you have, and the information the landscape offers. With this, you begin to make a plan for the continuation of your life.
Stage four is key to survival. The moment we consent to being lost, and stop running, is the moment that we save our own lives. In the swamplands after the shattering of divorce, you’re in stage four: you’re lost and you know it, the initial frenzy is over. You don’t yet know what to do. You probably feel like giving up completely, which is understandable. But there’s another option, and that’s to follow Gonzales’s advice, and be where you are.
Is there any redeeming feature to the suffering?
Some people claim that suffering is worth it, for the meaning it adds to our lives. Personally, I’d trade a whole lot of meaning for an absence of suffering pretty much any day. So my interest in this swamplands stage is not because of its capacity to deepen the soul (though it can do that too).
I’m writing about it because in order to survive great hurt, we need to hold onto hope, and we need to find some comfort in the midst of our despair. Paradoxically, the swampy landscape of despair contains tiny elements of comfort and hope, if you can find them. Like points of light in the darkness, they can encourage you, and provide a little illumination on your way. Furthermore, this bleak internal landscape provides important clues that can help you find out who you are now, and what you need in order to live a more authentic, and hopefully also happier, life from here on out.
Finding the points of light in the darkness
The great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung said that if you attend deeply to the darkness, the light inside of it will begin to emerge all by itself. But how do we do that? How do we attend to the darkness, and allow the light within it to emerge?
Here’s another metaphor from nature. In the 1970’s, ethnographer Thor Heyerdal crossed the Pacific on a reed boat called Kon Tiki. The boat was designed to travel by drifting in the current, so that it moved at the same speed as the water—which made it actually still. There was no power on the boat, so there was no light, other than that from the stars. The deck was very low, almost level with the water. One dark night as Heyerdahl sat quietly on the low deck, gazing out into the night, he became aware of dozens of glowing eyes. Entranced, he realized he was seeing sea creatures and fishes which had risen to the surface to look at the boat. Heyerdal had sailed often, but had never seen the fishes eyes in the night before. Why? Because in all his previous sailing, he had been moving faster than the water, aiming to get somewhere, in a boat that was lit up. With no speed, no power and no light, a completely different experience—and a previously impossible encounter—was possible. Let’s look in more detail at Heyerdal’s experience, and see whether we can extract the key elements:
No speed and no power: The Kon-Tiki was still in the water. It wasn't trying to get anywhere quickly. Instead, it was letting itself be carried. Being still and letting himself drift was what enabled Heyerdal to sit quietly, looking out at the night, and encountering the fish he never knew were there, willing to encounter him. This process is just as true for an internal landscape as for an external one. It’s amazing what you observe if you truly attend to what’s there. But you can’t do it with an agenda. And it particularly doesn’t work if you’re trying to move on out of there fast.
No light. To see without light you need to take the time to let your night vision switch in, and learn to use peripheral vision to see. Which changes your interaction from one of tracking for specific things, to opening your visual field to everything that’s there, including things you’ve never noticed before. You need night vision to see the fishes' eyes.
Finally, be open to whatever arises. Author Sri Hustvet, who struggled with a bizarre illness, says that the calming effect of accepting what is happening is all the more significant when the thing you are fighting against is yourself. When we accept our condition, and we stop feeling victimized by it, she says, we become open to finding redeeming elements within it, which opens the possibility of living with rather than fighting impotently against what is happening. Interestingly, Laurence Gonzales says that most people who have survived being lost in the wild report something very unexpected: when they finally stop running, and sit down where they are, they suddenly become struck by the natural beauty of the place. It’s a transcendental moment of awareness, that happens at the point of surrender. There is a shift in awareness that happens when you accept to be where you are, as lost as you are. Within the wilderness that seemed so intolerable, you find elements of comfort—as well as resources and direction indicators—that you couldn’t see before, and that you would never have seen, if you hadn’t got lost right here.
Finding new allies within
So we slow down, we abandon our agenda, we stop fighting the darkness, and we accept our place within it. And then, if we are lucky, we’ll start to glimpse the small points of light within the dark night of the soul. But is this enough? Will it get us through? If we can value those sparks enough, then yes, I believe it will. Because those sparks of light are not just sparks, they're clues.
There’s more to you than the part of you that’s wounded. As psychologist James Hillman has pointed out, there are many parts within us, but we are usually unaware of their presence. That's because the ego--the 'me' part that strives to get what we want and control things to avoid suffering--won’t switch off or sit silently long enough for them to emerge. But if you follow these steps, those other parts of you will rise to the surface like Heyerdal's fish, curious to meet you. They’re the allies you need. They’ll provide the clues to finding out who you are now, which is not who you were before your marriage, nor who you were within it--it's someone new.
Jung taught that our task in the middle stage of life is to transition from building a life in the world, to connecting more deeply with soul. He said that this transition often requires us to smash the very life we have so painstakingly built. If we hang on desperately to a life that needs to go, because we can’t face the loss, then our comfortable existence becomes a prison that gradually stifles all growth. This is not a very comforting philosophy, unless you’ve already lost everything.
The devastation of divorce can be terrible, but it clears a space for other, perhaps deeper elements of you to emerge, if you let them. I hope the metaphors in this article will help you stay calm, and give yourself time to connect with where you are in a way that lets those deeper elements emerge.
When you can accept where you are, and connect with the deep, restorative landscape of your soul, the project stops being one of desperate yearning for what was wiped away, and becomes more one of being curious about what you really want to have, and who you really want to be.
We never imagine it’ll happen to us. And when it does, it's devastating. Even if you wanted the divorce, it can wipe away all your sense of who and where you are. And if you didn't want it, well, it shatters your life.
You feel like you’re going to explode into a million tiny pieces. You spend all day coping, and then at night you collapse. You consult with attorneys, work out your finances, argue about custody, put the house on the market. You’re fighting to survive.
And then, one day, the dust settles, the chaos is over, and there’s just you, standing amidst the debris of what used to be your life. You’re no longer battling to survive. The adrenalin has left your body. Nothing is happening. It’s over, and you know it.
The swampland of the soul
This is the low point. There’s no pleasure, no energy. Either you lie down in the mud and give up, or you panic. You’re aware that you have to rebuild your life, but the task seems overwhelming. Jungian analyst James Hollis called this ‘the swamplands of the soul.’ The swamplands are awful, but they're also a crucial pivot point; the space between who you used to be, and who you will be. Between the past that's gone, and the future that you haven't yet imagined. So how do you survive in the swamplands?
Surviving in the wilderness
In his book ‘Deep Survival’, Laurence Gonzales describes what it’s like to be lost in a wilderness, and how to survive. Here are the stages he identifies:
1. You’re lost, but persist in thinking that everything will work out just fine if you continue along the same path. (Sound familiar? We entered this stage with the first uncomfortable internal whispers that something was wrong in our marriage.)
2. You realize you’re lost, but you don’t have a clue what to do, so you continue on the wrong path, hoping that home will be just over the next hill. (Remember that? That was the period of desperately trying to make things better, even when in retrospect, it was too late for the marriage to be redeemed.)
3. The knowledge that you are finally, irredeemably and undeniably lost makes you panic and run desperately through scrub and trees, burning yourself up, getting even more lost. (This stage spans the panic of the separation, the acrimony of the divorce, and the period of ‘temporary insanity’ that has so often has us frenziedly dating, trying to replace what we’ve lost so we don’t have to feel the grief.)
4. Exhausted by panic, you stop. You realize that wherever you are, you’re somewhere. You sit down where you are and take stock, making wherever you are your temporary home.
5. You rest, and take stock of the resources you have, and the information the landscape offers. With this, you begin to make a plan for the continuation of your life.
Stage four is key to survival. The moment we consent to being lost, and stop running, is the moment that we save our own lives. In the swamplands after the shattering of divorce, you’re in stage four: you’re lost and you know it, the initial frenzy is over. You don’t yet know what to do. You probably feel like giving up completely, which is understandable. But there’s another option, and that’s to follow Gonzales’s advice, and be where you are.
Is there any redeeming feature to the suffering?
Some people claim that suffering is worth it, for the meaning it adds to our lives. Personally, I’d trade a whole lot of meaning for an absence of suffering pretty much any day. So my interest in this swamplands stage is not because of its capacity to deepen the soul (though it can do that too).
I’m writing about it because in order to survive great hurt, we need to hold onto hope, and we need to find some comfort in the midst of our despair. Paradoxically, the swampy landscape of despair contains tiny elements of comfort and hope, if you can find them. Like points of light in the darkness, they can encourage you, and provide a little illumination on your way. Furthermore, this bleak internal landscape provides important clues that can help you find out who you are now, and what you need in order to live a more authentic, and hopefully also happier, life from here on out.
Finding the points of light in the darkness
The great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung said that if you attend deeply to the darkness, the light inside of it will begin to emerge all by itself. But how do we do that? How do we attend to the darkness, and allow the light within it to emerge?
Here’s another metaphor from nature. In the 1970’s, ethnographer Thor Heyerdal crossed the Pacific on a reed boat called Kon Tiki. The boat was designed to travel by drifting in the current, so that it moved at the same speed as the water—which made it actually still. There was no power on the boat, so there was no light, other than that from the stars. The deck was very low, almost level with the water. One dark night as Heyerdahl sat quietly on the low deck, gazing out into the night, he became aware of dozens of glowing eyes. Entranced, he realized he was seeing sea creatures and fishes which had risen to the surface to look at the boat. Heyerdal had sailed often, but had never seen the fishes eyes in the night before. Why? Because in all his previous sailing, he had been moving faster than the water, aiming to get somewhere, in a boat that was lit up. With no speed, no power and no light, a completely different experience—and a previously impossible encounter—was possible. Let’s look in more detail at Heyerdal’s experience, and see whether we can extract the key elements:
No speed and no power: The Kon-Tiki was still in the water. It wasn't trying to get anywhere quickly. Instead, it was letting itself be carried. Being still and letting himself drift was what enabled Heyerdal to sit quietly, looking out at the night, and encountering the fish he never knew were there, willing to encounter him. This process is just as true for an internal landscape as for an external one. It’s amazing what you observe if you truly attend to what’s there. But you can’t do it with an agenda. And it particularly doesn’t work if you’re trying to move on out of there fast.
No light. To see without light you need to take the time to let your night vision switch in, and learn to use peripheral vision to see. Which changes your interaction from one of tracking for specific things, to opening your visual field to everything that’s there, including things you’ve never noticed before. You need night vision to see the fishes' eyes.
Finally, be open to whatever arises. Author Sri Hustvet, who struggled with a bizarre illness, says that the calming effect of accepting what is happening is all the more significant when the thing you are fighting against is yourself. When we accept our condition, and we stop feeling victimized by it, she says, we become open to finding redeeming elements within it, which opens the possibility of living with rather than fighting impotently against what is happening. Interestingly, Laurence Gonzales says that most people who have survived being lost in the wild report something very unexpected: when they finally stop running, and sit down where they are, they suddenly become struck by the natural beauty of the place. It’s a transcendental moment of awareness, that happens at the point of surrender. There is a shift in awareness that happens when you accept to be where you are, as lost as you are. Within the wilderness that seemed so intolerable, you find elements of comfort—as well as resources and direction indicators—that you couldn’t see before, and that you would never have seen, if you hadn’t got lost right here.
Finding new allies within
So we slow down, we abandon our agenda, we stop fighting the darkness, and we accept our place within it. And then, if we are lucky, we’ll start to glimpse the small points of light within the dark night of the soul. But is this enough? Will it get us through? If we can value those sparks enough, then yes, I believe it will. Because those sparks of light are not just sparks, they're clues.
There’s more to you than the part of you that’s wounded. As psychologist James Hillman has pointed out, there are many parts within us, but we are usually unaware of their presence. That's because the ego--the 'me' part that strives to get what we want and control things to avoid suffering--won’t switch off or sit silently long enough for them to emerge. But if you follow these steps, those other parts of you will rise to the surface like Heyerdal's fish, curious to meet you. They’re the allies you need. They’ll provide the clues to finding out who you are now, which is not who you were before your marriage, nor who you were within it--it's someone new.
Jung taught that our task in the middle stage of life is to transition from building a life in the world, to connecting more deeply with soul. He said that this transition often requires us to smash the very life we have so painstakingly built. If we hang on desperately to a life that needs to go, because we can’t face the loss, then our comfortable existence becomes a prison that gradually stifles all growth. This is not a very comforting philosophy, unless you’ve already lost everything.
The devastation of divorce can be terrible, but it clears a space for other, perhaps deeper elements of you to emerge, if you let them. I hope the metaphors in this article will help you stay calm, and give yourself time to connect with where you are in a way that lets those deeper elements emerge.
When you can accept where you are, and connect with the deep, restorative landscape of your soul, the project stops being one of desperate yearning for what was wiped away, and becomes more one of being curious about what you really want to have, and who you really want to be.