My crisis came in the guise of divorce. I was in my mid-forties, married for twenty years with three children, when I learned my wife was having an affair. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I was torn apart. Divorce was not in my script at all, so when I saw my marriage crumbling beyond repair I was totally disoriented.
Betrayal in the form of adultery is always painful. In my case, its exceptional power lay in the fact that it reawakened my deepest emotions: my wife was rejecting me in much the same way I felt my mother had “rejected” me by dying when I was ten years old. In effect the situation that resulted was similar, only now it touched the core of my being.
In fact, my whole life disintegrated. My family was in tatters; I was no longer a husband or life-partner and was struggling to remain a father. I lost all sense of who I was and my confidence plummeted. I felt completely deskilled instead of the reasonably competent person I had been. Every one of my accounts was called in – I stood naked at the counter of life. For me this was loss on a grand scale. Most of all, I felt emasculated and impotent.
In time and with the help of therapy I was gradually transformed by the crisis. The therapy helped me to rebuild my confidence, to start believing in myself and to put myself center-stage. I shed a lot of my emotional armor and began to develop a greater awareness of my feelings. This fundamentally changed the way I functioned, shifting me from being ‘in my head’ to being ‘in my heart’ more; from looking out to looking inward. I slowly came to realize that “it’s all in me”, that we see the world as we are, not as it is.
My new perspective allowed me to feel more comfortable with myself and easier in my relationships with other people. I moved from feeling weak and powerless to feeling passionate and powerful. Somehow I managed to lay most of my demons to rest and virtually begin life afresh. I emerged a new man, in charge of my own life.
While in the throes of divorce, I was sure my days of despair would never end. But inadvertently my breakup crisis – the proverbial ‘kick in the butt’ – launched me into my present, and best, phase of my life. The transformation I underwent allowed me to enter into and sustain a loving relationship with the woman of my dreams.
@BreakupWriter
