You’re not a failure because you’re getting a divorce

Sheri Hardin

By Sheri Hardin, LCSW – Therapist at Plum Tree Counseling

Updated January 14, 2025

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People do have a lot of beliefs that lead them to feel like they failed when they divorce. If their parents stayed married through really hard stuff, whether they worked on it or not. The message could be either explicit or implicit. It’s either you don’t get divorced, no matter what. It could be that you actually did try everything possible, and either your spouse wasn’t on board, wasn’t going to grow with you. It could be that both people did the work and they grew, but they grew in different directions. A way to help you feel like that you’ve succeeded, that you’re not a failure, that you have come through this on the other side with some wins, is really being able to shift out of that kind of victim mentality of this happened to me.

There may have been really horrible stuff that happened to you, but being able to shift out of that and look at what have I learned? How have I grown? How can my life better now? Even if I thought it was good in my marriage or thought it was good enough, how can life better now? And so when you really shift that perspective to the gifts that you’ve received through the process, which can take a little while to get there, but when you shift that perspective to what are the learnings, the gifts, how can your life be really different?

That’s how you can succeed and you can come out of this feeling like, my life is different than I thought it was gonna be, but in these ways it’s better than it was, and that’s how to feel more successful rather than like a failure through divorce.

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