It’s normal to feel lonely after a breakup or divorce. It’s even common for people to be afraid of being alone. This article shares some great tips on how to deal with loneliness after a breakup or divorce.
One of the hardest things I went through when my ex and I split up was feeling lonely. I didn’t know how to deal with the loneliness.
It was excruciatingly painful. And actually, if I’m being honest, was afraid to be alone.
I mean, it makes sense, right? I had been married to my best friend (or so I thought, lol) for seventeen years and I had two beautiful children with him. All of a sudden, I was without a partner and I had to be without my kids nearly half of the time.
Every time they would leave to go to their dad’s, I felt like a little piece of me was dying inside. Or, rather, I think I actually felt like I was dying.
I tried to fill the void that loneliness left by dating guys that were bad for me, partying with friends, indulging in wine, and wallowing in my loneliness on the couch. There were hours upon hours of tears.
The voice inside me kept whispering, you’ll be alone for the rest of your life. No one wants you. You’ll die alone and you’ll be miserable for every moment of it. Your life is completely over.
It’s no wonder I was afraid of being alone and had a hard time coping with my loneliness with all of that unhelpful chatter my obnoxious and unrelenting brain was feeding me.
But I survived.
With lots of work, and time to heal, eventually, I learned to enjoy my alone time and my fear of being alone went away.
Now, this isn’t to say that I always enjoy being alone! I’m an introverted extrovert, so while I like a little time to myself to recharge, I need people to draw energy from. Too much alone time isn’t really my jam, either.
The key is, that being alone isn’t always my preference, but I’m not afraid to be alone anymore.
I’m not afraid to be alone anymore because I know that if I feel lonely, I am more than capable of finding the connection I need. I also don’t make feeling lonely mean anything about me or my self-worth like I used to.
Part of the reason that people are afraid to be alone is that they don’t like how they feel when they’re lonely. And that makes sense, but the problem is the resistance to those feelings only makes them worse.
How?
When you resist feelings, you are really judging them.
And when you judge the lonely feelings, you’re labeling them as “bad” and you’re attaching to the idea that you’d rather feel something different that you label as “good”. Further, when you judge your feelings as “bad”, you have more thoughts about how bad they are.
Those thoughts create an even worse feeling and the whole thing just snowballs.
Before you know it, your brain has taken over, and you can just forget whatever you really know to be true because your brain is hell-bent on protecting you from getting too comfortable in this scary alone-ness.
I mean, heaven forbid, you don’t want to be alone for the rest of your life. And that’s what your brain wants you to think – that if you get too comfortable here, things will never, ever change.
Even if your heart knows that’s not true.
I know this pattern well. I am a recovering emotional “spinner” like this and this is why I didn’t really know how to deal with loneliness after my divorce. I couldn’t get out of the emotional spin-cycle.
And do you know what I learned?
When your thoughts spiral out of control and you get in the emotional spin-cycle, usually the fear is really not so bad once you stop and look at it for what it is.
Like being alone, for example.
Will being alone kill you?
Nope.
It may not be your choice, but guess what? You’re also in complete control of your life. You don’t actually HAVE TO BE ALONE if you choose not to be.
Your fear is really just a habit loop running in your brain that you have the power to interrupt.
It’s a story you’ve been telling yourself and you can choose, right now, to rewrite that story.
You get to rewrite the story of what being alone means to YOU. But first you need to get honest about what your current story is.
The way you deal with loneliness and your fear of being alone is to start by getting honest about your story.
What is your loneliness story?
For me, it started when my ex and I were married. His job always required more hours than mine did. I got tired of being alone all the time, so I found my own activities, and hobbies, and made my own friends. It wasn’t long before our roles flip-flopped and he found himself waiting for me to get home and that didn’t always go over very well.
Looking back, I think subconsciously I felt that my loneliness led me to be busy in a way that caused tension in our marriage.
Bad.
Fast forward to having kids…
He’s a lawyer and had a 2 ½ hour round trip commute each day. He’d leave the house around 6:00 am and get home around 8:00 pm or sometimes even later. It was a long day for both of us – he worked hard, and I had two kids to parent while he was away.
It was another lonely time for me because I craved connection and didn’t get it when I needed it most.
But even though he was absent a lot, there were wonderful times of connection in our marriage, and we had great fun together. I learned to really appreciate the time that we did have together.
When our marriage came to an end, on one hand, I was fairly used to being alone and managing things myself. On the other hand, he took care of our family financially, and we had each other to lean on for support. I always underestimated the value of that support and connection with him.
When we divorced, it was like I got hit by a freight train. I was completely obliterated and had no idea how to deal with the loneliness that would hit me like a ton of bricks.
I no longer had his company (even though he was gone a lot of the time). I no longer had his support – both emotionally and with things like household responsibilities and the like. I no longer had family vacations and fun family times to look forward to.
This scared the shit out of me.
My story became “I can’t do this on my own”.
The story I had written said that being alone meant I had lost everything. It said that I’d never have any of that again. It said that I’d be alone for the rest of my life and it said that I’d lost the only things that would ever make me happy.
It’s no wonder I was afraid to be alone! But I learned something important:
The fear is always worse until you take a good look at it for what it really is.
When I started to break down what I was really afraid of, I realized that yes, my life might feel really hard now that I have to figure out how to deal with loneliness, but being alone is almost 100% certain NOT to kill me.
Life is hard. It’s hard for every one of us. No one is exempt.
I could either choose to believe my story about what it meant to be alone, or I could realize that being alone won’t kill me, even though it feels hard.
And what do we do when life feels hard, friends? We put one foot in front of the other. We do the work and we look for the next right step, always.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “You don’t have to see the entire staircase to take the first step.”
This is the new story I chose to write.
I like this story because when I didn’t know how to deal with loneliness, I looked at my entire life sprawled out in front of me as a life of being alone, and quite frankly it felt like shit.
It was overwhelming to see life that way, and I realized that in order for me to deal with loneliness, I had to learn that I just needed to accept that I felt lonely in each moment. I also learned that I didn’t have to solve loneliness in one fell swoop.
My rewritten story is also one that speaks to my resilience and my ability to create connection when I need it and also to appreciate my alone time. The fear I had of being alone wasn’t allowing me to enjoy the many hobbies and talents I have and I learned to appreciate that I now had so much more time to devote to them as well as explore new things.
So while I still love to be around people, and would prefer to have a partner in life, it’s not always a bad thing to have time to myself. And while sometimes I get anxious about being alone, I can always come back to my rewritten story and remind myself that it’s not a bad thing to feel lonely sometimes.
It’s a beautiful place to be.
If you’re wondering how to deal with loneliness after your breakup or divorce, I can help! Click HERE to schedule a call to learn how.
