Counseling for women after divorce in charleston, South Carolina

Therapy for divorce grief

It’s a Saturday morning at the beach and you’re alone with your kid. The other families are in family units: mom, dad, kids, dogs, umbrellas, coolers. You’ve got your kid, the umbrella, the cooler, and the small ache that this is what your weekends look like now. Your kid is fine. She’s building a sandcastle. You’re sitting on the towel with sunglasses on so nobody can see your face, watching her, watching the family with the four kids and the dad helping with the moat, and trying not to feel what you’re feeling.

You made it through the divorce in one piece. You handled the property settlement, the custody schedule, the conversation with your boss about whether to take leave (you didn’t), the move to the new house or the renegotiation of the mortgage. Your colleagues didn’t notice the dip. Your clients didn’t notice the dip. You handled this the way you handle everything: with the door closed and the schedule made and the next thing already started.

What you didn’t expect is that handling the divorce wasn’t going to make you okay.

The hardest part of the divorce hasn’t been the loss of the marriage. You knew the marriage was ending. The hardest part has been the question of who you are now that the marriage isn’t part of the answer. You spent twenty years being someone’s partner, fifteen years being someone’s mother, and your whole career being the kind of person who has things together. You can handle the partner role changing. You can handle the mother role changing. What you can’t handle is losing the version of yourself who always has her shit together.

You’re not used to feeling like this. You graduated at the top of your class. You got through the residency or the consulting years or the senior administrator track. The senior role at the hospital or the firm or the base or the system. The title that took fifteen years to earn. You learned to handle things faster than other people could even name them. That was the skill, and it still is. And it’s the wrong skill for this.

The question of who you are now shows up in the meeting where you’re being asked to weigh in on something you have an opinion about and you can’t find it. It shows up at the grocery store when you reach for the brand of cereal nobody in your house eats anymore. It shows up at 11pm when you find yourself on your ex’s Instagram looking for evidence of something you couldn’t name if you found it. It shows up on a Saturday at the beach when you’re sitting on the towel watching everyone else’s family and wondering which version of you is supposed to come home with your kid at the end of the day.

The phone buzzes with your ex’s name on it. Your stomach drops before you’ve read the message. It’s about your kid’s school pickup logistics, which is fine, but your chest is already tight, and the rest of the evening has a low hum of anxiety beneath everything else.

What you haven’t admitted yet, even to yourself, is how scared you are. You’re scared the woman you’ve been for the last fifteen years is the only version of yourself you know how to be. You’re scared you don’t know what you want for the next chapter because you’ve never asked yourself the question in those terms. You’re scared this is what the next decade of your life feels like.