Counseling for women after divorce in richmond, Virginia

Therapy for divorce grief

It’s a Saturday in October, and you’re at the fundraiser you’ve gone to every year for fifteen years. You see your old college roommate across the room and she pretends to look at her phone. You see the couple who used to host you at the lake on July 4th and they say hello in the specific way you say hello to someone you’re hoping won’t sit down at your table. You stand at the bar with a glass of wine you don’t really want and you remember when this room was full of people who knew you, and now it’s full of people who knew you as one half of a couple that doesn’t exist anymore.

You drove yourself there and you’ll drive yourself home. You used to find these events tedious, and now you’d give anything to find them tedious again, sitting next to someone who knew which stories you’d already told a hundred times.

You leave before the dessert course and the drive home is short. You walk into the house and the silence has a different quality now. Your kid is at the other parent’s for the weekend, the dog is at the other parent’s too, and you sit on the kitchen floor with your back against the cabinet for ten minutes before you can stand up to brush your teeth. The loneliness is worse here, in your own kitchen, than it was in a room full of people who pretended not to see you. That’s the part nobody warned you about.

You’ve done the work. You read Conscious Uncoupling and Untamed and the book about the gray divorce. You hired a therapist last year who was kind and seemed to take detailed notes. You started running again. You said the right things to your kid when she asked questions. You handled the legal process with the same competence you bring to a complicated case at work. You did everything you were supposed to do, and you still ended up on the kitchen floor.

What you haven’t admitted yet, even to yourself, is how scared you are. You’re scared this is what the rest of your life feels like, scared you don’t know who you are without the marriage you spent twenty years building, scared the people who used to be your people aren’t your people anymore.

You’re not used to feeling like this. You graduated at the top of your class, made partner three years ahead of schedule, raised a kid who’s mostly thriving. When things go wrong, you handle them. That’s who you are.

This is grief, and the tools that got you through everything else don’t work on it. Grief doesn’t respond to a plan or yield to insight. It shows up at the fundraiser when the couple you used to know turns down a different aisle. It shows up at work in the meeting where someone asks for your input and you don’t have one because you’ve been replaying last night’s interaction with the new lawyer. It shows up at 11pm when you find yourself on your ex’s Instagram for the fourth time this week, looking for evidence of something you couldn’t explain even if you found it. It shows up at the grocery store when you reach for the brand of cereal nobody in your house eats anymore.

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 college tour next weekend, which is fine, but your chest is already tight and the rest of the evening has a low hum of anxiety beneath everything else.