One understands why the “experts” find divorce and job loss
to be comparable. Both traumas disrupt your life in very significant ways.
Since the constellation of your daily activities constitutes
your identity, it makes sense that losing your marriage or your job would
produce an “identity crisis.” Anyone who suffers such a massive disruption to
daily routines will reasonably feel that he does not know who he is, where he
belongs or what he should do.
But then, the “experts” take a leap into the theoretical
void when they declare that job loss and divorce can be “good” identity crises.
You may recover from both major traumas, but calling them good feels a bit,
dare I say it, insensitive.
They take a second leap when they declare, as Elizabeth Bernstein reports, that both traumas require a long period of
self-reconstruction.
We probably did not need “experts” to tell us that a newly
divorced individual does best to reconstruct his life before he launches into a
new relationship. But, the same does not apply to job loss. When you lose your
job the best solution is to get a new job, ASAP.
A new job will effectively mitigate the pain of job loss and remove the stigma of unemployment.
Elizabeth Bernstein’s “experts” offer misleading and
destructive advice when they suggest that a worker who has lost his job needs
two years to get over the loss.
Doubtless they were not thinking clearly. A moment’s
reflection will tell you that anyone who takes two years to get back on the job
market will have a more difficult time of it. Employers do not often hire
people who have spent too much time unemployed.
If you lose a job and then get a new one, the new job will
provide a new structure, new colleagues, new responsibilities and new routines.
You need but learn to adapt to them.
Moreover, a new job is not filled with reminders of the old
job. When you get divorced, your surroundings, real and virtual, still contain
many mementoes of your time together. Obviously, this makes it more difficult
to forget and to move on.
Recovering from a divorce is not the same as recovering from
the death of a spouse. When your spouse dies you feel grief and you go into
mourning. Your friends and family will be there for you. Since there is no
stigma to losing a spouse, they will be there for you. The same is not true if you get divorced.
Surely, you will have to reconstruct your life after you
spouse dies, but you will not suffer the emotion that accompanies divorce: you
will not feel that you have failed.
Bernstein’s “experts” are too kind to say it, but one of the
most difficult factors in overcoming divorce or in getting over job loss is the
sense of failure.
Once you start seeing yourself as a failure, or once other
people start seeing you as a failure, you will suspect that you are not sufficiently
competent build a new life or even to get another job. That being the case,
recovery is going to feel like hard work.
If you succumb to the stigma of failure, you will have more
difficulty getting back in the game.
Worse yet, if your make it your mission in life to avoid
ever having to experience the same trauma again, you might decide to ensure that you will
never get divorced by not getting married again and ensure that you
will never get fired by not getting another job.
It is good that the “experts” recognize the importance of
psycho-social disruption. And it is good that they are telling people that all
the negative emotions that accompany divorce or job loss are, fundamentally,
NORMAL.
They are correct to point out that, when you get divorced,
it’s not just your life that needs reconstructing. If you have adopted the habit
of thinking of yourself as part of a couple, the absence of the other person
will require that you reconfigure your mental habits, to think of yourself as a
single person.
Clearly, it takes time. Just as clearly, it is probably not
a good idea to jump right into a new relationship. I suspect that those who
jump into new relationships are trying to retain the old routines with new
partners. One or the other of the members of the new couple will eventually
recognize that it’s like the masked ball. At midnight, he discovers that she is
not who he thought she was and she discovers that he is not who she thought he
was.
When it comes to divorce, the “experts” have declared two
years to be the normal recovery time. Curiously, Bernstein offers the case of
one Michael Hassard, a man from Alabama who negotiated his own divorce by
attending classes on divorce in a church in Alabama. We’ve come a long way from
therapy, don’t you think.
In any event Hassard was happy to hear that it would take
him two years to get over his divorce. He set about making it a project. He
charted his progress and worked his way out of it.
Clearly, the Church class helped Hassard, but so did his
military training.
Bernstein reports:
He was
sitting in class one night and began to see his recovery as the wall he'd had
to scale on an Army boot-camp obstacle course. It was going to be tough. There
was no way around it. But things would be better on the other side.
Of course, this does not prove that all people need two
years to get over divorce. Many divorcees have not learned good habits in the
military and are more likely to see the recovery process in terms of
psychodrama.
Moreover, Hassard had been awarded sole custody of his
children, so he was obliged to maintain a structure of home life, with routines
and rituals that would support them.
As a general rule, I think it well that therapists stay out
of the prophecy business. Some people might well benefit from knowing that
recovery from divorce is like a two-year training course. Others will tell
themselves that since it’s going to take two years to recover, they might as
well hibernate and await their rebirth.
Part of the problem with divorce is/can be betrayal on one side or the other. With death, there is no betrayal (unless it was suicide, and then it might be).
ReplyDeleteA course on divorce at a church? That's the therapy culture writ large.
ReplyDeleteWe do our fellow citizens a disservice when we give them 99+ weeks of nemployment checks. The income becomes the new normal, and people stagnate. Bernstein's study provides yet another excuse: "I NEED two Yeats to get over this." No, sir, you need a new job... and fast.
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Divorce gives so much for life time, but divorce class can help you come out form this breakable pain
ReplyDeleteseparation agreement | online parenting classes
I want to tell you people about my testimony “Well what happened to me is I was dating a guy for almost two years. Then I found out his ex girlfriend moved back to our town and started talking to him. She was a really bad influence on him and was ruining such a good relationship that we had. I didn't know what to do and I had tried a few spells in the past from psychics, but none worked to bring him back. When I finally tried from drstanleyspelltemple@hotmail.com the other girl got out of the picture and he came back to me within a week. There are definitely some powerful forces out there that can be a true blessing!....... Christye
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ReplyDeleteI do agree. Divorce is so much more difficult than just job loss or a death of someone you know. The turmoil that goes with it is not only external, but internal as well. Your biggest enemy in divorce is yourself and you really need to pick yourself up after a lot of healing before you can truly say that you’re once again ready to take another chance at relationships. Thanks for a great read, BTW!
ReplyDeleteChristine Bradley @ WestGreen Family Law
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