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A relationship that splits

 
When an emotional bond is broken, you go through a very difficult phase. How to overcome well the stages of pain and sufferin.This is the text of a talk given at a conference for separated people and delves into what the trauma of separation can bring into people's lives, but also explains how one can overcome the pain of this situation and find the resources to continue on one's life path.

It is a very painful and very complex phase for which special accompaniment is needed. Understanding what is happening can help you get through these moments without being completely overwhelmed. First, it is helpful to understand that literature speaks of various types of divorce. In 1973, Paul Bohannan, for example, elaborated six dimensions that involve the couple at the moment of separation:

  • Emotional divorce: represents the dissolution of the project of common life built up until then, of the dreams and hopes born during the time spent together.
  • Legal divorce: the legal dissolution of the bond.
  • Economic divorce: change of status that can create a condition of economic hardship for one or both spouses.
  • Community divorce: abandonment of the common home or estrangement from friends and their families and more generally from the social network built together.
  • Parental divorce: when the high level of conflict does not allow an educational agreement to be maintained with regard to the children / or an intentional separation or a separation for legal custody reasons takes place with them.
  • Psychological divorce: separation of self from the personality and influence of the ex-spouse, i.e. learning to live one’s life without the other.

Another thing on which it is useful to draw attention concerns the awareness that when the marriage ends against the will of one of the two spouses, the one who suffers this decision experiences a psychological condition similar to mourning (Gambini, 2010), indicating with this term the set of all those conscious and unconscious psychological processes that are aroused by the loss of a loved one.

And if we talk about mourning, we cannot fail to remember the phases of mourning are classically: a first phase of shock and disbelief, characterized by daze and protest, a second phase of intense desire and search for the lost person, a third phase of disorganization and despair, a fourth phase of reorganization (Bowlby, 1982).

All this therefore brings out the concept of the need for time to elaborate the process of separation, a time that could also be long and that is certainly not the same for everyone. In this process, people who separate have to deal with three emotions in particular: love, which implies nostalgia for the loss or the secret hope that everything can go back to the way it was before, the anger caused by the frustration suffered, the feeling of having been deceived and the perceived pain, sadness, linked to the feeling of loneliness and discouragement that the separation causes (Emery,  2005).

Just like in a real mourning, the difficulty lies precisely in its elaboration, that is, in the possibility of saying “goodbye” to the person who is no longer next to you. It is not an easy job because separation can also be defined as a complex trauma and according to psychologist Janina Fisher, the condition of complex trauma leads to what is called “the fragmentation of self”.

In addition, some authors such as Fisher (Rutgers University, 2010) have studied how, after a breakup, even just thinking about the loved one activates areas of the brain involved in addiction and physical pain. That is, when you suffer abandonment or rejection, you suffer with your entire body, you feel unable to continue the same life that suddenly appears empty, tiring or impossible.

But above all, as evidenced by research (Slotter, Gardner and Finkel, 2009), the breakup of a love relationship leads to a loss of identity. Separation breaks the history of the person into two distinct times and poses the problem of how to give continuity to self-identity. This is the focal point: separation from one’s spouse shakes one’s identity and undermines the representation of oneself. And this happens in particular all the more so when roles and identities have been anchored in married life. Paola said, for example: “After the separation I could feel acquaintances and other couples looking at me, I felt I was worth less and after a while I was no longer able to meet them”.

Or Roberto wrote: “I felt like a failure, as if our shipwrecked project of common life somehow said that I was not able to maintain a bond, despite the difficulties, and I was not able to do anything in other areas of my life as well.”

It is a matter of making contact with this identity of oneself put in crisis and distinguishing between what has happened and what one is and what one can continue to be, despite the event of separation. It is a matter of questioning oneself and understanding whether the marital status is fundamental with respect to one’s identity and self-esteem or one’s perception of self-efficacy in the usual contexts of life.  Perhaps the possibility of a new understanding of oneself and a new redefinition of oneself  could even open up between change and continuity of identity which, as someone said, is like “the flowering of a new sprout on a branch that seemed to have dried up”

Author: Lucia Coco

Source: Città Nuova