Recently, two people wrote me. One was a woman who shared, “My husband destroyed me emotionally. How do I ever move on?” And ironically the other was a man, who said, “Women don’t have a monopoly on being abused.” My heart goes out to both of these brave people who are suffering, and to others who identify with their situations. In this piece, I share not what I wrote to them privately in response to their emails, but rather, my thoughts on emotional damage, relationships, and our American culture.

Who identifies with “My husband destroyed me emotionally”? 

I am guessing many of you who are reading this.

Emotional destruction by a spouse: there are few things more difficult to heal from. The word “destroyed” is one of those words in the English lexicon that – in this case – I hesitate to use. It’s a word we hear in conjunction with nuclear explosions, California wildfires, tsunamis, and corporate oil spills. It suggests something that’s impossible to come back from. In the case of divorce or the severing of a long-term, intimate partnership, it can feel this way for a few years afterward — especially in the case of physical or emotional abuse.

Instead of “destroy,” I prefer the word “damage,” which suggests something that can truly be healed, something that can be made stronger, more graceful, and more functional by healing.

Husbands and wives are extensions of cultural value systems; we are all products of one culture or another. Husbands in patriarchal systems often have more leverage for exerting a destructive force in the lives of a wife they want to control.

Aside from their physical strength and the aggressive influence of testosterone, they also often are the ones in a marriage with more financial clout, status, and authority. If a husband from such a culture wants to wreak destruction, havoc and abuse, they are more in a position to do so than wives who may still be limited to hearth, home, and child-rearing rather than out in the world earning money.

Damage and destruction take many forms within a marriage. Toxicity comes in the guise of cheating, constant criticism or defensiveness – a refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions. There is yelling and verbal abuse, physical abuse, or threatening the family pet. Gaslighting, or a constant need to be right, addiction, financial recklessness, lying, manipulation, and chronic anger are also destructive.

Do you question if your marriage is unhealthy? Check out “27 Signs You are in a Toxic Marriage.”

But using the word “husband” exclusively here suggests that men are the only ones who wreak destructive emotional havoc that is toxic and difficult to heal. This is not the case. Men are not the only gender who can destroy emotional well-being, just as women are not the only victims of emotional toxicity, the only single parents, or the only gender to survive abuse.

Women are survivors of this kind of damage, and yes, emotional abuse and destruction. There is no doubt about that. But so are men, and as a culture, Americans have not successfully socialized men to understand or even talk about their feelings. Though our stories of what it is to be male or female are changing, thankfully, we still objectify men as the bread-winning “strong and silents.”

This website is for women, but if we women are to welcome the wholeness and healing that we say we seek, then we must recognize that we also damage emotional well-being to the point of destruction. And we need to improve how well we listen and take responsibility for our own hurtful behaviors. Women need to do a better job of encouraging men to value and discuss their own emotional processes, not just ours.

Being emotionally destroyed by your husband is not a pretty or comfortable truth, but it is a truth, nonetheless.

I have two male friends who had both been emotionally damaged by the women in their lives. For a period of time, they felt that their self-esteem had been destroyed. One had a wife of many years who cheated on him; he turned to alcohol, and it took his son telling him he was afraid for him to snap him out of the grief he was trying to numb.

The other had a long-term life partner who continually gaslighted him, refusing to take responsibility for how her cutting remarks affected him and redirecting the blame by making him out to be the cause of her continual caustic remarks.

He began his own self-rescue by pulling step by step out of the relationship, resisting the temptation to turn back to the familiar and call her. He went for long bike rides. He went to lunch with friends, played with his dog, bought a house in a neighboring town, and slowly, pulled his sense of himself out from under her.

And so, they healed themselves.

To the woman who said, “My husband destroyed me emotionally”, I want her and others like her to know that women go through a similar healing process, destroyed or not. Sometimes a husband’s damage is simply draining a wife’s vital spark by making her the only adult in the marriage. 

I have another friend who married at 21 and divorced at 23. Her husband didn’t abuse her; in fact, he was a very caring man. But he had no sense of responsibility or recognition of his role as an adult in the marriage. He quit his job when she went on maternity leave because he wanted to be with her, overlooking the fact that she was still bringing in money from her job and now he was not. When she went into labor, he couldn’t be reached on the phone.

Finally, the woman asked her mother-in-law to go by the house. He had been playing a video game with headphones on for hours and hadn’t heard the ringtone. He was angry when she left him, as a child is when they are grounded for not doing their chores.

This woman healed herself by leaving, by refusing to take an ironic back seat to “Call of Duty.” For years, she healed herself by refusing to date or even consider another relationship. She focused on her personal growth, career, and children, as well as discovering not only her voice, but also what she truly desired. She started practicing yoga and later became a yoga instructor. She eventually remarried, but it took years for her new husband to persuade her that he was safe, worth the risk, and that he would join her in adulthood.

Women can heal themselves if they choose, if they choose to do the hard work in understanding their stories and taking action in support of themselves. Check out “46 Steps to Ensure Your Divorce Recovery: A Definition and a Guide.”

In terms of being emotionally destructive, I believe patriarchal institutions can be overlooked as secondary perpetrators. The question of destruction should be applied to the institution of marriage itself, and the culture that pushes it as a norm and a priority.

The institution of marriage and our culture can also make women feel like failures, with a continual emphasis on cleaving to one’s husband and motherhood being a woman’s top-tier priorities. Despite it being the year 2023, women are still shown by all the tools of cultural norming that if they are not making men, marriage, and childbirth their primary life goals, they are somehow missing the point of their existence.

Spoken or unspoken, there is a lingering message still felt by many: if you’re not a wife and a mother, you’re not a whole and complete woman. And getting ground down by that – especially for women who come from purity cultures with their steel cable ties to a religion where the whole emphasis is on being a wife and making your husband happy — can certainly be destroying.

When women are part of a system of thought that is not geared toward protecting them and their emotional needs but is instead geared toward leveraging them as a commodity for making other people comfortable, it leaves them with a drastically reduced sense of their own value as a human being and will undercut any sense of autonomy they might have had. This is especially true if the purity culture of their religion is tied to another rigid system, like a military or medical career, a police force, or even a hierarchical corporation.

If a woman has enough self-esteem to be upset about it, she will be able to get back up. But if she never knew she had a right to be mad in the first place, it’s a lot harder. It is often seeing their children begin to suffer abuse by the man of the house that snaps women out of the numbness that their own abuse has instilled.

It cuts through the haze of that life-or-death need to survive by sinking into denial or invisibility, and sends them on the road to healing. They realize that they have to get their children out. I know three women who literally packed their bags, got their children’s personal items together, and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, or when their husbands were out of town.

If you are in an abusive relationship, please read this article, “Leaving an Abusive Marriage? There are Steps You Need to Take First.”

This kind of abuse so erodes a woman’s sense of self that it often takes a long time and something jarring for them to realize how unsafe their husbands are. But this doesn’t include all the little coping decisions made in less extreme situations – choices made to lessen presence, and become smaller:

What do I like to eat? How do I like the room when I sleep? What do I like to see in my space? All these small things make up the individual and a sense of autonomy. Gradually, women (and men) begin to trust their judgment again. Perhaps they talk to their friends and discover that many people get the emotional rug pulled out from under them and that this doesn’t mean their ability to make good choices or be discerning is fatally flawed.

Gradually, though, the small things grow into big things like: I’m going to enroll in a college course, or I’m going to work from home, or I think I’ll get a dog or my commercial driver’s license. Slowly we build ourselves back — sometimes from zero, sometimes not.

We become better at trusting ourselves and we rediscover what it feels like to know that being safe at home, whole and healed, mostly means just being ourselves. We get more committed to figuring out who that is and how to be just us. No matter how long this process takes, we’re all in there somewhere.

Schedule your free consultation with SAS for Women to discuss steps you can take to support your precious, emotional healing after a challenging divorce.

NOTES

Jennifer Bent is a freelance writer, print journalist and feature writer living in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Connect with Jennifer at verbosej@hotmail.com 

Whether you are thinking about divorce, dealing with it, or recreating the life you deserve, one thing we see making a significant difference for women is the conscious choice to not do it alone. Since 2012, smart women around the world have chosen SAS for Women to partner them through the emotional, financial, and oftentimes complicated experience of breaking up and reinventing. 

SAS offers all women six free months of email coaching, action plans, checklists, and support strategies for you — and your precious future. Join our tribe and stay connected.

*We support same-sex marriages. For the sake of simplicity in this article, however, we refer to your spouse as your “husband” or a “he.”

When struggling through a divorce, many women look down the road and envision their final divorce decree as their ultimate goal, the culminating prize, the finish line that will incontrovertibly signal they have done it: they survived the divorce marathon! Why this is so is natural. There are so many steps that are procedural with divorce. There are those documents to gather, the Statement of Net Worth to complete, the countless conversations to endure negotiating the terms, maybe even, the selling of the house, that signing that final document must mean the end of the divorce, right?

Yes, if you consider only the legal process.

But at SAS, we know that this phase you’ve been through — negotiating the terms and signing that settlement agreement — is just one stage of your journey. And the stage to come is the one that’s more important.

More significant for you as a human being is your divorce recovery, the emotional and healing work of exploring and metabolizing what you’ve left behind, who you are now, and who you will become. One way to acknowledge and honor the arrival of this stage as a newly independent woman is through a divorce ritual.

Learn more about your divorce recovery and read 46 Steps to Your Divorce Recovery: A Definition and a Guide.

What is a divorce ritual?

A divorce ritual is a symbolic event that marks the end of a marriage or a divorce. It will look different to every woman, because there is no set definition or ceremony that constitutes a divorce ritual. It is unique and special to each person.

Divorce rituals step away from the logical and rational thought accompanying the divorce’s legal process. Instead, divorce rituals play on the abstract, like emotions and spirituality, to mark the completion of your divorce and transition into a new life. A divorce ritual allows you to find closure in your heart in a way that the legal process does not. Divorce rituals can also serve multiple, important purposes, like helping you let go of the difficult past and set the stage for your new life. In this way, they  celebrate an ending and a new beginning.

Divorce rituals allow you to acknowledge your previous suffering and turn those pains into wisdom as you move forward.

As divorce rituals are unique to each person, it is essential when considering yours to think about what would be best for you. What would feel right? How will you acknowledge and let go of your past relationship?

Not sure if you are there yet? For comfort and perspective, check out “How Long Does It Take to Get Over a Divorce?”

Choosing a Divorce Ritual

For the average person, a divorce ritual might be an entirely new (and shocking!) concept. But for those who are dealing with or recovering from divorce, the need to address this major shift in your life is obvious. There is a yearning to address the tugging of your heart that is almost indescribable. So, to honor you, and what you’ve been going through, we have identified a few ideas and common examples of divorce rituals to inspire and to help guide you as you embark on your new path.

Symbolism and Cleansing Elements

If you don’t know where to begin in creating your divorce ritual, you might consider focusing your energy on a specific symbol of your marriage. This might be a classic item like your ring or wedding license, or something unique that represents your marriage, like a particular CD that holds that “special song” or your honey moon photo album.

As you think about your divorce ritual, what it will entail, and perhaps focus on, it can be helpful to connect with the elements of the earth. For example, you might consider fire, a transformative energy that relates to anger and power, to burn your divorce papers and melt down your ring. This might help release your heart from some feelings of rage and hatred.  You might also connect with the element of water, which can be associated with sadness, longing, grieving, and, or cleansing. You might release your wedding symbol or a letter to your Ex into the water, either in a bottle, or sinking it with a thread and stone, or in its own Viking funeral boat, thus releasing yourself and your story with him*.

Consider reading this scholarly article for more on divorce rituals from a cultural and religious perspective.

Reversal of Marriage Ceremony

Some women may convert an aspect of their original marriage ceremony into a divorce ritual. For some, a common Christian wedding tradition is the lighting of the unity candle. This is when the bride and groom take two individual candles representing themselves and light one candle in the middle representing their marriage. They then blow out their candles to symbolize the end of their individuality and the start of their commitment to each other and unity. A divorce ritual based on this might be to reverse the unity candle. You might snuff out the symbolic shared candle and light your individual candle while visualizing what this independent version of yourself looks like. This can be done on your own or as part of a larger gathering of loved ones who witness you. This type of ritual flips the notion of marriage into the energy needed to start your new, independent life.

For stories of inspiration, check out “Starting Over After Divorce at 50: Five Stories on Finding Yourself.”

Sharing an Experience

A more collaborative approach that some women find helpful is to share an activity or final ritual with their Ex. Yes, with their Ex! This allows both spouses to end the marriage together and possibly, in a more positive light. This kind of divorce ritual might involve sharing one last special meal together, or one last toast, or one last dance while listening to music or songs that were symbolic of their marriage. Other couples choose to share a bed one last time. (Yes, it’s true!)  The thought here is to mirror the end of the relationship with the beginning, and help you embrace your newfound life as a single person.

Not all divorce rituals need to be planned out. They can be spontaneous. You might feel in your gut that something must be done to mark your transition, like an impromptu prayer, or a long trek or pilgrimage where you will get in touch with yourself. If you are called to do something, or feel a ritual is needed deep in your heart, then not only is it valid, justified, and important, it will probably make you feel freer afterward.

Consider other important steps to take to celebrate your hard-won status: read “100 Must Do’s for the Newly Independent Woman”.

Considering Your Own Divorce Ritual

Ideally, your divorce ritual commemorates your special rite of passage from your divorce to your new independent life. It can be done privately or with close family or friends. You’ll want to choose a meaningful place for your ceremony to encourage your sense of finality and closure as well as peace and serenity. Detach from your headspace that worked so hard in the last chapter of your divorce, and instead, check in with your heart as you aim for emotional, spiritual closure.

Be prepared that a divorce ritual might bring intense feelings to the surface. Make sure to take care of yourself during and after the ceremony with extra self-love. This could be going to a favorite place to enjoy a special meal by yourself or with friends, or even something simpler, like buying yourself flowers. 

As unique as each person, no two divorce rituals will ever be the same. This is precisely what makes the ritual so beautiful and potent for you.

Conclusion

As a society, we have rituals that celebrate momentous times in our life. Birthday parties, baby showers, religious celebrations, and of course, weddings. Your divorce, an enormous rite of passage, is also deserving of honor. Divorce rituals help you formalize reflecting on your past, moving on from it, and embracing what lies ahead. This post gives you a starting point to consider you and your needs. Think about the best, most meaningful divorce ritual for you. You will want to cross this threshold into your new life by honoring your past but, more importantly, looking forward to your precious future.

NOTES

Elizabeth Newland is a third-year law student in Chicago committed to children and family rights. She aims to work in a family-related non-profit firm after graduation. 

Whether you are thinking about divorce, dealing with it, or recreating the life you deserve, one thing we see making a significant difference for women is the conscious choice to not do it alone. Since 2012, smart women around the world have chosen SAS for Women to partner them through the emotional, financial, and oftentimes complicated experience of breaking up and reinventing. 

SAS offers all women six free months of email coaching, action plans, checklists, and support strategies for you — and your precious future. Join our tribe and stay connected.

*We support same-sex marriages. For the sake of simplicity in this article, however, we refer to your spouse as your “husband” or a “he.”