As I’ve mentioned in a number of posts, no one teaches women how to leave. Once we are married, we are supposed to put in the work, suck it up, sacrifice, accommodate, do anything and everything to preserve the marital bond. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about sharing divorce stories is I love to see the moment women realize they are done, what it took for them to finally throw in the towel.
How to leave will be a series, because there is no way I could capture how to leave in one single post. This first post is about how to emotionally, psychically, spiritually ALLOW yourself to leave. And allow is a big word. This is all about giving yourself permission.
There is a reason why it takes, on average, three years from the moment a spouse considers divorce to actually pulling the trigger. It is exhausting work to see how unhappy you are, and to allow yourself to do something about it.
Until I did MDMA therapy, I did not even consider divorce. This despite the fact that after a particularly grueling couples therapy session, as we stood in the parking lot by our cars, my ex said he would have left years ago if not for the kids. Me? The thought had never even entered my mind.
I came from parents who were married until my father’s death at age 55 (my mother was only 45, the age I’m about to turn in a couple of weeks). I came of age mired in evangelical Christianity where marriage was a sacrament of God, not to be broken. I am also an identical twin, in other words, I knew what it meant to be part of a twosome you couldn’t escape. You just made do. You just made the best of it.
Now, I’m not a therapist, a lawyer, or really anyone to give advice. But these are the steps, as I see it, for how to actually find the courage to leave.
STEP ONE: START TO LOOK WITHIN
I spent most of my life avoiding the difficult aspects of my life. I had a well-developed skill that I learned in childhood: anything unpleasant, anything uncomfortable, anything I didn’t want to look at or consider, could be locked away in a vault in my brain. I don’t think I’m the only one who does this. In fact, during Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” I laughed out loud when Riley literally had a vault in her brain that her core emotions got trapped inside of. This coping mechanism is incredibly adaptive. I could just pretend difficult things didn’t happen.
This is what allowed me to marry my ex-husband in the first place. There were red flags aplenty that this was not a relationship written in the stars. But I bulldozed right past them, put them in the vault, stayed the course on making this relationship marriage material.
So my first step towards being able to leave my marriage was starting individual therapy in 2019. I had been in therapy a few other times in my life, namely after my dad died while I was a sophomore in college, and in my early twenties when I was trying to determine whether I wanted to stay with my then boyfriend (future husband) despite some obvious betrayals. In 2019, my youngest enrolled in kindergarten. I was coming out of the crucible of the early years of motherhood, where I was the primary parent, shouldering 80% of the physical, emotional, and mental labor of raising two kids, where I almost drowned in the daily onslaught of needs and demands.
Finally, with one hour a week to talk about my life and check in with myself, I started to name some of what I was struggling with. But I would NOT have said my marriage was in trouble. Our problems were no bigger than any others, manageable for sure. Some communication issues. He worked too much and I was exhausted from parenting. He wanted me to initiate sex. All things that were 100% fixable.
Then, the pandemic hit. And everything fell apart, especially my marriage.
*I think another way we can start to look within is by writing. During the pandemic, I began writing in my own voice for the first time after almost a decade as a ghostwriter (aka writing in someone else’s voice). I’ve heard from countless other women that it was by turning to the page, whether it was a journal or a writing project, that they could see things clearly for the very first time.1
STEP TWO: STOP LOOKING AWAY
The thing is, you can go to therapy once a week and talk about your problems, and then leave that office and go back to life as usual. Some of this is survival mode. There are dishes to wash and summer camps to sign up for, and kids to pick up from school. But things don’t really change if you are only really looking at yourself and your life one hour a week.
It does not feel good to look at the pain points in your life. It fucking sucks. But until we truly look at what we are dealing with, nothing will change. In fact, I think we all need a crisis point where we cannot look away any longer. My crisis point was that Fair Play discussion. I had thought this system might help my ex SEE why I was struggling. Yes, I wanted help but I also wanted validation. This is too much for anyone to do. But it was an epic fail, which led me to finally admit that we needed marriage therapy. (I knew we needed therapy, but didn’t want to start virtually. But that’s what we did, meeting our new marriage therapist via Zoom a few weeks later).
And being in marriage therapy meant we couldn’t look away, pretend we didn’t have problems. For one hour every week, we had to sit and face them.
STEP THREE: TRY TO FIX IT
Yes, I am a fan of trying. I don’t think anyone should give up on their marriage without professional help. However, sometimes a marriage is too far gone by the time you start. Sometimes marriage therapists just make things worse. Sometimes you don’t want to fix it even if you could. And that is okay.
(In a strange twist of fate, I recently found out that my kid’s therapist’s dad was our first marriage therapist, hired when said daughter was just two months old. This was a very strange realization and kind of weird, honestly. She asked jokingly whether I thought he was any good. I laughed and said: “well, we stayed married for another ten years! I don’t know if that is success or not!” Honestly, I now think it was an epic fail. We were having the same fights a decade later. Part of me wishes her dad could have named what was happening, which was that we just saw things differently and would never get on the same page. He would have saved us many years of struggle).
STEP FOUR: ACKNOWLEDGE WHAT YOU WANT
This was the step I struggled with. I did not know how to access what I wanted. My desires and wants were buried so deep after forty years of being a woman that I could not access them. Enter MDMA therapy which changed my life.
Not everyone needs psychedelics to get in touch with their feelings. But often we begin to feel the truth, then we brush it away. We can’t face it. It is too painful.
But those feelings will catch up with you. If they are real, they cannot be wished away.
writes about this in Dear Sugar. She talks about this on We Can Do Hard Things. “When we really tell the truth about what it is we need and want…that is where the healing begins,” she says. ”What I say in my letter to these people is it’s okay to want what you want… you want to go. I am saying you’re allowed to know it. You are allowed to know the true thing about yourself, and you are allowed to act on it.”Wanting to leave is enough. You don’t need a list of reasons, justifications, proof that you did everything you can. In fact, Strayed would probably even disagree with my Step 3, try to fix it. She would say, fuck fixing it, pack your bags and run.
STEP FIVE: BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE ALLOWED TO LEAVE
In order to leave, we must grant ourselves permission. Permission to do what you want. Permission to believe that what you want matters. Permission to believe that come what may, your children, if you have them, will be better with you living in truth and bravery than in sacrifice and submission. Permission to know that on the other side of this trial (and dear God, it is a trial in so many ways), you will grow and evolve and become unrecognizable to yourself in the very best way. Women who leave never want to go back. While perhaps they waver a bit as they crumple under the weight of paperwork and legal fees and negotiations about custody and kids who grow tired of packing a bag, they don’t waver on their decision. They feel lighter immediately. Most of the women I’ve interviewed for The Divorce Diaries wonder, if anything, why it took them so long to leave.
We have not been raised to believe in our own authority. This is why, I think I, in particular, was so eager to cleave to a man who was not right for me. I didn’t want to be making decisions on my own. I wanted someone else to share the rent, the costs, the decisions. I was in my twenties and I was scared and rather than leaning into my fear and learning, growing, and impressing myself, I turned to another to keep me standing.
But you are your own authority. You are the only keeper of your own life. No one can tell you what to do or grant you permission except yourself.
And you are allowed.
Allowed to want more. Allowed to be unhappy. Allowed to feel manipulated and used. Allowed to be scared and yet still be willing to go into the unknown and see what comes.
Sarah Blondin has several meditations that I found incredibly empowering during the time that I was doing my MDMA work and letting myself feel the fact that I wanted to leave. And yes, along with the MDMA therapy, I started meditating. Going within daily, to the self that I had buried, to create and nurture my relationship with her.
To leave we must feel sturdy in our decision. We must feel more tied to ourselves than others.
You Are Allowed (she has renamed these meditations but I have put their original titles which I found incredibly powerful)
In order to leave, you have to fortify your inner world, your belief in yourself, your connection to your power, your willingness to do what YOU need, and to put others and their demands aside. This may be one of the few times in your life where you do this, focus so solely on what you want and need. But it is required to get through to the other side. You must love yourself more than others. Even your children, though for me, I did it for them. Because they deserved to have a mother who felt alive. But had I thought only of them, and their experience, I wouldn’t have left. I would have quietly kept dying, propping up their perfectly structured life, while sacrificing my own.
If you want to leave, you have to put yourself first. No one else will do it for you.
Yes, what I am saying is that you have to save your own damn life. You aren’t responsible for your children’s. They will go on and live lives of their own, lives you will have no control over. Their lives aren’t yours to own and manage. Yours is the only life where you truly hold the reigns. So will you stay? Or will you go?
There is no right answer. But if you want to leave, you can. The rest of your life is waiting for you.
The poem above is by poet
who has her own Substack filled with beautiful musings.Liking this post, restacking it, or leaving a comment helps it find more readers. And if you consistently find value in the writings on The Mother Lode, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
A HOW TO LEAVE READING LIST
Untamed, Glennon Doyle
You Could Make This Place Beautiful,
Liars, Sarah Manguso
I literally logged off my session with my therapist about doing this very thing, then opened my inbox to this. It has to be a sign that I’m making the right decision to go. I needed this so much and I thank you immensely for publishing it. ❤️
Cindy, wow - what powerful, truth-filled, helpful words these are. I am honored that "The Most Important Thing" has been part of you claiming what is true & right for you. Here's to continuing to make that shelter of kindness inside ourselves. xo Julia