After a tumultuous life event, it can feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under you, and going back to any sense of normality can sound like a tall order. However, you’ve got to start somewhere. You might feel as though you just want everything to go back to normal – to the way it was before whatever happened. Unfortunately, that’s not possible, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be cause for total despair, your life will likely be different, but that doesn’t have to be an entirely negative thing.
Those first steps are perhaps the most important, however, and while they’ll vary based on your situation, understanding that simple fact can go a long way.
After the End of a Relationship
Finding yourself at the end of a long road that you’ve traveled with a partner can be an incredibly difficult thing, regardless of whether it’s still just the two of you or if you’ve started a family at this point. In fact, if you’ve gotten to the point where your life with them has come to define a large part of your life in general, the end of this relationship could make you feel as though your entire world is falling apart. It’s an understandably emotional time, and you can’t just switch off how you feel about it, but it’s worth remembering that there will be a tomorrow, and you get to decide what that looks like.
Even here, though, the exact nature of your situation could vary wildly. If it’s just about you and your partner, and there was no legal union involved, it might be more about how you restructure your life, where you go from here, and how you navigate your relationship with them moving forward. That being said, it could be that you’re married or have a family together, so you might feel the situation becomes much more difficult. Some divorces will naturally be more contentious than others, but it’s important that you understand that it, at this point, is a legal issue. That means that you might decide it’s in your best interest to understand the legal process that usually happens here at length. Conducting research into divorce mediation Los Angeles, might be a good place to begin, and beginning to paint a broader picture of what you can expect moving forward might make you much more confident in your approach.
However, while the legal angle is undoubtedly important, you might find that it’s the emotional aspect you’re currently struggling with the most. After a long time in a relationship with someone, you might find that it helps to go back to focusing on yourself, understanding what it’s like to be completely autonomous in a way you weren’t before. This doesn’t mean that you should cut everyone off, far from it, as your support network can be invaluable during times like this, but it just means that you take care of yourself in a way that allows you to thrive and flourish.
Starting Afresh
At some point in your life, potentially after a breakup, you might decide that the path that you’re currently on simply isn’t working out for you, and you want to do something else entirely. You might not enjoy what you do professionally, you might not live close to any of your friends or family, and where you do live, you might not hold much attachment to. When these factors begin to accumulate, it’s easy to despair and feels as though you’ve wasted too much of your life with the decisions that led you here. However, it’s easy to see the forest from the trees with hindsight, and falling into a spiral of regret and self-loathing won’t help you here. You need to try and take positive action – to move closer to what you do want from your life, starting now.
This might very much sound like something that’s easier said than done. Moving somewhere completely new takes money, and how are you meant to start a new career if all of your experience up to now has been spent in the same line of work? Well, you have to try and approach these problems constructively, creating a path ahead that makes sense. First of all, you might start to think about what you want to do. While the location might seem more important to you, thinking thoroughly about the direction you want to take your professional life in might help prevent you from wanting to shift gears again further down the line. Once you’ve got an idea, you can start to think about what you’re going to do to start a career in that field. Do you need qualifications? If so, you can think about studying through online courses to help save money and gain what you need in a way that can fit seamlessly into your schedule.
Then, you can begin to think about the location. If the problem before was that you lived too far away from your friends and family, that might be what you think about rectifying. Even if it’s not somewhere that’s in the immediate vicinity of them, it might just help to be in a spot that’s more accessible for everyone involved. Thinking of it like this might mean that you don’t restrict yourself too, allowing yourself to also think about where is going to be valuable from an employment perspective. Outside of these two factors, though, you might also find it worthwhile to think of what you enjoy about a location. Do you want to live by the sea? Do you prefer the idea of living in a city, or would you rather be somewhere more rural? In the case of the latter question, each option has its own pros and cons, so it’s something that’s worth thinking intensively about when you’re trying to make a positive step forward that you can feel good about.
Changing Yourself
In addition to the wealth of external factors that you might not like about your current circumstances that encourage you to seek a life elsewhere, you might also have a more internal conundrum. Sometimes, escaping your surroundings and simply putting yourself in a different environment won’t help to completely fix the problems in your life. Sometimes you’ll need to look at yourself and be prepared to answer some difficult questions. This isn’t about being critical of yourself for no reason – quite the opposite. You should be doing this out of a place of genuine self-love and out of a desire to see yourself improve in order to lead the best life possible. It might simply be that the problems that you have with your life as it is are problems that have their roots in certain aspects of yourself that could be changed for the better.
The exact nature of this change will be something that’s entirely personal to you and something that you might already have a pretty good idea about. However, while simply recognizing this problematic factor is an important step, it’s much easier to acknowledge it than it is to actually change it. Change takes time, and there’s no shame in not succeeding on your first attempt. Equally, it’s valuable to learn from these ‘failed’ attempts, as they can teach you something about yourself and how to go about it differently in the future. When you do finally manage to overcome your hurdles, you do so with the knowledge that you’ve accumulated across the whole process, not just with trial and error.
The first step of simply recognizing that you want to change might feel insignificant, but it’s an incredibly positive revelation to have. This is something that can propel you forward and motivate you to get to the point that you want – whatever that might look like to you personally.
That Distant Happiness
A trap that some people can fall into when they think about what they want their lives to look like in the future is thinking of it in terms that define their realistic target as having no problems at all. This, unfortunately, might simply just be infeasible. There will always be problems, not only because that’s just the way life is but also because that’s arguably just how people stay occupied. Chasing an unrealistic standard might lead you to grow frustrated and disillusioned, so it’s important that you have a good idea of that from the outset.
That being said, this by no means implies that you can’t overcome your current issues and find yourself in a much more positive situation moving forward, and that version of you in the future could have none of the problems that burden you today – which is ultimately what you’re aiming for. The first step can often feel like the most difficult because you understand how many steps come after that, but actually committing to taking that first step can be such an important and constructive gesture for much the same reasons.
Guide created by Scottsdale Mental Health & Wellness, fill out this mental health assessment online for more information.
