Thank You To My Ex

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not asking you to forget all the bad that has happened to you.

Remember, by all means, so that you do not repeat patterns that no longer serve your growth and your highest good. To free yourself, you need to understand that everyone you encounter is your teacher in some way or another. Ask yourself what lessons you have extracted, give gratitude and move on. 

Do not hold onto that anger.

Understand that bitterness and hatred are walls that we create, imprisoning our minds.

Nelson Mandela so famously said – “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

I know you may think that there cannot be anything you can be grateful for when you leave a terrible relationship, even if you are still in one, especially one where there is an adversarial divorce and lots of trauma and pain. I thought so, too, until I actively worked on giving gratitude to my ex.

Often people refer to your time married as “time-wasted” when you are divorcing. “Oh, I wasted 16 years of my life with them”. That time was not wasted. You lived in that time, and you grew; you learned.

So, if you continue to live in an unhappy marriage for the rest of your life, is that also considered time wasted?

Or if you continue in a marriage, whilst not bad, but mundane, where you compromise yourself in many ways, who you are as an individual, your authentic self, abandoning your dreams, is that seen as time wasted? Somehow not.

When I married my ex, I was crazy in love. He was my first boyfriend, and even though I knew him from high school, we only dated when I was twenty-four. In a year, we were married. People referred to us as the power-couple. To the outside world, we had everything. #couplegoals. The “aunties” would even approach me hoping to get the “recipe” for their daughters. I was very good at pretending. I have been for a long time. It is a survival mechanism. A trauma response.

We had trouble from the outset, but this being my first relationship, I wasn’t fully aware of the red flags. I was raised believing that we needed to make things work in a relationship, not run at the first sign of trouble. Also, I was supposed to count myself lucky because I “bagged-quite-a-catch”, so to speak.

Whilst over the years, the marriage experienced a barrage of events that break marriages (and I feel like we experienced them all). But it was  not all bad. When undertaking the gratitude practices, I realized that there is a lot for which to be grateful. It is a powerful tool for forgiveness, not just to forgive your ex-spouse, but also to forgive yourself.

Forgiveness does not mean that I have forgotten the bad events. I have chosen to reframe these events, e.g. trying to understand what part I played in each of the events materialising, looking at the event from his point of view, and forgiving him daily for all things that he attempted to do to destroy me.

Holding onto the past does not serve me. It is not easy, but each day I wake up, I have to make that choice over and over again to forgive and heal.

Mostly I choose to look at the positives instead of the negatives. This is for my benefit and my daughters benefit so that I can heal and move on.

So, with that, I want to share my gratitude to my ex with you. I share this in the hope that you too may practice gratitude with all relationships that are troubled in your life, with a hope that they can be repaired, or at least unburden you.

I am grateful:

1. For our daughter. Thank you for our little girl. She is the most precious gift from our creator, and we are so lucky to have her. It was a struggle for me to fall pregnant, but you stuck by me through the IVF and were supportive and helpful throughout the process.
2. That you are a great dad, our daughter loves you very much, and you are doing an excellent job being her daddy. Thank you for trying new things that most other dads don’t do. Especially those things that take you outside your comfort zone.
3. For our homes. We always had beautiful homes at every stage of our lives, so thank you for working so hard on the houses in which we lived.
4. Our Pets. Thank you for all the cats. You are a great pet dad, and you were the reason I have the pets that I have today. You know how much I love them.
5. For the adventures. Despite your fears of jumping from heights, you still joined me on crazy adventures, bungee jumping and sky diving, river rafting and many other crazy adventures.
6. For the travel. We never really travelled before marriage, and together we saw all areas of the world.
7. My Learning. I never wanted to study my MBA, but I did it with you to support you in your journey. Thank you for always encouraging me to learn along with you.
8. For your support. You were with me through some of the most harrowing painful times in my life, with my past traumas, grief and loss of my father, so thank you.
9. For everything you did to try and make our marriage work, because 16 years of marriage means you did try.
10. For the growth. Thank you for all the lessons you taught me along the way in our marriage, good and bad. Without any of these, I would not be the person I am today, nor would I have found my gifts and purpose.

 

Hopefully, you, too, can look at your relationships through a different lens. With a lens of gratitude, try to look for the good in the other person you chose to marry and with who you chose to have children. Practice gratitude daily. #Heal, #Grow and #Flow after your #Divorce