Feeling at Home in Your Home after Divorce

Home. Feeling at home again in your home is an important goal after divorce; I would go so far as to say it is one of the priorities.

Our residence may or may not change with divorce but our sense of home likely will change in accordance with the particular circumstances of divorce.  Some of us will stay in our home and our ex will move out. Some of us will have to sell our home or terminate a lease on our apartment. We might need to downsize. We might need a room mate to help cover costs. 

Coming to terms with where you're at right now in terms of where you call home and making wherever you are a place that is safe and sacred for you, even if it's a transitional space, so that you can begin to feel grounded again.

Spring cleaning is not just for spring it is for all times of rebirth and renewal!

In this post I am speaking specifically to the situation where your ex has moved out and you are living in the residence where you had both lived together.

Others will think you have it easy as you get to remain in the house, thereby displaying their severe lack of empathy. If you are living in a space where you lived with your ex, you may have just as much work as someone who is moving into a new space, if not more, to make the space your own. 

The many arguments that reverberated against the walls in the place where you now live will continue to bounce off the walls. You will want to open the windows, figuratively and literally,and bring in fresh energy. 

If every time you look around the corner there is another photograph taken during your marriage you are setting yourself up to feel out of place in your space.

Make wherever you are living uniquely your space.

Find the sacred nature of home for you and make sure your current space emanates that level of peaceful holding for your soul as you reflect on moving forward. 

There will be days when it all feels like too much to endure. Can you turn on a steaming hot shower or run a cozy bath surrounded by only what is comforting to you.  Your ex's grooming products must be removed. The extra thick floss that only worked because they had large gaps in their teeth has no place on the side of your tub.  If their favorite shampoo with the usual crud they left around the rim has you showering in a defensive posture, all will remain rigid and vexed. The water will not be enough to wash the essence of all you are grimacing about away.

Sally was married to Harold.  Every time Sally entered her home, the home that used to be Sally and Harold's home, she was drawn, like metal to a powerful magnet, to the living room.

Sally would first look at and then sit in Harold's big, ugly, plaid chair covered with dog hair. The dog hair was enmeshed into the wool and could not be removed even with a powerful vacuum.  Harold had insisted upon having the chair in the middle of the living room  where he would watch all the premier league soccer games. Oh how she hated the sight of him in that chair, cold Fosters in hand. The thing is, when Harold moved out, the chair he insisted must always stay in the center of the family room, that hideous chair was left and Harold bought all new modern furniture for his 16th floor apartment. Nothing plaid was purchased.

Sally lamented, "Every time I look at that chair, I think of Harold and all of the sad memories from the last year of our life poor back into my thoughts. Then I get tired of being sad and become angry, very angry! I think about all the hours he spent rooting for Liverpool while I cleaned and cooked and did all of the parenting."

There is only one remedy for the unsightly heartache trigger. Tell Harold, "Pick up your chair by Saturday. If you don't it will be in the garage until Monday and then out on the curb."

Do not underestimate how important it is to live in a space where you feel peaceful, safe, and at home. Once the daunting effort of removing anything that does not signal home to you has been executed, pause and experience the energy around you shifting. This is your space, sacred and uniquely you!