How to Deal with Loneliness & Move on After Divorce When You're Feeling Lonely | Dr Karen Finn

Divorce catapults you into a stormy sea of emotions. Anger, disbelief, and feeling lonely are just a few of the overpowering emotions you experience as you deal with the end of your marriage.

Learning to deal with each of them is critical to your ability to move on, but learning how to deal with loneliness is one of the most difficult.

Dealing with loneliness is especially challenging because it’s a self-perpetuating emotion. It’s not energizing, like anger, so you can't just work it out of your system by constructively expressing it. And it’s not like disbelief that you can conquer by consistently being presented with facts to the contrary.

RELATED: 5 Ways To Stop Feeling So Lonely Almost Immediately

Loneliness feeds upon itself. The more you experience it, the greater it becomes and the more difficulty you’ll have trying to conquer it.

Loneliness grows deeper and more profound the more you experience it.

But feeling lonely as you deal with divorce is normal. You’re not really destined to be alone and lonely for the rest of your life, no matter how you feel right now.

“Feel” is a keyword here because loneliness is a feeling. It isn’t a fact. And since it’s a feeling, you can change your feeling by working through it instead of being trapped by it.

Here are 11 tips for how to deal with loneliness so you can move on from your divorce:

1. Connect with others who have also been through a divorce.

Despite how unique your circumstances or how different you feel, there are plenty of people who can easily empathize with your situation — everyone who is going through divorce gets what you’re dealing with. And the quickest ways to find these people are in online divorce communities and in divorce support groups.

2. Get clear about what's making you feel lonely.

You probably spent time alone when you were married and didn’t feel the same sense of overwhelming loneliness you feel right now. That’s because you’re feeling like there are things missing from your life now that weren’t before.

By coming face-to-face with exactly what’s missing, you’ll be able to start grieving the losses instead of staying stuck in them. And once you start the grieving process, you’ll be gain clarity about how you want to either replace or eliminate what’s missing.