Your first set of holidays after your divorce will be weird, scary, and painful – but they’ll also be happy, joyful, and unexpectedly fun if you let them. The key, I think, is to feel your feelings. It’s okay if you’re having a day that isn’t holly and jolly. It’s alright if you sit down to write in your gratitude journal and struggle to come up with anything aside from Well, I changed out of my PJs today.

I don’t mean to downplay the feelings you may be going through right now as you approach your first holiday after divorce. It is one of the most traumatic events you can go through in your adult life. Here are 21 quotes to remind yourself that you are loved, you are brilliant, and you will move through this season with your head up and deep breaths in your lungs.

“Your dream doesn’t have an expiration date. Take a deep breath and try again.” — KT Witten

“Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” — Deborah Reber

“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.” — Lucille Ball

“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping it will transform into a door.” — Coco Chanel 

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” — Maya Angelou

“When people divorce, it’s always such a tragedy. At the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse.” — Monica Bellucci

“It’s sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open, in a way—cracks you open to feeling. When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain.” — Jennifer Aniston

“Divorces are made in heaven.” — Oscar Wilde

“When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care about other people. The more alert and sensitive we are to our own needs, the more loving and generous we can be towards others.” — Eda LeShan

“Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.” — Corrie ten Boom

“There is no such thing as a “broken family.” Family is family, and is not determined by marriage certificates, divorce papers, and adoption documents. Families are made in the heart. The only time family becomes null is when those ties in the heart are cut. If you cut those ties, those people are not your family. If you make those ties, those people are your family. And if you hate those ties, those people will still be your family because whatever you hate will always be with you.” — C. Joybell C.

“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” — Lena Horne

“In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word ‘divorce’ came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant ‘divide.’ In truth, it comes from ‘divertere,’ which means ‘to divert.’ I believe that. All divorce does is divert you.” — Mitch Albom

“When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks and wait for rain.” — Andrea Gibson

“To me, finding my faith, right now where I’m at, is putting all of my trust in something bigger than myself and living for something bigger than myself and trying to do that through service.” Noor Tagouri “Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.” — Jesse Jackson

“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn’t a sign that they ‘don’t understand’ one another, but a sign that they have, at least, begun to.” — Helen Rowland

“If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.” — Shannon L. Adler

“You cannot start the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last one.” — Michael McMillian 

“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” — Lily Tomlin

“Sometimes you’re going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human.” ― Heidi Priebe

“Divorce, the end of an error.” — Unknown

Are there other quotes that have inspired you? Share them in the comments!

No matter what happens in the course of your divorce and what time of year it is, know that you are capable and you’ve got this. I’m sure every blog post full of inspirational divorce quotes says that, but I really mean it! The first Christmas after my divorce was a doozy – I could barely hold it together because I wasn’t prepared for everything that would surface in my life during the holidays.

There are unique worries, challenges, and feelings that happen in a divorce around the holidays, so I pulled together a few of my favorite resources I’ve shared throughout the years. You can find links to all holiday blog posts right here. Things like what to prepare for your first Christmas after divorce, how to talk to family members about it, and how to make sure your kids have an easy transition during this time.

Divorce and depression seem to go hand in hand due to the resulting upheaval of a person’s normal existence. Your day-to-day routine is gone along with your spouse. There’s the heartbreak of knowing the future you envisioned with your husband will no longer be. Maybe you’re trying to adapt to a new home and neighborhood. As a result, some days you might not feel like even getting out of bed.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel, and you can start to feel better about yourself and the life ahead of you. If you’re struggling with the blues, these tips on how to deal with depression after divorce by Jennifer Horton can help.

Divorce and Depression

by Jennifer Horton

Next to losing a spouse to death, divorce ranks right up there as one of the most stressful events of a person’s life. It’s a time of dramatic upheaval, uncertainty, loss, sadness that can shake up even the most unshakeable personalities. Divorce entails a great deal of life altering decisions as well as unavoidable changes in a short period of time that can ultimately lead to depression symptoms.

Causes

While depression has many faces, it also has multiple causes, and it’s good to be aware of these causes if you are going through a divorce so that you can determine which combined causes where you can make reasonable adjustments to minimize your risk.

Some of the most common causes are:

• Genetics: a family history is relevant
• Life events: trauma, abuse, divorce, marriage, graduation, retiring
• Family and social environment: lack of social support, loneliness, relationship problems
• Medical conditions: alcohol or drug abuse, certain medications, health issues & chronic pain
• Financial strain: job changes, unemployment or underemployment

How to Deal with Depression after Divorce

Thankfully, depression is very treatable and simple lifestyle changes can offer a great deal of relief, in addition to professional help. While these things are simple, when you are depressed, it may not feel easy to do; however, you (and your happiness) are worth the effort!

Plan

When depression takes hold, a vicious cycle often takes place. First you feel listless, tired, uninspired, and lost, which causes you to be less productive, and then you feel worse with this list of things looming over your head that you haven’t done. This is especially counterproductive in divorce when so many practical things need to be accomplished, and decisions made.

Make a list of everything that is weighing on your mind that needs to be done. Just get it out, and on paper. Next, schedule a time (be realistic and gentle with yourself) when it will be accomplished. Having it mapped out and documented in a realistic way that you feel confident about accomplishing provides a huge sense of relief. The trick here is to be realistic, gentle with yourself, and to not over schedule. Be sure when you are planning and scheduling to budget time in your calendar for self-care, or for the other tips on this list. The goal is harmony. When you are taking good care of you, you are feeling better, and things are getting done. (Notice the order of that: YOU come first.)

Movement

Get into motion! Moving your body boosts your mood, positive hormones, and positive thoughts and feelings follow. Also, increasing your breath has a wonderful therapeutic affect that helps to move stagnant energy. Again, be gentle with yourself. If you are not already active, start small and realistic. A 15 minute walk around the block is a great place to start even if you “don’t feel like it”. Recognize, that you may not feel like it; however, you’ll be thanking yourself for it afterwards. Find your favorite, energizing music to help you along. Then when you go for it, congratulate yourself for following through!

Gratitude Journal

In my most difficult times, I have found my gratitude journal the most worthwhile tool. When life is challenging us, it’s easy to be focused on just the challenges of divorce and depression. A gratitude journal is there to remind us that there is another side to the coin. Not everything is challenging. Some things are easy, joyful blessings. We tend to disregard them if we don’t take the time to consciously give credit to life’s good fortune. Take a few moments every morning to acknowledge what is going well, what makes you smile and what you are truly grateful for. You are likely to be amazed at how much you really have going for you.

Tickle Your Funny Bone

Laughter truly is nature’s medicine. It engages your lungs, increases oxygen flow, and massages your internal organs. Enjoy some laughs with your funniest friends, go to a comedy club, watch hilarious video clips on YouTube, ask someone to tell you their best joke, or watch your favorite funny movie. Do this (schedule it as I suggested) regularly to dissipate negativity, and ramp up your optimistic emotions and thoughts.

Contribution

There is something magical about us as humans because we are hard wired to help others. I have heard it stated that one of the great laws of life is that you cannot help another without innately helping yourself. How true! It feels good to give! Call a friend and ask them if there’s anything you can help with, volunteer as a Big Sister, help out at a shelter, or tutor a child who is struggling in school. When you realize how much you have and have to offer, your whole being is lifted up.

Be Gentle

This point is worth saying again. Be sure to schedule time to make yourself and your self-care a priority. It may be as simple as making sure that you get your manicure or pedicure this week, scheduling time with friends, taking time for a nap, or giving yourself permission to just chill out. When you get back to your “regularly schedule program” you’ll have much more energy and enthusiasm to bring to those activities, and you’ll feel much better about it!

Nurture in Nature

Nature is a built-in rejuvenator that helps all of us let go of stress and get back to well-being. Flowers, beaches, fields, trees, animals, sunshine and fresh air all boosts us and reminds us that everything will be provided. After all, nature never struggles or worries. Nature just flows and you are a part of nature.

When you go out into nature you can even try this little ritual. Find a place and set the intention to leave your worries behind. You can dig a hole in the ground, mentally dump your worries there and bury them, or you can imagine a bubble or balloon that will absorb your worries and carry them away. Walk away and feel the relief knowing that you are always supported, loved and guided.

Here are some more articles that discuss other ways of dealing with divorce and depression to help you gain a better perspective and move on with your life.

Depression from Divorce

Your Emotions After Divorce

Life After Divorce & New Beginnings

Advice for the Newly Divorced

Tips to Get over Your Ex 

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Parenting after separation or divorce is sometimes a challenging experience. If you were in a bad marriage, the thought of not having your ex undermine your method of parenting and discipline is something you are probably looking forward to.

But it’s not all a bed of roses being the only parent at home. When the kids act up, you have no one to back you up. When you’re working late, it’s all up to you to make sure supper is on the table, baths are taken, and stories read. It doesn’t matter if you’re dog-tired; it’s all up to you to take care of things.

So how do you handle being the sole parent on duty? Keep reading to get some perspective…

How to Parent with Yourself

By Brette Sember

A big part of parenting after separation or divorce is learning to parent all by yourself. It’s actually trickier than it sounds.

When you were building up to the separation, you probably thought that you could not wait until you were alone with your kids and looked forward to not having to parent in tandem all the time. You might have believed that things would be so much smoother and easier when you could just make and implement decisions and schedules and not have the turmoil of your relationship interfering. If you are now separated or divorced, you probably know that it’s easier and harder, all at the same time!

Manage the Burden

When you parent alone it is all up to you and that means a very time and labor intensive situation. You’re the one who has to do the driving, work on potty training, monitor a teen’s texting, stay on top of homework, parcel out snacks, turn off the TV to screams of protest, and enforce bedtime when your kids are with you. There’s no one else in the house to keep an eye on them, change a diaper, wipe up a spill, or fix the broken kite. When you’re alone with your kids it is all on your shoulders, which can feel very overwhelming if you let it get to you.

Give yourself breaks by using a sitter, turning on a video (gasp!), or shutting the bathroom door. Short moments when you can catch your breath do help a lot and let your recharge enough to keep on moving.

Remember that you are not in this alone

If you have a reasonable relationship with your ex, you may still be able to discuss important decisions about your kids together. If not, you need to have friends and family you can talk to about your life, who can offer their perspectives and advice.

Accept and Forgive Yourself

This is a very stressful time in your life. You aren’t at the top of your game. You’re going to make mistakes as a parent. And your kids will turn out just fine. You may snap at your child, say something you don’t mean, or make a decision you later rethink.

Apologize to your child if you said something you regret. Feel free to rethink choices you made and go in the other direction. This is actually a very good thing to model for your child – that no one is perfect, that we all make mistakes and that it is important to own your missteps and still move forward.

Try New Things

This is your chance to retool your parenting. There are lots of things changing in your child’s life right now and while it is important to maintain continuity overall, it is also easy to make small changes without them becoming a major focus right now. Adjustments to bedtimes, household rules, chore distribution, church attendance, TV time, exercise plans, or even food types can be snuck in now without much disruption when there is already a lot of change happening.

Focus on the Positives

When you are parenting after separation or divorce, it can be easy to be a glass half full person and focus on all the times you don’t have with your kids, when they are with the other parent. This kind of thinking is not helpful in moving forward. Instead, when you are with your kids, enjoy them. Love the time you have and be happy about it. And when you are alone, make the most of that time as well, enjoying the freedom it affords you and the time you can devote to other things.

Take Time to Get Into Your Stride

It takes practice, but soon you’ll feel confident parenting by yourself. And while you will still feel tired and sometimes resentful that this is the way it has to be, you will adjust. Your children will adjust as well and the difficult first year of single parenting will pass and everyone will adapt to a new routine. 

While parenting after separation and divorce isn’t always easy, you can still get through it and raise well-adjusted kids in the process. For more ideas on parenting after divorce, check out the following articles: 

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“I’m smart. I paid attention to my relationship. I was careful about whom I chose as my husband. I did my due diligence: We had similar goals, we wanted the same things . . . until he told me we didn’t. How did I end up this way?”

There’s actually a recently coined name for what we used to call “blindsided by divorce.” The new catch-phrase (which doesn’t seem too catchy to me): “sudden divorce syndrome.” It even has an acronym: SDS.

Why syndrome? Because hindsight is 20/20. If you look back, you now see patterns in the mist — vague signs that you might have been able to interpret as warning signals. But how does this help you now? Not really at all.

Some of the symptoms I’ve read about in the lit about SDS:

• lack of disagreement (because your ex was checked out of the relationship),

• your ex started to pursue more activities on his own, sometimes as a cover for an affair (but, ordinarily there would be no red flag about a partner deciding to pursue some of his own interests — isn’t that something a healthy, secure adult would do?),

• or your ex became more serious about his career (again, should you have known this meant he was distancing himself from you?)

As a smart, aware, aspirational woman who tends to read the latest in self-development and feels it’s important to grow as a person — how could this have happened to you?

Here’s what I think you can and should (yes, I’m not afraid to use the word “should”) take away from what has happened. And this is the total extent of the self-flagellation — as far as self-recrimination and guilt is concerned.

1. People can be deceptive — very easily, and very effectively. It is completely amazing how shamelessly and well people can lie.

2. There was no way you could have known, based on the relationship you thought you had with your husband.

3. No, it would not have been better, and you could not have saved things, if you had scrutinized his every move for clues, or had felt insecure enough about your relationship to have been living in fear.

4. You were not wrong to have felt secure about your marriage.

5. Were you in total denial? Only if you had seen signs all along the way, and had consciously chosen to ignore them. And, even if you did this, you were likely hoping for the best, as an optimist. Should you stop being an optimist, and now live in worry and fear? If you think about it, you know that you don’t want to live this way and that no one’s life improves from second-guessing everyone’s motives for the rest of your life.

6. Look at what you now believe caused your husband to blindside you, and choose differently or choose better in certain areas going forward — if there were lessons to be learned.

7. If your husband suddenly demanded a divorce, and it’s because you no longer want the same things in life, or he turned into a tail-chasing baby-man overnight, you have nothing personally to learn from his actions. Perfectly good, loving, and responsible men can turn 180 overnight, deciding that the rest of their lives should be 100% me-me-me and have not a minute of remorse (okay, maybe a minute) about what this does to their exes and families. In these cases, it’s not you. It’s him.

8. Protect yourself financially so that no one can do this to you again. This has nothing to do with fearing to love again. Don’t fear. Choose as wisely as you can. But never allow a relationship (whether with a man, or with other family members — even your kids) to financially damage you. If you always protect yourself financially, you can weather any emotional storm (because it will only hurt, not destroy you).

I say a definite no. The term “sudden divorce syndrome” makes it sound as if there are a list of symptoms, and if only you had recognized them, you might have been able to save your marriage (putting the blame on the spouse, and taking responsibility away from the person who decided to leave).

It’s as if it’s a cautionary tale aimed at women who are still married. “Watch your step; he might be fixing to leave.”

If you’re reading this and not divorced, but you’re wondering if your husband is about to check out, your own feelings should guide you to having a conversation with him. You may find that you’re anxious over nothing, or you may see there’s a darting, nervous look in his eyes and realize that there is something.

Financial terror often accompanies the sudden news that your husband wants out. If you happen to be in an extreme situation and underemployed yourself, here are a few books you might find really helpful.

And, if your husband has not asked for a divorce yet, but you’re wondering whether he will — and whether you might want to leave first — I’m also including a link to Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay.