Rebuilding Your Life After Divorce: Maybe Women Were Never Crazy After All

Sometimes I sit and think about how lucky we are to be women today.

I know that might sound strange when so many of us are dealing with menopause, anxiety, broken hearts, divorce, grief, sleepless nights, ageing parents, children leaving home and trying to work out who the hell we are after spending years looking after everybody else.

For many women, rebuilding your life after divorce isn't just about getting over the end of a marriage. It can happen at exactly the same time as menopause, children leaving home, changes in friendships, financial worries and that huge question of who you are now after spending years being somebody's wife, mother and the person everybody else relied on.

But when I look back at the generations of women before us, I realise just how far we've come, because women have always struggled. They just weren't always allowed to talk about it.

For generations, women experiencing anxiety, depression, grief, hormonal changes or emotional distress were often dismissed as unstable, hysterical or simply “difficult.” Some were heavily medicated, some were institutionalised, and treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy were used much more widely during periods when standards around consent and patient rights were very different from those we expect today. Countless other women were simply told to pull themselves together and get on with it.

Think about our mothers and grandmothers. Menopause wasn't something everybody discussed around the dinner table, and women certainly weren't openly comparing notes about hormones, brain fog, anxiety, loss of confidence, sleeplessness or that horrible feeling of suddenly not recognising yourself anymore.

HRT wasn't talked about or available in the way it is today, and for many people, going to see a therapist carried a stigma that suggested there must be something seriously wrong with you.

Why Do So Many Women Still Suffer in Silence?

So people kept quiet. If your marriage broke down, you got on with it. If somebody died, you were expected to be strong. If you couldn't sleep or were struggling emotionally, you might have been given medication and told to rest. You certainly weren't joining online support groups, listening to podcasts or finding thousands of other women experiencing exactly the same thing.

Women suffered behind closed doors, and I sometimes wonder how many spent years believing there was something wrong with them when actually they were grieving, hormonal, overwhelmed, traumatised, lonely or simply exhausted from carrying too bloody much.

Maybe women were never crazy. Maybe nobody was listening properly.

We Have Something Previous Generations Didn't Have

This is why I think we're incredibly fortunate to be living now. We have access to information our mothers and grandmothers could only have dreamed of. We can research menopause, ask questions about HRT, find therapists, retreats, communities and support groups and talk openly about divorce, grief, anxiety and trauma. We can listen to another woman telling her story and suddenly think, Oh my God, that's me.

One of the most powerful changes is that women can now take some of the most painful experiences of their lives and turn them into something that helps somebody else. A divorce can become a book, grief can become a community, a breakdown can change somebody's career, and a woman can lose everything she thought her life was going to be, rebuild it and then create something from everything she learned along the way.

Pain doesn't have to be wasted. We can turn it into purpose.

But there is one part of all this that I still find incredibly sad. We have more resources available to us than any generation of women before us, yet so many women are still trying to do everything alone. They suffer quietly, tell everybody they're fine and convince themselves that asking for help means they're weak. They believe that eventually time will heal something they've never really dealt with.

I understand why, because women have been conditioned to cope. We look after everyone else, keep the family going, turn up for work, answer the messages, remember the birthdays and make sure everybody around us is okay. Somewhere amongst all of that, we start believing that because we're functioning, we must be healing.

But coping and healing are not the same thing. Keeping yourself busy isn't necessarily healing, going on holiday isn't always healing, and pretending you've moved on certainly isn't healing. Being able to get out of bed every morning doesn't mean your heart isn't still carrying something incredibly heavy.

You can look absolutely fine from the outside and still know that something inside hasn't moved forward.

Why Rebuilding Your Life After Divorce Can Feel So Difficult

Perhaps we need to look even further back to understand why putting ourselves first can feel so unnatural.

Were we born this way, or were we taught it?

Think back to some of the first toys many little girls were given. There was probably a doll somewhere amongst them, and before we could even properly understand what motherhood was, we were pretending to feed a baby, put it to bed, push it around in a pram and look after it.

As we grew up, so many of the messages around us continued to reinforce the idea that being a good woman meant caring, nurturing, helping and putting other people's needs before our own.

Then for many of us came being a wife, and I think this is another part of the conversation we don't talk about enough.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of women made themselves smaller for their husbands because, for some reason, we grew up believing that his career, his time and his ambitions were slightly more important than ours.

We supported our husbands while they built their careers, often without even thinking about what we were sacrificing to make that possible. We had dinner ready when they got home, kept the house running, remembered what needed buying, did the school runs, looked after the children, organised appointments and somehow knew when somebody needed new shoes, a costume for school or picking up from somewhere at four o'clock on a Tuesday.

And plenty of women were doing all of this while working themselves.

I call it balancing plates, and bloody hell, did we become good at it.

Women are constantly told we're brilliant at multitasking, but perhaps we became brilliant at it because we had to be. Make the dinner while keeping the kids entertained, take the phone call while tidying the kitchen, put another load of washing on, answer an email, find the missing PE kit, remember tomorrow's appointment, listen to somebody telling you about their day and then get the kids bathed and into bed.

Before you know it, it's 10pm and you realise you haven't actually done one thing for yourself. Then you wake up the next morning and start balancing the plates all over again.

And Before You Know It, 18 Years Have Passed

Think about that for a moment.

That's 18 years of your life where so much of your time has been spent doing things for other people. Making sure they're fed, they're happy, they're where they need to be, they've got what they need, and everything around them keeps moving.

Eighteen years without paid holiday, without clocking off at five and, most of the time, without anybody really acknowledging just how much work went into keeping everybody else's lives running.

Of course we wouldn't change having our children, and looking after the people we love is part of life. But somewhere amongst all that caring, a lot of women slowly move themselves further and further down their own list.

And 18 years is a long time to practise putting yourself last.

Do something for long enough and it becomes more than a routine. It becomes part of your identity. You become the person everybody relies on, the one who remembers everything, fixes everything and makes everybody else's life run a little more smoothly.

So is it really any wonder that when the children grow up, the marriage changes or ends, menopause arrives or life simply becomes quieter, we don't automatically know how to put ourselves first?

We've become experts at knowing what everybody else needs and complete beginners at asking ourselves what we want.

Then suddenly some of those plates disappear.

You'd think we'd feel nothing but relief, but strangely, that's often when women can feel the most lost. When you've spent most of your adult life defining yourself by what you do for everybody else, having time for yourself can actually feel uncomfortable.

Who am I now? What do I enjoy? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to spend my time with? What is my purpose now that everybody doesn't need me in the way they once did?

This Could Be the Most Important Stage of Your Life

I actually think this is one of the most important stages of a woman's life because you have a choice about what happens next.

You can decide the exciting part of your life is behind you, stay at home, watch television and wait for everybody to need you again, or you can realise that perhaps this is the first time in your adult life when you have the freedom to properly discover who you are without everybody else's needs coming first.

Your children aren't going to love you any less because you travelled somewhere without them, took up something new, made new friends, fell in love again, started a business, went on a retreat or decided you wanted more from your life.

In fact, I think our children want to see us thrive. They want to know we're okay without them and see us enjoying our lives rather than sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.

And our job as parents doesn't finish when our children become adults. It simply changes. We're still their mentors, and we're still teaching them by the way we live our own lives.

If they see us learning, they learn. If they see us getting back up after heartbreak, they learn. If they see us asking for help when we need it, they learn. And if they see us reach 50, 60 or 70 and still believe there are places to go, people to meet, things to learn and whole new chapters waiting to be written, imagine what that teaches them about their own future.

That's why, if you've spent most of your life saying yes to other people, it can feel incredibly uncomfortable to suddenly say yes to yourself. You might even feel guilty about it at first.

Do it anyway, because sometimes the only thing you've got to lose is the comfort zone that's been keeping you in the same place.

And just imagine what you might gain when you finally step outside it.

Putting Yourself First Isn't Selfish

Wanting some of your life to belong to you now isn't selfish. It's about time.

And putting yourself first doesn't mean you stop caring about everybody else. It simply means you finally include yourself amongst the people you care about. It means asking yourself what you need, what makes you happy, what you've been putting off and, perhaps most importantly, how you want the next chapter of your life to look.

Because we are probably among the first generations of women to have this much information, this much choice and this much freedom to actually do something about it.

We can say, Actually, I'm not okay. I need some help. I want to understand what's happening to me, and I don't want to spend another five years feeling like this.

But we can also say, I'm okay, but I want more. I want to travel. I want new experiences. I want new friendships. I want to learn something, change something, start something and find out who I am now.

You don't have to be falling apart to decide you want your life to change.

There is nothing crazy about that.

The world is finally beginning to understand something women should have been told generations ago. We're not crazy. Sometimes we're hormonal, grieving, heartbroken, overwhelmed or exhausted. Sometimes we're carrying experiences our bodies and minds haven't forgotten, and sometimes we're simply women standing at the end of one version of our lives trying to work out what the next one is going to look like.

Our mothers and grandmothers didn't have half the resources or choices we have today, so maybe the greatest way we can honour the women who came before us is to use them. Talk, ask questions, get the therapy, research your hormones, find your people, take the trip, take the retreat, accept the support and admit when you're struggling.

But most importantly, give yourself permission to enjoy your life.

You've spent years looking after everybody else. That doesn't mean your purpose has disappeared now that they don't need you quite so much.

Maybe your purpose was never only to look after other people.

Maybe this next stage is about discovering what happens when you finally start looking after yourself too.

After all those years of balancing plates, where is the reward for all that hard work?

The reward is getting to live your dreams.

It's having the freedom to start asking yourself what you want. To travel, explore, try something new, meet new people, change direction and do some of the things you've spent years saying you'll do “one day.”

You've spent years helping everybody else build their lives. Now perhaps it's time to build the part of yours you've been dreaming about.

Because suffering in silence was never strength, and neither is spending the rest of your life sitting on the sidelines because you've convinced yourself your important years are behind you.

For generations, women didn't have many of the choices we have today.

We do.

And if you've spent a lifetime saying yes to everybody else, perhaps this is the chapter where you finally learn to say yes to yourself.

Ready for Your Next Chapter?

If any part of this story resonates with you and you feel like you've reached that stage where you're ready to start putting yourself first but could do with some support and guidance along the way, that's exactly why I created Mending Hearts Retreats.

Our healing retreats give you the opportunity to step away from everyday life, work through what you've been carrying, meet others who understand and create a new circle of friendships while you start working out what you want your next chapter to look like.

Sometimes saying yes to yourself is the hardest part.

If you're ready to make that next move, we still have space available on our upcoming retreat in Marrakech from September 26th - October 02. Visit https://www.mendingheartsretreat.com/marrakech-2026. Who knows, four weeks from now you could be stepping into your next chapter with a completely different outlook on life, a whole new circle of friends and excitement about what comes next.

Or you could still be sitting at home watching Dancing with the Stars.

The choice is yours.

If this has got you thinking that maybe it’s finally time to say yes to yourself, you can find out more about who we are, what we do and our upcoming retreats at www.mendingheartsretreat.com.