Guilt Trips and Divorce - How to Handle Religious Issues, Family and Friends

Handling intrusive family members, prying friends and nosey parishioners while going through a breakup is never easy. It’s tough enough coming to grips with the fact your relationship is over. Throw in the frustrations, disappointments, stress and anger, plus, dealing with guilt as you confront the opinions of relatives, in-laws and your circle of friends can be a major source of irritation. In addition to the fact you’re going through hell right now, trying to live up to other people’s expectations is a major pain in the butt. With all this stuff going on you cannot abandon yourself to fulfill their illusions. If you do, you’re headed for serious trouble. Take a deep breath, I have good news. This chapter is going help you to shut them up, relieve you of your guilty conscience, shift the focus to comforting you with an emphasis on enjoying the rest of your life.

The fact that you love your family and friends is a good thing. But, it’s NOT FAIR, when you, or them, uses your relationship with them to make you feel remorse because your relationship is in a tail spin. There is a big difference between dealing with karma because you did some heinous act versus coming to terms with a failed relationship. The reason is that it ended doesn’t matter. We can pick any old scape goat to beat you with. It’s totally irrelevant. Whether it was based on everything but the right thing, infidelity, you just grew apart, it ran its course, it collapsed due to broken promises or should have never began to start with.

If you’re ready to stop having your religious beliefs be used against you; ready to stop lying to yourself and everyone else, just keep reading. I promise things are going to get better. More than likely the major source of your stress stems from one or two sources. It’s either disappointment from failure or guilt. The only thing that’s going to help you get past the hurt, pain, and anger of failure is time. Hint – No matter how much you want this to go away YOU CANNOT RUSH TIME. You must come to terms with the fact you’re going to have to allow TIME to have it’s perfect work in your life.

Now, with that stated let’s focus your attention on something you can actually do something about – feelings of GUILT. If we had to pick which has the most negative effect on the human spirit failure or guilt. It’s guilt. The reason being guilt is often associated with keeping up appearances. Who in their right mind wants to fail in front of friends, family and those that compose their social / cultural community. Since we’re being honest, I’m going to throw this in, most religious folk (not to be confused with spiritual or Godly people) are judgmental as hell. So, when you connect that to tension and additional guilt that family, friends and religious beliefs, add to your stress – those feelings are multiplied tenfold. So don’t be so hard on yourself. Your feelings are very normal.

by D Ivan Young, Relationship Expert