A friend of mine has a useful phrase to describe an experience that I think many of us can relate to: she calls it “getting divorced”. She’s not actually married, but you don’t have to be to recognize what she’s talking about.
Divorcing is what happens to her when her partner sneezes into his hand and then rubs it on his jeans, or when he chews his food really hard, and when they disagree about how to raise their daughters and argue about money.
When she divorces, my friend loses sight of the good in their relationship and she feels it’s all bad. She somehow no longer has access to her love and desire for him, or to any memories of the many happy years they spent together, or to the warmth and humor and solidity he brings to their family life. She loses all sense of the resilience of their relationship and the difficulties they have faced and overcome together. All this disappears and is replaced by a certainty that she must get out, immediately, and as far away from him as possible.
What struck me when she told me all this is that it is not a feeling she is describing; it is a state of mind. It doesn’t exclude feelings – in these times she feels anger, disgust, pain and more – but it’s so extreme and overwhelming that it coalesces into a belief that she needs to escape her situation completely and utterly. That she should be separated not only from her partner, but from everything in her life. You don’t have to have a partner to divorce; you can break up with your parents, your friends, your colleagues, your pet, your teenager. You can divorce with your own mind.
This state of mind is so important to recognize for what it is: a state. Because at that time, when we go through it, it doesn’t feel like a state that can fluctuate and shift and come and go. It feels like a permanent, fixed, rigid knowledge of how things are and always will be. It can seem like the only way out is total destruction, and it can take all of a person’s self-control not to end their relationship, quit their job, abandon their children, and break up their friendships.
But the only way out is not to burn everything to the ground. Because the reality is that this state of mind will pass, and thinking and feeling more clearly will become possible again. Understanding it can feel so out of reach because the experience is so overwhelming and all-encompassing, it’s impossible to see and feel its edges, to remember that it does have edges.
I try to stick to this as best I can when I’m in this frame of mind. I reach for the words my psychoanalyst said to me in one of my early sessions as a new mother, when I cried during the 50 minutes about how overwhelmed and incapable I felt, how I couldn’t do it, how the lack of sleep made me losing my mind, how I was completely lost. The next morning I felt fine. Things were hard, but I wasn’t overwhelmed, I wasn’t incompetent, I was managing. What she said was so simple and, as is often the case, all the more powerful for it: today you are in a different state of mind than yesterday.
This is not to say that these states of mind are meaningless, or that our feelings do not matter, because they change over time. This doesn’t mean you should ignore your experience and wait for it to go away, dismiss red flags or accept someone’s disrespectful treatment. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t change anything. It may be that when you move out of this divorce frame of mind, you still want a divorce. After that session with my analyst, I realized I wasn’t as alone as I felt the day before, and I asked my loved ones for more help. Things got better.
Psychoanalysis has another name for “being separated”; the analyst Melanie Klein called it the “paranoid-schizoid position”. Paranoid, because in this state of mind everyone else is always and only out to get you; and schizoid, meaning splitting into all good and all bad. She theorized that all of us are born in this paranoid-schizoid position, that babies can only experience themselves and those around them as either all good or all bad – that we can only see in black and white both figuratively and literally. She understood that throughout our lives, when we encounter certain triggers, we can be sent back to this, our most primal state.
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Some days building a better life means holding on as best you can and resisting the urge to cut all ties with the people who drive you crazy. It might help a little to realize that you may be in a dissociated, paranoid-schizoid state of mind right now—and that you may be in a different state of mind tomorrow.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I grow up – Conversations with adults in search of adulthood
