Separation in Marriage – How to Cope With the Fear of Losing Him
You’ve spent years, maybe even decades growing roots.
Thick, strong roots that touch every aspect of your life.
But lately it feels as if all those strong roots are wilting away and that they could be uprooted at a moment’s notice.
The idea of separating from someone who’s been such an integral piece of your life is terrifying. A separation could have far-reaching consequences that impact every facet of your existence.
But you need to remember something.
You’re still with your husband.
The specter of separation in marriage is what is fueling your mind with fear, pumping you full of cortisol, and making the situation even worse.
That is why you must learn to manage your fear. If your goal is to save the marriage you must be in the right state of mind to do so.
That’s why we’re going to dive into what’s happening in your brain and offer three solutions to manage your fear and ready your mind for the romantic battle ahead.
How Fear Impacts The Brain
There’s a good reason people fear things.
If we never felt fear our species probably wouldn’t have lived for very long.
We wouldn’t bother gathering food for our next meal because we don’t fear hunger. We wouldn’t bother running as fast as we could to get away from a predator, because being eaten alive just doesn’t scare us.
Fear has played a crucial role in keeping us alive.
But fear becomes our greatest enemy when we don’t quickly do away with the feeling.
We’ve all heard of the fight or flight response triggered when we’re scared.
It’s this response that floods our brain with chemicals it thinks we need. These chemicals are suppossed to help us deal with the situation at hand. They raise our heart rate, dilate pupils, increase blood pressure, and devote resources to crucial organs while overlooking others like the gastrointestinal system.
This response can be good for a moment or two. During an emergency, they can kick our bodies into gear so we quickly get ourselves to safety.
The problem comes into play when the fight or flight response is overactive.
An abnormal fight or flight response may lead to an imbalance in hormones and can result in chronic anxiety, bipolar, panic attacks, phobias, and depression.
When describing fear’s impact on decision making, behavioral psychologist George Loewenstein wrote, “Fear causes us to slam on the brakes instead of steering into the skid, immobilizes as when we have greatest need for strength, causes sexual dysfunction, insomnia, ulcers, and gives us dry mouth and jitters at the very moment when there is the greatest premium on clarity and eloquence.”
Fear leads us to overestimate the chances of something bad happening. So if you’re scared that your husband will leave, fear will feed on that worry and compound how you’re feeling. It leads you to overestimate the chances that he’ll actually leave.
To make good decisions you need to be of sound mind.
To get there, heed these three perception-changing strategies.
1) Work With The Present
You might be tempted to bury your emotions. To push them aside, repress them, and ignore how you really feel.
This may help you for brief moments. It may protect your children at the moment from an unstable home life and not alert your friends or colleagues that what’s really going on.
I was given this advice in a romantic relationship I had a while back.
When my relationship was getting rocky a friend advised me to keep smiling and keep loving.
But that’s near impossible when that happiness is feigned. When smiling is forced and being loving is contrary to how I felt. These contrarian emotions were always clashing.
So I stopped smiling and started to really embrace how I felt.
When you embrace your feelings you embrace the present situation.
You stop living in a fairytale where everything is rosy even when the wolf is in the garden.
To deal with your reality you have to live within it.
Confronting these emotions allows you to work through them.
This is how we heal.
Once you’ve begun to acknowledge how you feel you can begin to analyze the situation with a realistic head on your shoulders. Instead of running from the problem, you’re facing it.
Again, shutting down those negative emotions doesn’t lead to a healthy resolution in your marriage. It also means you’re repressing emotions that will percolate and bubble over in an unhealthy way later on.
2) Things Don’t Happen Overnight
It feels like tomorrow everything you’ve built could crumble. The emotional, social, and financial monoliths you’ve constructed through the years might be hit by an apocalyptic earthquake.
But that’s not going to happen.
You’ve imagined that tomorrow he’ll file for divorce, the kids will leave with him, and you’ll be financially ill-equipped to deal with your life.
Again, that won’t happen.
The real bad stuff (and real good stuff) will come later if it comes at all.
Your emotions make you feel as though doom and gloom is around every corner, but that’s just a feeling.
The uprooting of someone’s life is a lengthy process. Roots run deep and they can’t become uprooted without a bit of effort.
Now I don’t mean to minimize your feelings when I say this. But you have to take a deep breath and realize that those fantasies of yours are your worst enemy.
Never have I had a client that couldn’t feed their children after a separation in marriage. I’ve also never had a client suddenly have to move out of their home, open new bank accounts, find a new job, and completely leave their previous life behind.
Let’s be realistic here.
A separation takes time.
It’s likely that both parties want to do everything they can to stay together. To leave the relationship now would feel as though everything you built was all for naught.
Trust that things will work out in the long run.
Understanding that the process takes a while allows you to mitigate that fear of flight response. It helps you calm down and be cognizant that there isn’t a lion in the bedroom.
This isn’t a 100-meter sprint, it’s a marathon. One that will be difficult no doubt, but one where anything can happen, both good and bad.
3) Elevate You
We fear the worst-case scenario because we think we’re not good enough.
We think we’re not worth our partner’s love, that no one else will love us after they leave, and that we don’t have the ability to provide for ourselves.
2023 has never been a better time to be the best you financially and romantically.
It’s also the best time to elevate your self-worth.
You’re a strong, independent, amazing woman with the ability to get through your difficult situation. Elevating yourself, and your worth and focusing on what makes you great is a powerful tool.
This will give you the confidence to move forward in style.
It’ll give you the sexy confidence your husband wants to see, potential suitors want to see, but most importantly what you want to see in yourself.
But how do you go about cultivating this new you?
Authentic Relationship System Training
Going it alone is rough, especially when it feels like the universe has conspired against you.
That’s where I come in.
My systematic program offers a step-by-step blueprint designed to improve your marriage, but more importantly improve yourself.
We work on healing wounds your relationship or prior relationship has created with self-love.
Through an extensive online curriculum as well as weekly calls, we’ll undergo a six-month journey that focuses on understanding male psychology as well as the healing process to create meaningful transformation.
I’d love to learn more about where you’re at and what you’d like to achieve going forward. To learn more about each other let’s schedule a brief chat.
If you want to see what former clients have said about the program, check out their reviews here.
