What is it that you want when you find yourself in a divorce? You want to heal and get over the pain and agony of the loss, and you want to find a way to move on with your life and put the divorce behind you.

In teaching divorce recovery workshops for over 35 years with many thousands of devastated divorced men and women, we have concluded that time alone will not achieve these objectives. We have seen people who have been divorced 3, 10, even 15 years still suffering the after-effects of their divorce. Even some who have remarried carry the wounds and bitterness right into the next relationship.

Is recovery from divorce that difficult? Yes it is. Divorced people agree that this experience is the worst or one of the worst experiences of their lives. Life is turned upside down by divorce. It destroys your self-confidence. It upends your dreams and plans for the future. It brings seemingly insurmountable problems. Suddenly you have changes in your finances and living conditions. You have to deal with the emotional upheaval of your children. Your family and friends may take sides or begin to act differently. Marriage is like an ecosystem that is in balance; divorce wrecks that balance.

If you have never been through a divorce (and for over two-thirds of divorced people, it is their first), you don’t know what to do. You probably never considered that your marriage might fail, even though half of all marriages do. You never received instruction on how to behave during and after divorce. As a result, you are probably like most people we encounter in our divorce recovery workshops, you feel lost, you are stuck somewhere in the process and you make a lot of mistakes. The truth is, much has been learned about how to heal, move on and get closure in divorce. From our years of teaching, we have written this book to help you achieve a successful recovery.  

This book is designed to help you heal, learn from your experience, plan for the future and begin to take action to build a new fulfilling life for yourself. Our 10 step process will help you accomplish all of that if you are willing to put in the time and effort. Each section has insights, recommendations, and action steps to direct you as you move from healing to closure. We organized these 10 steps in a workbook type format to involve you in the process.  Just reading about divorce recovery will not get you there.

Our promise: If you will take the time to read this book carefully, attempt to understand all the ideas that sometimes may run counter to what your instincts want you to do, and do the exercises in the 10 steps, you will heal, move forward with your life and gain closure in your divorce.

If you are recently divorced or in the process of getting a divorce, to achieve all of this may seem almost impossible. Where do you start? That’s what this book is about: helping you to be patient and take baby steps to pull yourself out of the nightmare of divorce and into a promising new life.