A friend of mine has a useful phrase to describe an experience I think many of us can relate to: she calls it “getting divorcey”. She isn’t actually married, but you don’t have to be, to recognise what she’s talking about.
Getting divorcey 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 very loudly, and when they disagree on how to raise their daughters and have arguments about money.
When she gets divorcey, my friend loses sight of the good in their relationship and she feels it is all bad. She somehow no longer has access to her love and desire for him, or to any memories from the many happy years they have spent together, or to the warmth and humour and solidity he brings to their family life. She loses all sense of the resilience of their relationship and the difficulties they have faced together and overcome. All of that vanishes and is replaced by a certainty that she needs to get out, right now, and as far away from him as possible.
What struck me when she told me all of this is that it isn’t a feeling she is describing; it is a state of mind. It doesn’t exclude feelings – at these times she feels anger, disgust, pain and more – but they are so extreme and overwhelming that they coalesce into a conviction that she must escape her situation completely and utterly. That she needs to be divorced not only from her partner but from everything in her life. You don’t have to have a partner to get divorcey; you can get divorcey with your parents, your friends, your colleagues, your pet, your teenager. You can get divorcey with your own mind.
This state of mind is so important to recognise for what it is: a state. Because at the time, when we are going 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-restraint not to end their relationship, quit their job, leave 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 this can feel so out of reach because the experience is so overwhelming and all-encompassing, it is impossible to see and feel its edges, to remember that it does in fact have edges.
I try to hold on to this as best I can when I am in this state 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 throughout the 50 minutes about how overwhelmed and incapable I felt, how I couldn’t manage, how the sleep deprivation was making me lose my mind, how I was utterly lost. The next morning, I felt OK. Things were difficult, but I was not overwhelmed, I was not incapable, I was managing. What she said was so simple and, as is often the case, much more powerful for that: today, you are in a different state of mind from yesterday.
This is not to say that these states of mind are meaningless, or that our feelings don’t matter because they change over time. It doesn’t mean you should ignore your experience and wait for it to disappear, dismiss red flags or accept someone’s disrespectful treatment. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t change anything. It might be that when you move out of this divorcey state of mind, you still want a divorce. After that session with my analyst, I realised I was not as alone as I had felt the day before, and I asked my loved ones for more help. Things got better.
Psychoanalysis has a different name for “getting divorcey”; 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 theorised 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 figuratively as well as literally, we can only see in black and white. She understood that throughout our lives, when we encounter certain triggers, we can be sent right back to this, our most primal state.
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 are driving you crazy. It can help a little to recognise that you might be in a divorcey, paranoid-schizoid state of mind right now – and that you might 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
