Scanning through the morning news, I came across a Newsweek article titled, "Time Only Heals Some Wounds." The short of it is that human beings are amazingly resilient and readjust back to an equilibrium, even when they suffer through good and bad life events: job loss, death of a spouse, disability, marriage, winning the lottery. However, the author digged into a couple of studies from Europe (German & UK) and came to a particularly interesting conclusion. Divorce is the worst of life events. Perhaps I'm overstating it but here's an excerpt:
Widows and widowers do get over their grief, but it takes a full seven years for that recovery to occur. Divorce and job loss, on the other hand, seem to leave people permanently scarred. Hold up. People get over the death of a spouse, but not a divorce? While this wouldn't seem to make sense at first, psychologists have a couple of possible explanations. Some suspect that it may in fact be easier to adapt to a one-time hit of bad luck—even if it's big, like death—than to a chronic condition. Divorce in this sense is akin to long-term illness or disability: It's a broken life, never to be repaired, with all sorts of messy reminders around all the time. It's also possible—and Lucas's findings support this—that people who get married and then divorce are significantly less happy to begin with than people who get married and stay married. In other words, divorce selects people who tend toward misery anyway.
You have to take into consideration that the two studies are based in the UK and Germany, where they're inherently depressed and pessimistic.
My personal opinion on this -- having gone through a few of my own life changing events -- is that life is never fair. However, there is a tomorrow and better to focus on the present and future than to wallow in the past. You can't change history nor can you revise it, but you can learn from it and make you stronger and help you write a new future that will hopefully be better than the past. Life sucks but don't let it suck the life out of you.
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