[relations parents destinations]
A GUIDE TO PERSONAL GROWTH
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I look at this as a chance to create new space. I mean, you can change your life in just a few days.
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– Dr. Barbara Winter, psychologist, Boca Raton
MS. OPPORTUNITY How To Reinvent Yourself After Divorce BY EMILY J. MINOR here’s a lot of talk about reinvention among baby boomers these days. Indeed, reinvention seems to be the catchphrase for 2014. (That, and “mindfulness.”) But how is it possible to reinvent your life after a divorce? What if your heart is broken? What if you’re poor? What if you’re angry and hurt and lonely? How do you climb out of that? “I tell them to look at the opportunity,” says Dr. Barbara Winter, a Boca Raton psychologist. While recovering from job loss has inched toward the top of the list in terms of life-changing personal devastations, divorce is still
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No. 1, according to a 2013 British study that followed 200 people who had been through both. “I see everything,” Dr. Winter says. “I see people who aren’t even married separate. I see infidelity. I see people who are just disconnected.” And the problem she sees more than anything? Conflicted relationships, she says—just so much unresolved stuff. Dr. Winter, who for many years specialized in female patients, says she works with couples to stave off divorce, when it’s possible. But once the decision has been made, she helps one of them—often the woman, but sometimes the man—
move forward. Her message? View the split as an opening to create a happier, more fulfilling life. “I look at this as a chance to create new space,” Dr. Winter says. “You
can create a new life. I mean, you can change your life in just a few days.” Sometimes. In November of 2002, Katherine Charlton’s world changed in an instant: Her son, Robert, died of cancer. He was 11 years old. By that July, Charlton and her husband of 15 years were divorced. She retained primary custody of their three surviving children. “I was going to wait a year (to get divorced),” says Charlton, who lives in West Palm Beach and had met her ex-husband at church camp when they were both teenagers. “But then certain things happened.” A child’s terminal illness can be devastating to a marriage. Statistics have played that out again and again. Likewise, a child’s death is
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