The way your heart can love someone and hate them at the same time is to create two categories inside itself. It sees your spouse (the one you HAD when you were married) from two different perspectives. It almost creates two people in these categories. Even though you know it is the same person with good and bad traits, your heart sees them as a person that you have had wonderful times with and another person that you are having or, in your case, had horrible times with.

What you and your heart wanted to do was keep the good person and divorce the bad one. But, because the two traits were in the same body, you found yourself having to divorce “both of them.”

If you were the one causing ALL the trouble in the marriage, then the situation just described was the experience your former partner went through. It can be just one spouse causing the problems or it can be both of the marriage partners causing the difficulties. Regardless of your particular situation, you have pain and damage based on a marriage that got torn apart. And, that is what Jesus wants to be spending time together with.

It is true you had some part in CAUSING the conflicts and the divorce. And, no doubt you and your former spouse expressed a lot of blame, accusations, and words of dissatisfaction for each other. You have probably blamed and accused yourself during and after the divorce. Even though you can’t remember all the words that were said, your heart can still feel the damage those accusations inflicted on it. You and your former partner hurt your heart; you hurt it with regret, blame, conflict, and divorce; and, your former partner hurt it with accusations, retaliation, wrong deeds, and rejection.

You may want to shift the blame over to your former partner so as to try to bring healing to your heart. Even your friends will try to use this technique to help you feel better about the divorce. You and they can spend a lot of time going over all the things your former spouse did to you. It would seem like all you would have to do is PROVE it wasn’t your fault and you would be healed.

Sooner or later you will discover that blame, reasoning, and justifying do not bring healing to your heart. It doesn’t respond to reasoning, logic, or common sense. It needs to be able to let it all go through the process of forgiveness. Forgiveness may be the one thing you can’t see yourself doing; or, it may be you have already tried to do that. Forgiveness is hard to come by. However, that is what your heart has to have in order to be healed. But, Jesus is going to drop that issue for awhile and take you back to your divorced condition.

Step by step you made your way through the divorce maze and came out the other end divorced. Now life is having to be lived without your spouse. The dynamics of a divorced couple run the gamut. There all kinds of reactions during the divorce process and all kinds of emotions after it is all over. This complexity makes it hard for ANY human to be able to address all the intricate aspects of it.

Regardless of what kind of a divorce you feel you had, you still were damaged before the divorce, during it, and after. No matter how hard you tried to not get hurt, you still got inflicted with emotional wounds. You can talk to yourself and even tell all your friends you are fine. But, you know, deep down inside, you are not fine.

You now carry attitudes about people, life, marriage, and relationships that you didn’t have before. You were effected by all the painful events that took place during the whole process. You didn’t like what happened to you; and you have some ideas for not letting it happen again. Whether you intended to or not you have built a wall in ALL your relationships. Trust has been weakened and you will find yourself having a hard time giving it. Your heart now has a plan that it will set in place; and, it WON’T be good, if you don’t let Jesus heal it.