How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?

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No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash. But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity. In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.

During graduate school for clinical psychology, I learned about transference: the way a patient uses the anonymous therapist as a fun-house-mirror reflection of their own unresolved relational needs. The patient and therapist piece together a deeper understanding of the patient based on the echoes of outside relationships that inevitably play out in the therapist’s office. As a therapist, part of what I could offer my patients was the experience of being in relation with someone else without the complexities of a personal relationship. I was never meant to be fully known to them. Research consistently indicates that the strongest predictor of success in therapy is the therapeutic alliance — the rapport between therapist and patient — and traditionally, therapists rigorously protect this for our patients with clear boundaries. By reducing the white noise of personal information, or self-disclosures, therapists provide patients with a unique opportunity to feel connected to another person by care alone. To be there in feelings and not in facts was the superpower I had always wanted.

Periodically, my patients’ imaginations and interpersonal needs would bump up against my own reality. Throughout my pregnancy, I worked as a psychologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, supporting women pregnant with babies facing severe or fatal diseases. I willed my healthy son, glowing inside me, not to overhear these conversations — survival rates, palliative care, congenital anomaly. Please be okay, I tried to communicate to him. I swaddled my healthy pregnancy in baggy sweaters, bracing for the day a patient would notice my growing good fortune and ask: Why me and why not you? It was the first time a fact about me was announcing itself to a patient. But no one said a word.

At eight months pregnant, I lumbered into the waiting room at the Children’s Hospital to greet a patient who I had not seen in several months. From her seat, she was eye to eye with my son, curled up and kicking. “There’s something different about you,” she said knowingly. She then complimented me on a haircut I hadn’t gotten and pulled herself up to standing, saying, “I’m really observant.” Despite my patients being thoughtful, curious, and attentive, not a single one acknowledged our shared condition. I truly believe they did not allow themselves to see my pregnancy at all. Knowing that the person they asked to witness their grief was floating through a healthy pregnancy was too much to contend with, so they looked away.

I loved my life working in a helping profession and being immersed in the details of other people’s stories rather than documenting my own narrative for public consumption. The week before my 18th birthday, I deactivated my Facebook account. I didn’t want to measure my birthday in how many messages I did or did not receive from people across the family-to-strangers continuum of a Facebook friends list. Becoming a psychologist solidified my detachment from social media. Professors urged me and my graduate school peers to be wary of the conclusions an understandably curious patient might reach if they were to unearth online artifacts of our real-world lives. My partner was on a different path, in which social media and exposure were not impediments but rather necessities. We puzzled through this predicament on walks, over pizza, in our apartment and excitedly concocted rules of engagement of how and what he would share about our lives together. It was a tenuous balance — my profession, which requires privacy, and his, which is measured in applause — but it worked well while life was unfolding according to our plans.

During my pregnancy, I had never felt happier nor more aware of how precarious happiness could be. When my baby was first placed on my chest, still tethered to me by his umbilical cord, I sobbed with relief. We had done it. He had arrived. I survived preeclampsia, a life-threatening birth complication, and finally, our family was whole. Mine is a story of worrying in the wrong direction. As a perinatal psychologist, I knew all the statistics — how vulnerable a marriage is in the postpartum period, how vital community connection is in preventing depression and anxiety, how new parenthood impacts a whole family — but I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career. Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.

Motherhood, I have learned, fills your time but not your mind. In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, marveling at his sweaty little hands grasping a crayon, I work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage. This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide. Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high-school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child. While our partnership has changed, our parenthood has not. Both of us fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided. As for me, days with my son are sunny. Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.

Even as people from my past have reached out to say they saw my face in a tabloid, my patients have remained silent. Was some algorithmic or karmic force protecting my patients from seeing a tabloid drama in which I play the role of a voiceless ex-wife? Or did they know about my divorce and didn’t know it’s okay to tell me? Because of the clinical frame — that promise the psychologist makes to the patient to not take up emotional space — I don’t explicitly share any part of myself until they’ve already found out by themselves. Recently, while eating muffins with my son at the Sunday farmers’ market, I locked eyes with a patient who was in treatment because of the grief of a miscarriage. It was her decision whether to discuss our in-the-wild encounter in my office the following Tuesday. But I held the moment in mind, thinking through what her acknowledgment or silence would mean in the context of our work together.

It’s hard to measure an absence, and I can’t say for sure how much my career has been impacted by what’s out there online. But there have been hints along the way, like the job offer that dissolved without explanation after yet another tabloid news cycle or the patient who’s scheduled for a first appointment but seemingly vanishes. On my darker days, I railed against the unfairness of a public divorce, asking my therapist (we’re all just a Russian nesting doll of therapists supporting therapists), Who would trust a cardiologist who had a heart attack because they never got an EKG? Of course, I am not owed anything, whether it be a job or the privilege of being any given person’s psychologist. Still, even as someone who spent years researching how people respond to ambiguity, I hate not knowing if the way my story has been told has impacted my opportunity to help others sort through their stories. I have the deeply human propensity to find evidence for my worries in the unknown. As a visitor in this digital land I thought had successfully chosen not to live in, it is uncanny to see myself in a shoddy mosaic of others’ words and impressions. I have puzzled alone, for nearly two years, about what to say as someone who is, by personality and profession, equally allergic to being the center of attention and to being erased.

At the Children’s Hospital, my invisibility was welcome protection from hard conversations for me and my patients. And while I still firmly believe in following my patients’ leads and not presuming to know what parts of my personhood resonate with them, the publicity I did not consent to increasingly feels like both a challenge and an opportunity. If I’m discovered — as what, being vulnerable? — perhaps it could be a point of connection rather than a clinical liability. My entire adult life, I feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy me. One day in London, I looked up and found that they had both arrived. And I am okay. If I can’t be invisible anymore, I may as well introduce myself. You know how a sponge is most effective at absorbing liquid when it’s already a bit wet? Maybe we can think about my messy not-so-personal life in that way: a dose of my own loss, rage, powerlessness, sadness that helps me hold yours. I cannot resolve the incongruity of a career in helping others prepare for the exquisite fragility and beauty of pregnancy and postpartum and then having my own world upended. But I can start hearing myself when I tell patients that avoidance maintains fear, and maybe it’s time to accept that I’m not unknown anymore.

So consider this essay my message in a bottle sent out to sea to maybe wash up at my patients’ feet someday: I’m sorry I can’t be invisible anymore (really, more than you know, I’m sorry). This information about me will rush in like water filling all of the blank spaces where you could have, should have, would have imagined me to be whomever you needed. I hope this is okay, this psychologist of yours who had a window into her life pried open. Knowing what you now know, I can say with both personal and professional authority, you are so much stronger than you assume. Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward. I’d tell you (and myself) to let go of the worries — our anxious minds are creative but not particularly good guessers about the future. If you want to or need to, we can acknowledge what you now know about me, and then we’ll quickly work our way back to your story with a question that is a therapy classic for good reason: And how did that make you feel?