there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep th

Are you reeling from a recent divorce? Did you just find out that your wife is gay and is moving out to be with her lover? Do you feel that the misery you feel right now will always be with you? I understand. I felt like that once too.

The good news is that your crystal ball for telling the future is probably way out of alignment. The bad news is you probably don’t know it. When something bad happens to us, it is normal to predict that we will be very unhappy for a very long time. The truth is that we are usually wrong. That is good news if you have just suffered a major negative change in your relationship.

Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Professor Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting. He studies how people expect events to impact their lives in the future. Gilbert and his colleagues ask participants in their studies how they believe they will feel months and years after a certain event takes place. What they found is that we routinely predict the effect on our emotional lives to be much more enduring than it is.

Why? One reason seems that when faced with negative life experience, our unconscious mind has a marvelous way of changing how we view events so that we can handle them more easily. You can call it rationalization or a great coping skill. It really does not matter. What matters is that when we have had a painful experience such as the discovery that our spouse is not the person we thought he or she was, we begin to view them differently. We start to find reasons that make us feel there is a benefit in that person not being in our lives any longer.

There is a second thing that impacts how poorly we predict our future unhappiness. When we initially think about how we will feel in the future, we see our life as if it were going to be impacted by only this one event. In fact, there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep thr

for a very long time. The truth is that we are usually wrong. That is good news if you have just suffered a major negative change in your relationship.

Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Professor Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting. He studies how people expect events to impact their lives in the future. Gilbert and his colleagues ask participants in their studies how they believe they will feel months and years after a certain event takes place. What they found is that we routinely predict the effect on our emotional lives to be much more enduring than it is.

Why? One reason seems that when faced with negative life experience, our unconscious mind has a marvelous way of changing how we view events so that we can handle them more easily. You can call it rationalization or a great coping skill. It really does not matter. What matters is that when we have had a painful experience such as the discovery that our spouse is not the person we thought he or she was, we begin to view them differently. We start to find reasons that make us feel there is a benefit in that person not being in our lives any longer.

There is a second thing that impacts how poorly we predict our future unhappiness. When we initially think about how we will feel in the future, we see our life as if it were going to be impacted by only this one event. In fact, there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep th

er a certain event takes place. What they found is that we routinely predict the effect on our emotional lives to be much more enduring than it is.

Why? One reason seems that when faced with negative life experience, our unconscious mind has a marvelous way of changing how we view events so that we can handle them more easily. You can call it rationalization or a great coping skill. It really does not matter. What matters is that when we have had a painful experience such as the discovery that our spouse is not the person we thought he or she was, we begin to view them differently. We start to find reasons that make us feel there is a benefit in that person not being in our lives any longer.

There is a second thing that impacts how poorly we predict our future unhappiness. When we initially think about how we will feel in the future, we see our life as if it were going to be impacted by only this one event. In fact, there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep th

rience such as the discovery that our spouse is not the person we thought he or she was, we begin to view them differently. We start to find reasons that make us feel there is a benefit in that person not being in our lives any longer.

There is a second thing that impacts how poorly we predict our future unhappiness. When we initially think about how we will feel in the future, we see our life as if it were going to be impacted by only this one event. In fact, there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep th

there are many other influences along the way. When I asked my spouse to move out, my marriage was over. However, I continued to work, to relate to my children and grandchildren, and to move in my circle of close friends. I continued to see movies, to read books and to work out at the gym. These all helped me move back to a normal level of happiness much more quickly than I had supposed.

If you have recently divorced or are in the process of divorcing, keep three things in mind:

1. You will probably not hurt as much, or for as long as you think you will. Our thinking is a wonderful tool that helps change our emotional reactions to the upsetting events of our life.

2. The picture we develop of the emotional rollercoaster we are on takes into account only the painful event. Our reality is that we have many other things influencing our emotional state at any moment.

3. Ask others who have gone through similar experiences how long they were miserable. This is a more reliable predictor of how quickly you will return to a normally happy state that our predictions.

Be encouraged. I thought that divorcing my spouse would have a lasting impact on my life. It did. But the very good news is that it did so in a positive way. The sadness and pain you may be experiencing now will fade and happiness will return. Plan on it! And you will find it!