Chapter 5: The Bomb from the award-winning memoir by Michelle Parise about the moment one discovers betrayal. Prepare to feel some type of way about it.

Maggie Smith: This Place Could Be Beautiful, Right?

An interview with Nedra Glover Tawwab — How to Set Boundaries

May I have some more on boundary setting, please? — How to Create Life-Changing Boundaries

Screaming to Be Heard / Live from the TAT Lab

You Are Codependent — An interview with Vanessa Bennett

Tim Ferriss On Love, Loss & Meaning

7 Questions You Must Ask to Deepen Any Relationship, Friendship or Partnership

Breaking Generational Trauma & How to Be Confident From the Inside Out

How to Heal — An interview with author Alex Elle (How We Heal: Uncover Your Power and Set Yourself Free)

How to Be Intentional / Cathy Heller

Loving Yourself (the truth) / Kamal Ravikant

Blink Yourself Awake / Anne Lamott

A Wonder-Full Life / Jeffrey Davis

How to Unwind Anxiety / Dr. Jud Brewer

Courage Over Comfort / Elizabeth Lesser

Meditation: Inhabiting our body, realizing wholeness

Spiritual Solutions / Deepak Chopra

The #1 Journal Exercise to Become the Person You’ve Always Wanted to Be

Good Bones, Good Life / Maggie Smith

The Simple Practice That Changed Her Life (and might change yours) / Elizabeth Gilbert

Megan Devine | It’s Still Okay to Not Be Okay

Finding Your Person (with dating coach Amy Nobile Messing)

"But for a stay-at-home mom, divorce isn't just divorce. It's more like divorce plus losing your job. The job I once had—stay-at-home-mom-slash-dilettante-writer—no longer exists."

“Every morning in the shower now, I sink to the floor and cry, a silent animal cry, my mouth gaping open and my body hunched forward and when a sound finally comes out, it does not sound human.”

“And I learned the hard way that to nullify yourself means that when you most need yourself, you may not even know who you are. I had made choices, and now I was seeing the consequences. It’s taken three very painful years to learn lessons I would rather not have had to learn. But I have learned my worth. And I will never again settle for less.”

“Along the way something magical happened. I came to believe that I created my divorce so that I could experience a much richer life. A life I couldn’t have dreamed because I couldn’t possibly deserve something so spectacular.”

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

“Communicating our boundaries isn’t easy, but without it, we set ourselves up for long-term suffering. We simply can’t have a healthy relationship with another person without communicating what’s acceptable and unacceptable to us.”

“We all go to the store. I walk behind my mother and son with the slump of the defeated and the abandoned. I look at all the food, the army of overstuffed carts packed full of Economy sizes of everything, huge sacks of mesquite coals, and red meat Value Packs displaying six fat steaks on a white tray. These people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.”

“When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.”

“In our winter, a transformation happened. We read and worked and problem-solved and found new solutions. We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”

“I walk around the jailhouse and smoke a cigarette. I don’t know what I can do to stop this pain in me. I can’t imagine how I am supposed to live.”

“Clearly, Rachel didn’t want to be vulnerable, which is exactly what speaking honestly with her boyfriend would require. She felt ill-equipped to ask him why he would drop out of sight for days or weeks and then reappear as if nothing happened. So, in essence, she was saving herself from the pain of facing her feelings of being unimportant or discarded.”

“That night, the bottom fell out of my solar plexus, and it would remain somewhere south of normal for a long, long time. He still loved me, he said at first. We stayed together for two more hard years. … My heart was still in it, which is how a heart comes to be broken. Our hearts had been beating together, side by side, through my entire adulthood, and then they weren’t.”

“The thoughts that race around my head the most are about growing old alone. I don’t regret my divorce, but I would like a life partner. It’s hard having to re-create yourself in your forties. You have days that you feel great and days where you feel like the wind has been knocked out of you. In a relationship there’s an illusion that you’re not alone. After a separation or a divorce, that illusion isn’t there anymore.”

“Still, Plath had published much more than Hughes, and may have been surprised to find herself the trailing spouse. … In the wake of Ted’s triumph, she worried about carrying even more of the household burden. … She likely doubted that she could ask her husband to share those chores now that he was famous. If she did not win an equally prestigious prize—and soon—she would never reclaim her poetic equity within the marriage.”

“When we let tensions fester, or allow familiarity to pass for understanding, we tend to leave parts of ourselves out of our most important relationships. We miss out on the opportunity to continue to grow. We lose track of who we want to be, and we can’t share our full selves with those we love.”

“We have a choice in how we tell our life story. We do not write it in permanent ink. There are no points for consistency, or even accuracy. We can change it at any time, for any reason, including one as simple as making ourselves feel better. After all, a primary function of our life story is to allow us to place experiences firmly in the past and take from them something beneficial that will allow us to thrive in the future. Only when that happens will we know our transition is complete.”