You Need to Help Me Get Divorced

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

Those were his opening words. He sat across from me – a CEO, polished, composed, clearly a man accustomed to stating his requirements and having them met. "You need to help me get divorced."

He had had an affair. His wife knew. The marriage was, in his view, finished. He wanted practical help navigating the process with the least possible collateral damage to his children, his business, his reputation.

What he did not expect was that we would spend the first several sessions not discussing his wife at all – but his father.

The Instruction That Never Left

When he was five years old, his father left the family. Before he went, he crouched down and said to the small boy: "Now it's you who must look after your mother."

Five years old. And already responsible for another adult's emotional wellbeing.

He had carried that instruction his entire life – not consciously, but in every relationship he had ever entered. The compulsive need to take care of his wife. The suffocating guilt when he felt he was failing her. The resentment that built silently beneath his care. And eventually, the affair – not as an escape from love, but as an escape from an unbearable weight.

What the Work Uncovered

Through regression work, he returned to that moment with his five-year-old self. He felt what the child had felt: the gravity of a responsibility no child should ever be given. And for the first time, he allowed himself to be angry at his father for it – not the polite, managed anger of an adult, but the raw grief of a boy who had been asked to grow up in a single sentence.

As that weight shifted, something unexpected happened. The story he had been telling himself about his marriage began to change. Not because the facts changed – but because he was seeing them from a different place inside himself.

The Marriage He Had Never Seen

His wife, it turned out, was not the dependent figure he had constructed her to be. She was a capable, intelligent woman who had adapted to the dynamic he created – because he needed her to need him. The moment he stopped needing to rescue her, she began to flourish independently. She took a new role. She reconnected with friendships she had neglected. She became, in a sense, a stranger – and a much more interesting one.

He fell in love with her again. Not with the woman he had been managing for fifteen years – but with the woman she actually was.

The Divorce That Never Happened

He did not get divorced. He did not get what he came for. He got something considerably more difficult and considerably more valuable: an understanding of the pattern that had been running his life – and the freedom, slowly and imperfectly, to live outside of it.

This is the nature of inner work. The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. The question a client carries in the door is rarely the question that needs answering. And the outcome is almost never what either of us expected.

Stay tuned.

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