We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.
Samuel Pisar, Holocaust survivor.
Starting over
There are emotional roller coaster rides every divorced person will go through, alternating between sorrow and relief, guilt to numbness, from rage to resignation and at the most inopportune time a desire to be vindictive. Some have described themselves during such times as being “crazy hurt”.
There is a way to turn this into a season of “constructive craziness”. That time is when you personally come to the realization that your marriage is over and will never come back. In some instances that moment may be when you realize that you really never had the awareness to get off of the ground because of generational Family of Origin issues each of you brought to the marriage when you said "I DO." That doesn't mean you don't take personal responsibility for your part in the failure of the marriage. It does mean that you can connect the dots better now that you see how the past plays a big part in all of your relationships.
This realization will be on a different time line for everyone, but the general consensus suggest that once a person embraces emotionally the end of their marriage there is about a 2 ½ to 4 year period of diligently working through issues to get back to the point where they can responsibly handle another relationship with all of its attending demands and rewards.