Separation and loss: A study on the impact of divorce

Abstract

This article emerged starting of a search that had as aimed to understand the feelings that emerge in men and women when they lose marital bond. It was carried under a qualitative basis and counted on the participation of three men and four women, all divorced. The tool used was the semi-structured interview and the collected data was submitted to the Thematic Content Analysis. This analysis led to the conception of two categories: the emerging emotions and feelings in the loss context due to the divorce and the repercussions of such loss about the personal identity. The results indicated that searching and establishing a new affective bond was a strategy used by the participants involved in the study, in order to strengthen and support the resignification of their personal identity. The majority of the interviewees earned such resignification by becoming independent and capable of developing their own potentialities. About the feelings and emotions lived through the critical period of separation; they ranged from “happiness and peace” to “failure and sadness”.