Do you really want a divorce? Or are you just ‘getting divorced’?

A A friend of mine has a handy phrase to describe an experience that many of us can relate to: she calls it “divorce.” She’s not actually married, but she doesn’t have to be, to recognize what she’s talking about.

A divorce can happen if her partner sneezes into his hand and then rubs it on his jeans, if he chews his food very hard, and if they disagree about raising their daughters and argue about money.

When she gets divorced, my girlfriend loses sight of the good in their relationship and feels that it is all bad. Somehow she loses access to her love and longing for him, or to memories of the many happy years they spent together, or to the warmth, humor, and solidity he brings to their family life. She loses all sense of the resilience of their relationship and the difficulties they have endured and overcome together. All that disappears and is replaced by the certainty that she has to get away, right now, and as far away from him as possible.

What struck me as she told me all this is that it’s not a feeling she’s describing; it’s a state of mind. It doesn’t exclude feelings—in these moments she feels anger, disgust, pain, and more—but they’re so extreme and overwhelming that they coalesce into a belief that she needs to escape her situation completely and utterly. That she needs to divorce not just her partner, but everything in her life. You don’t have to have a partner to divorce; you can divorce your parents, your friends, your coworkers, your pet, your teenager. You can divorce your own mind.

It’s so important to recognize this state of mind for what it is: a state. Because when we’re going through it, it doesn’t feel like a state that can fluctuate and shift and come and go. It feels like a permanent, fixed, rigid knowledge of how things are and always will be. It can feel like the only way out is total annihilation, and it can take all of a person’s self-control not to end their relationship, quit their job, leave their children, and sever their friendships.

But the only way out is not to burn it all down. Because the reality is that this state of mind will pass, and clearer thinking and feeling will become possible again. This understanding can feel so out of reach because the experience is so overwhelming and all-encompassing that it is impossible to see and feel the edges of it, to remember that it does indeed have edges.

I try to hold on to this as best I can when I’m in this frame of mind. I reach for the words my psychoanalyst said to me in one of my first sessions as a new mother, when I cried for 50 minutes about how overwhelmed and inadequate I felt, how I couldn’t make it, how the lack of sleep was driving me crazy, how I was completely lost. The next morning I felt okay. It was hard, but I wasn’t overwhelmed, I wasn’t inadequate, I was making it. What she said was so simple and, as is often the case, so much more powerful for it: today you are in a different frame of mind than you were yesterday.

This is not to say that these states of mind are meaningless, or that our feelings don’t matter because they change over time. It doesn’t mean that you should ignore your experience and wait for it to go away, ignore red flags, or accept someone’s disrespectful treatment. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t change anything. You may still want a divorce when you come out of this separation state of mind. After that session with my analyst, I realized that I wasn’t as alone as I had felt the day before, and I asked my loved ones for more help. Things got better.

Psychoanalysis has another name for “separation”; analyst Melanie Klein called it the “paranoid-schizoid state.” Paranoid, because in this state of mind everyone is always and only out to get you; and schizoid, which means you split into all good and all bad. She theorized that we are all born in this paranoid-schizoid state, that babies can only experience themselves and the people around them as either all good or all bad—that we can only see, figuratively and literally, in black and white. She understood that when we encounter certain triggers in our lives, we can be sent straight back to this, our most primal state.

Some days, building a better life means holding on as best you can and resisting the urge to cut off all ties with the people who are driving you crazy. It can help a little to acknowledge that you may be in a divorce-like, paranoid-schizoid state of mind right now—and that tomorrow you’ll be in a different state of mind.

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood