In my professional and personal life, when I meet people who feel broken after a divorce, they can usually be divided into two categories: those who truly believe there's something wrong with them, and those that are using their status as armor.

Burlesque dancing didn't solve all my post-divorce problems, but what it did do was force me to court myself for a little while.

Love is a good thing.

Keeping physical items from the past is important - we keep old toys, grandparents' jewelry, yearbooks, dance recital programs - and we assign meaning to them. Those items become the memories, and that's a very healthy thing to do. The problems occur when we have too many of those sentimental items, and they start weighing us down.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal and used these interests to become a 'guys' girl.'

'The Babadook,' written and directed by a woman, is a gorgeously told female-focused story of grief, longing, loneliness, and what mourning can become.

Nothing makes me feel more mushy and full of love for my husband than going back and looking at our flirtation unfolding online. I love reading our old e-mails, texts, and Gchats.

Holiday food is rich and indulgent. Going-home-to-see-family food is richer and even more indulgent.

Parents go to sleep early. This is universal.

For so long, TV consisted of a limited number of shows a year, and those shows had to appeal to as many people as possible. The joy of TV now is that shows don't have to be broad anymore - they can be small, weird, and niche.

I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colorful than the one I lived in.

I'd watch shows like 'The Kids in the Hall' or 'Twin Peaks,' and I'd see weird people being celebrated and appreciated without compromising their weirdness. On 'The Facts of Life,' I'd see girls who were pudgy, beautiful, popular, tomboyish - many ways of being female - and I'd feel quietly reassured.

Far from 'rotting my brain,' as I was often told would happen, TV helped me feel less alone at a time when I spent so much time alone.

I have a pretty intense work ethic. If something's not done, I cannot let go until I get it done.

As any daytime judge show can tell you, spending someone's money or taking their stuff because they hurt your feelings is not justified.

No matter how you handle alcohol at your wedding, you will most likely be upsetting someone.

Get married wherever you like, make accommodations for the people you love so they can attend, and forget about the people who can't.

I am fairly convinced that people plan destination weddings because they would actually like to elope but want to have given you the option to attend.

People get married for a wide array of reasons and have all sorts of expectations of how marriage will change the relationship. And while it's true that turning the person you're dating into a legal partner does affect certain things, those who expect marriage to be a cure-all for all your relationship woes are sorely mistaken.

Things can be tough even when surrounded by nice Pottery Barn stuff.

Dealing with wedding stuff is a bit of a double-edged sword - it seems that divorcees are expected to either burn it all on the front lawn, tears silently coursing down their faces, or keep the stuff, shrine-like, concealed somewhere in their homes.

Some divorcees turn their pain inward. They brood, and they grieve for a long time, always wondering if they could have done something differently to keep this from happening. They make every problem in their relationship into something they could have prevented.

You're not a victim of your divorce. What you decide to do with yourself and your personal life after your marriage ends is your decision, and completely under your control.

It's easy to isolate yourself when you're buried in work, or to rely only on work friends for empathy. And while your work friends will always 'get it' more than your life partner, they don't know how to comfort you like your partner does.

Balanced, passionate, grounded people are the ones whose careers are ultimately the most successful.

The benefits of a healthy, thriving relationship may not be nearly as exciting as watching your career take off, but both aspects of your life are equally important.

Sometimes new spouses don't fully process the commitment they've made until after the deal is done, and then they panic.

In some cases, newlyweds want so badly for things to be perfect that they ignore warning signs, both in themselves and each other.

If you've experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.

Cheating is very rarely about the actual act of being with another person.

We all have an idea of how we like to be treated that we would like others to adhere to, and somehow we've gotten in our heads that the perfect person for us will just know what this code of behavior is.

Unequivocally, individual human beings who live together will always have different standards of what a 'clean house' looks like.

If you don't simply communicate with your spouse what household tasks you would like them to do, you are setting yourself up to be angry.

People all want and need different emotional responses - some people like to be talked down when they're angry; some people want to be left alone.

Nothing makes a girl feel as unsexy as divorce.

A lot of people end up getting married more out of expectation than out of passion for each other, but if your options have ever been, 'We either get married or break up,' be careful. Marriage should be a new addition you add to the house that is your relationship, not the structure you impose on the house once it's already built.

Sometimes we put so much effort into things we're doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don't stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.

Marriage, even a happy and successful one, can be extremely stressful, but that stress is worth it if you're marrying the best person for you.

Ghosts of Marriages Past can haunt many aspects of a new relationship - your expectations of what a man should do, how you behave in conflict, your ideas of how commitment should look - they can even make your new man look untrustworthy when he's really behaving normally.

Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person - either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being 'good enough' to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn't paint the entire picture.

If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.

Sometimes we are much better at judging people based on how they treat everyone other than ourselves. We make a million excuses for why they treat us how they do.

Post-divorce, the world can feel harsh and full of jagged edges.

The period that directly follows the dissolution of a long term relationship is extremely volatile, with emotions running the gamut from misery to elation to relief to terror.

In my experience as a therapist and as a friend, it seems that the majority of the breakup resources available are for women and not men. Women, who tend to be more vocal about their emotional struggles, are the squeaky wheel that gets the grease from friends, from online communities, from books, and from therapeutic approaches.

Women are encouraged to go on an emotional journey of self-care after a divorce, while men are expected to need help learning how to cook and parent on their own.

Men - not all men but a good majority of the ones I have known and worked with - tend to think of difficult situations in their lives as problems that need to be solved.

After my divorce, I took some time off from having a romantic life to begin the tough work of figuring out where I'd gone wrong and what on Earth I could do to understand how to be a whole person in a relationship.

Being completely independent doesn't make you a strong woman - it's being strong enough to trust yourself in other people's hands that takes guts.