Divorce trip can be the first journey toward a new attitude

PEOPLE sometimes take trips for deep reasons. They’re turning 50 and feel compelled to see Florence; they’ve just recovered from an illness and want to trek in the Himalayas; they’re divorcing and need to escape the anguish.

Psychologically motivated trips like these are, in a sense, gambles with life. The transition or crisis makes people more willing to free themselves from routine, feel in a heightened way or make life changes based on events on the road. They are my favorite kinds of trips.

I took one a decade ago, and it changed me. I was in the middle of an ugly divorce, and my life was changing, but into what, I did not know.

I couldn’t find the threshold and didn’t want to walk through the door. Then my parents offered to send me anywhere I wanted to go. I was jobless, childless, husbandless and couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so I took a divorce trip, the polar opposite of a honeymoon.

I’ve heard of women who have gone to swinging singles resorts in the Caribbean after a divorce. One, a beleaguered single mom, came home from such a place on Haiti, having danced every night until dawn with several men who seemed interested in her. She did not get involved but felt more attractive to the opposite sex afterward, no small gift.

“Travel can help you get away from the scene of pain,” says Harriet Lerner, a psychotherapist and author of “The Dance of Connection” (Quill, 2002). “This is especially important because it’s normal to have crashing self-esteem after a divorce.”

A friend of a friend went to a Caribbean island in the throes of divorce and slept with a Frenchman she met on the beach. On the plane home, she wondered what in the world she had been thinking, given the dangers of sexually transmitted disease.

Marilyn Mason, a Santa Fe, N.M., psychologist and author of “Seven Mountains: Life Lessons From a Climber’s Journal” (Penguin Putnam, 1997), says it’s dangerous for disenchanted lovers to travel because they might meet someone who looks better than the spouse back home, thereby precipitating divorce. West L.A. psychotherapist Marion Solomon, author of “Narcissism and Intimacy: Love and Marriage in an Age of Confusion” (W.W. Norton, 1989), says people who feel devastated by divorce should not travel to find someone new. “They have to be careful,” she says. “If they think whoever they meet is going to be a lifelong partner, they might be disappointed.”

Still, travel seems to me as good a prescription for divorce and other traumatic life passages as antidepressants. In the aftermath of a divorce -- and before AIDS made people wary about sleeping with strangers -- a friend who had just separated from her husband traveled from India to the Mediterranean, where she spent a week on the beach with a man she met on the tour. The two then went their separate ways without looking back.

Sex isn’t mandatory on a divorce trip; other things can be at least as fulfilling. Dunham Gooding, director of the American Alpine Institute in Bellingham, Wash., which sponsors two-week climbs of peaks in Asia, Alaska and South America, doesn’t know precisely what motivates participants.

But he says they are rewarded in ways that could benefit anyone going through the uncertainty and turmoil of an important life passage.

“Entering a landscape as challenging as the mountains is completely absorbing,” Gooding says. “People’s decisions matter and have immediately measurable results.” Moreover, there’s the “psychological refreshment of going into a grandly beautiful place,” as Gooding puts it.

Some of the same benefits accrue from travel of any kind. For me it was a simple trip to Europe, on my own for the first time.

I flew to France and visited my best friend, who had a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees, then took a train to Italy’s Cinque Terre, where I walked an olive grove-lined path above the Ligurian Sea, a time of deep quiet and healing solitude.

My divorce trip ended in Rome. It was my first visit there, and I clearly remember going out walking shortly after I arrived. Suddenly I saw the Colosseum and dissolved in tears. I don’t know whether I was weeping for the gladiators who died there or for myself.

The whole week in Rome was like that. Grief over the end of my marriage heightened my reactions, turning visits to the Vatican or the Piazza Navona into emotional pilgrimages. I bonded deeply with the Eternal City and still think of it as the right place to go when life falls apart. For me, Rome was a door to a new life, though it took some time for me to realize I had passed through it.

Now, when someone I care about is in a time of trouble, I tell him or her to travel, but not just for sightseeing, pleasure and escape. Traveling at such times is a rare opportunity to find the road ahead.