What To do With Pictures & Mementos

There are two different ends of the continuum when it comes to this, or you might find yourself someone in the middle and not sure. One end is the “burn it all!” end. This involves a feeling of wanting to purge everything, to take all of the photos, ticket stubs, and anything else you can find and to watch it burn in a fire pit. The other end involves keeping every single little thing, looking at pictures all the time, and feeling stuck in what once was. It is normal to have moments where you might feel each of these things, but it is unhealthy to get stuck in either extreme.

Let’s talk about random mementos, clothing items, gifts, etc. first and then we will move on to pictures. One healthy approach to handling mementos is to start by packing them all up into a box and putting it away somewhere. The early stages of a break-up or divorce are not usually a good time to make decisions about what you might want to keep or get rid of. Those decisions are better made once you have had some time to process things and let your feelings settle. After some time, then you can better sort through what you might want to keep, and some of it might surprise you. After my divorce, there were certain things I kept that might have seemed sentimental, but in my mind, the items no longer had any connection to him and I had just become attached to them on my own. There were other things that I knew with strong certainty that I did not want to keep. It takes time to sort that out though, and it doesn’t help anyone’s progress to keep yourself living in a time capsule, surrounded by mementos. This is why putting them out of sight somewhere can strike the perfect balance. It allows you to live in a healthy environment and start getting a little distance from raw memories, while also not having to make irreversible decisions when your emotions are still raw. If it feels really hard to bring yourself to pack everything up, ask a friend or family member to come help you do it. If you are worried that you might be tempted to get the box out and frequently go through it before you are ready, then you can also ask someone to store it at their house for a while.

What To do With Pictures & Mementos, Rain Into Rainbows LLC

In this digital age where it is so easy to just pull out your phone and snap a picture or video, you are likely to have lots of photos by the end of a relationship. There are many ways to handle this, so I am going to provide a few recommendations and then you can choose which options resonate with you. Again, with the two extremes, it can be tempting to just delete every single picture from the relationship: vacations you took together, holidays, etc. It can also be tempting to lay in bed and cry while you scroll through every single picture. Neither are where I want you to get stuck. Let’s talk about some healthy middle ground options.

First of all, I would recommend getting the pictures that are the most painful off your phone. There are many 3^rd party options for where you can store digital photos that aren’t on your camera roll. Look into some of these options if you don’t already have something like that set up. Getting the ones that feel the most painful, like photos of the two of you smiling together, or your favorite pictures of your former significant other, off your camera roll can help to protect your raw emotions. You don’t want to be scrolling through your camera roll looking for something else and then feel like your stomach drops when you suddenly see a picture of the two of you looking happy together. So, step one is to remove the most emotionally triggering photos from your camera roll and to save them somewhere else.

 Okay, now we’re going to assume that you have all of your photos stored somewhere digitally, such as Amazon Photos, Shutterfly, Google Photos, or something similar. If you prefer to keep them all on the camera roll in your phone, then you can still do these recommendations. Save your favorite photos of the relationship in an album called “Later,” or something similar. The idea is to safeguard these until more time goes by. Once that is done, let yourself go ahead and delete the rest of the photos of your ex or the two of you together. It can feel cathartic to delete certain photos. One caveat is this: photo editing nowadays is amazing, so if there is a group shot that you love, hold off on deleting it. You might be able to find someone to edit your ex out. I did this with some photos that had been taken of my whole family and had included my ex. I reached out to the photographer and she was able to delete him out.

What about all of the photos from trips and adventures together, or even just your daily life, but that don’t specifically have your ex in them? My recommendation is to give yourself some time and NOT to go immediately delete all of these. Why? Because those photos are not just representations of times from your relationship. Those photos also represent your own memories separate from your ex. You still lived those experiences regardless of whether your ex was a part of those situations or not. I was with my ex-husband for 17 years of my life. Due to the nature of how the marriage ended, I looked back on those 17 years and had no idea which parts had been real and which parts had been a façade. But I also didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of just “erasing” 17 whole years of my life. I worked a lot in therapy on reclaiming my own memories from those 17 years. I knew who I was and I knew what was real for me. The trips we had taken and the life we had built was real from my end. I got rid of the pictures that included him, but ended up saving pictures from trips, places we had lived, etc., because that was representative of my life regardless of what he had secretly been doing. If there are certain trips or experiences that you aren’t sure if you want to save, then add them to the “Later” folder and don’t decide yet.

Once you have had more time, open that “Later” folder and make some decisions. You might decide you want to go ahead and delete a lot of it or you could decide you want to save a few of your favorite pictures of the two of you. There is no right or wrong about this. I would say that the two main guidelines for sorting through photos and mementos are these:

1.       Don’t leave yourself surrounded by painful memories or what feels like a shrine and might keep you stuck longer in raw emotions

2.       Buy yourself time to make decisions. Get things out of your sight while you heal, but preserved so that you can come back and make actual decisions when you have processed more of the experience

Lastly, but importantly, start creating new memories. Schedule things to look forward to, take photos as you are building your new life, start surrounding yourself by new photos and mementos that feel symbolic and comforting and remind you that there was and is so much more to life than your ex.