Maria Shriver reveals divorce from Arnold Schwarzenegger took a toll on her

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ex-wife Maria Shriver has recently explained how “brutal” divorce from the actor took a toll on her mental health.

The former wife shared shocking details about her challenging period and how she came to terms with her with the end of her marriage to Arnold in her upcoming book, I Am Maria.

Maria, who shares four children with Arnold, wrote in an expert of her book, per People, that the “end of their marriage came as a devastating, life-altering blow after the deaths of her parents, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver”.

“My twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up,” said the 69-year-old.

Maria mentioned, “It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me. Without my marriage, my parents, a job—the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart.”

For the unversed, Arnold confessed to fathering a child Joseph Baena, with household staffer Mildred Patty" Baena.

Maria revealed in her book, “I was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety.”

“I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified,” she noted.

Maria opened up that she went to various therapists, healers, shamans and psychics after the trauma but she found healing through writing poetry.

“I started writing from a deep place within,” she continued.

Maria further said, “Through my poetry, I’ve found a woman who was terrified of not being able to live up to her family’s legacy—scared of not being big enough, a good-enough daughter, sister, wife, mother, journalist.”

“I found someone who had spent a lifetime avoiding grief. And I also learned that when that lifetime of dissociated grief and trauma is released, it rushes out like a tsunami,” added Arnold’s former wife.