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Photo: KYUNGWOO CHUN
This text first appeared in May 2020.
A hasty train journey through Germany.
A sofa in a friend's apartment in Berlin, on which she sat for three days and cried constantly.
A phone call with her brother, who among other things said the sentence: "I knock this guy out."
That is the first thing that comes to mind Katja Schäfer (*) today when she remembers the first few weeks after her husband left her because he fell in love with someone else.
"After that, for many months I was obsessed with pain, couldn't think of anything else, talk about anything else," the 43-year-old doctor recalls.
Schäfer was able to clarify the purely practical problems with her ex-husband - for example, who looks after the two daughters, six and three years old, at what times.
But emotionally she felt in a never-ending state of emergency: She was permanently sad, had no more self-confidence, felt unable to act and powerless.
At this stage, Schäfer said in retrospect, whether she would ever be better again, she could not have given a forecast.
She was too deep in the hole for that.
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