He burned a bridge, so she burned her dress.
Emma Lou, 38, cathartically destroyed her wedding gown for a photoshoot to help her heal from her traumatic divorce.
Lou was with her husband for a decade, during which she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. The painful condition thrust her into depression, coupled with a lack of support from her husband.
She finally grew the courage to leave her toxic relationship. Lou got divorced in December 2018 at the age of 30 after four years of marriage.
In the years since, Lou has worked to heal from a lifetime’s worth of trauma, through therapy — and burning her ex in effigy.
“Our marriage really was quite toxic between us, we argued,” she told Media Drum World.
When she was 23 years old, the Brit was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a disorder which causes widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep, memory and mood issues.
“It took a lot out of my life, my dream job and affected our relationship,” she said. “I was very depressed and stressed back then, but we got married even though I wasn’t well. In time our relationship got worse, and it became emotionally abusive as well as other things.”
Lou eventually gathered the strength to leave her partner of 10 years, and was able to say goodbye and get her own home with the support of her family, doctors and women’s aid.
“It was a blessing that I did ask the universe for help, and it answered,” she said.
Finally on her own, Lou began a “roller coaster” of grief, self-healing and discovery, all of which led up to a colorful photoshoot and a wedding dress bonfire.
“I came to my spiritual path with this journey, finding crystals, doing reiki and having counselling to help heal my past as some of my hurts didn’t just come from my husband, but past too, and childhood trauma from being adopted at birth and bullied at school,” she explained.
One day she was talking with a friend who had trashed her wedding dress when Lou was inspired to take it even further. She wanted to destroy her dress with powdered paints “to bring back color to what was dark.”
A photographer reached out to Lou, who had began modeling at that point, when she recruited him to shoot the colorful destruction of her dress and trauma.
They met at Wallaton Park in Nottingham, UK. Lou went all out and threw the paints all around her as she spun around in her once-white wedding dress.
“The best part was the paint bomb, but unfortunately it missed me and went all over the photographer. He got covered in green paint and it was so funny I couldn’t stop laughing so much I had to sit on the floor,” she remembered.
“After the day ended, I got home, and I had this amazing energy around me, and I felt so empowered. I’d recommend any woman or man to trash their outfit it’s like an ending of a cycle, bringing in new beginnings.”
When Lou got the photos back, she had another wave of emotional release. In all the planning, she hadn’t even realized that she had destroyed her dress on her wedding anniversary.
The newly empowered woman kept the painted dress for a while but eventually decided to fully move on and let it all go up in flames.
On Easter Sunday, Lou headed over to a friend’s house dressed in black and decided to let her “past go a witchy way.” Standing over the metal fire pit with a fire poker in one hand and her white veil in the other, Lou looked like a true sorceress stoking the ashes of her $900 wedding dress.
“We let go by setting things on fire. I thought, well, it’s definitely me,” she said. “As it burned, the flames got higher and looked like dragons coming out of the flames. It was a great experience and I felt a shift of energy.”
Lou is still healing from her divorce and lifetime of pain but is proud to have made a new life for herself, overcoming her past one ritual at a time.