Maria Shriver Opens Up About Her ‘Brutal’ Divorce From Arnold Schwarzenegger After Repeated Affairs In New Book Excerpt: ‘I Was Terrified’

Maria Shriver Calls Arnold Schwarzenegger Divorce A 'Devastating, Life-Altering Blow'

In excerpts of the book obtained by various publications, Shriver, 69, hasn't appeared to shy away from discussing the end of her 25-year marriage to the 77-year-old Terminator star, with whom she shares four children: Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27.

Their marriage was plagued with allegations of repeated affairs. Shriver filed for divorce back in 2011, shortly after the actor and bodybuilder admitted to fathering a child, Joseph Baena, with their household staffer Mildred "Patty" Baena – a revelation that shook their marriage to its core. However, the divorce wasn't officially finalized until 2021.

The New York Times best-selling author described the experience as a "devastating, life-altering blow," which was made even more painful by the deaths of her parents, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, around the same time.

"My twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up," Shriver wrote. "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."

"I was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety," she continued, adding: "I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified."

Maria Shriver Opens Up About How Poetry Helped Heal Her

Shriver is seemingly in a much better place now – and she credits much of her healing to writing poetry! She described undergoing a "litany" of self-discovery methods, including therapy, spiritual healing, shamans, psychics, and even time spent in a convent (yes, really!) but in the end, it was poetry that helped her find peace!

"I started writing from a deep place within. 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," she wrote, before going on to reflect on her tendency to hold herself to "impossible" standards.

"I found a woman who had insisted on measuring herself by some impossible standard that guaranteed she'd come up short and feel bad about herself no matter what," Shriver said, before adding: "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."