Maria Shriver talks about feeling ‘invisible’ during Arnold Schwarzenegger marriage

Maria Shriver says she utterly reevaluated her life after her break up from Arnold Schwarzenegger and their subsequent divorce.

The Emmy-winning journalist, best-selling creator and member of the famed Kennedy clan, 67, appeared on the Making Space with Hoda Kotb podcast to debate her “continual quest to learn about myself.” She stated after her 2011 separation from The Terminator star and former California governor, she visited a convent as a part of therapeutic journey and bought sage recommendation. She additionally spoke about feeling “invisible” during her marriage — one thing she felt all through her life inside her well-known household.

Shriver, who break up from 75-year-old Schwarzenegger, with whom she shares 4 youngsters, after he admitted he fathered their housekeeper’s teenage little one, stated when her marriage ended, it gave her the “freedom” to do some soul looking and “go and figure out” her fact.

“I did so many things,” on that journey. But one … was I went to a convent, a cloistered convent … to be in silence and search for recommendation, stated Shriver, who was raised Catholic. “The reverend mother there … she said, ‘I think you came here looking for permission.'”

She stated it felt like “a scene out of The Sound of Music… She goes, ‘You can’t come live here … but you do have permission to go out and become Maria.’ I was, like, sobbing… I had never given myself permission to … be vulnerable, to be weak, to be brought to my knees. And the world did it to me. And then I was like, ‘OK, God, let’s go. And I’m going to take this and learn everything I can about my role and what I need to learn … When the universe knocks you like that, I think you have to not focus on the other person [but] … what do you learn from this experience? So I gave myself permission to start learning.”

“I did everything that was available that I could find to heal myself. I still look at myself as on a healing journey,” she stated, including, “I will never abandon myself again.”

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Shriver, who’s “single” whereas her ex has been in a relationship with bodily therapist Heather Milligan since 2013, stated she felt “invisible” in her marriage with Schwarzenegger — a feeling that plagued her all through her life.

“I grew up feeling invisible in an incredibly public, famous family,” stated Shriver, whose mom, Eunice Shriver, was the sister of former President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy. “There were a lot of really big characters in that family … If you, as a child, are standing next to the president of the United States, two U.S. senators, the first lady, nobody’s looking at you. You are background noise. And you take that with you really through life, and you end up putting yourself in situations where that continues until you learn your lesson.”

The lesson, she stated, was, “That it’s not about other people seeing you. It’s about you seeing yourself. And that took me a really long time, a really long time to learn.”

When she married Schwarzenegger in 1986, “I would find myself getting angry at people who … didn’t acknowledge that I existed when I was standing next to Arnold… or my uncle.” Now she sees, “They were teaching me a lesson. That it’s not about whether they see me. Do I see me? Am I visible to me?”

She talked about getting along with the Austrian bodybuilder turned actor in 1977 after an intro by NBC News’s Tom Brokaw. Her household had reservations — and expressed them.

“I grew up in this big Democratic family,” she stated. “I was taught to believe that people who were Republicans were the enemy and then I fell in love with a Republican.”

Shriver stated she “could see people in my family having judgments about the person I was choosing” as a result of he “hadn’t gone to the same kind of schools that people I grew up with [did and] wasn’t the same political party and wasn’t this and wasn’t that… Then I moved to Los Angeles and my family was like: ‘Oh my god.’ … My mother was like: ‘You’re in Hollywood and that’s terrible.’ I was like, ‘Is it?’ … I feel blessed to have had obviously the parents that I had,” she stated, additionally referring to Sargent Shriver, “but they’re very different than me” regardless of additionally sharing many similarities.

Shriver stated a few of her self-growth was additionally in making an effort to “be a different kind of mother” and a “different kind of wife” than hers was in addition to typically “a different kind of woman.”

“I wanted to have a different kind of marriage than my parents did,” she stated. I needed to have a distinct form of life that my dad and mom did and the ending of all of that undoubtedly despatched me on a journey to reevaluate all the things in my life. Every facet of my life. How I had gotten the place I used to be? What was my position in it? What may I do higher? What had I carried out that put me in that place? … I checked out all the things.”

Today, “I’m transferring by the world in a distinct place and a distinct means than I used to be 10 years in the past, 15 years in the past,” she said.

Shriver said growing up she wasn’t able to talk to her parents about a lot of things. There had been two assassinations in her family. There was a lot they were going through that was never spoken about and it had a “detrimental” impact on her. As an adult, she sought a journalism career that was “chaotic.” She’s since looked at and asked, “Why was I interested in chaos? … I really wrote myself a poem [about being] hooked on chaos … to point out myself that it was me and that I may take myself out of it.”

With her now adult kids, she sees her home as a “fueling station” for them, where they can come back at any time and get food, love, encouragement and truth.

She said her children’s relationships — including daughter Katherine’s marriage to Chris Pratt — is “so radically totally different that my era” as far as “what folks count on in a partner or a accomplice right now.” It’s also “very totally different from than I went into [in my] marriage.”

Her role as mother is one she’s most proud of.

“I all the time stated to myself… I knew that my youngsters would find yourself in remedy sooner or later however I knew that they would not in a position to say: ‘She wasn’t there,'” she said. “They may say she was this, this or this, however I did not need them to say I had chosen one thing over them. I needed them to know they had been my precedence and I needed them to really feel that.”

Shriver and Schwarzenegger separated in 2011 and took 10 years to finalize their divorce, which was full in December 2021. Since their break up, they’ve publicly appeared collectively at occasions in help of their youngsters’s initiatives.