LOS ANGELES — Reese Witherspoon hit a low point when she split with Ryan Phillippe in 2006, a divorce that was both "very humiliating and very isolating" in her eyes. But the actress says it was the right way to feel at the time.
"If it's not painful, maybe it wasn't the right decision to marry to begin with," the 32-year-old star reasons in the April issue of Elle. "Those are the appropriate emotions."
The "Walk the Line" star says things went from bad to worse as her friends and family tried to pick her back up from the divorce.
"When people get in your face and say, 'This will pass,' you think: Are they crazy?" she explains to the mag. "I'm never gonna feel any better than I feel right this minute and nothing's ever gonna make sense again. And I still have moments where I'm like, 'Nothing's ever gonna make sense again.' "
Witherspoon and Phillippe married in 1999 and have two children together, Ava, 8, and Deacon, 4. After her marriage tumbled, Witherspoon said she looked at herself in the mirror to find answers.
"You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it's a really easy thing to do, and I'm certainly guilty of it," she tells Elle. [You have to] look at yourself and go, 'What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility? And that's the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it."
As for her current beau, actor Jake Gyllenhaal, Witherspoon says she couldn't be happier.
"He's fabulous," she says. "He really is a fantastic guy."
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