How Do You View the Past?

by | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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How Do You View the Past?

When you think of your life up until this point, does it make you happy, or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?

How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you’re living with challenging circumstances, it’s hard not to let your current situation colour your thoughts about the past, present, and future.

When I was going through my divorce, I was looking for proof of how I’d gotten to that point. In the thick of it, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I’d mine my own memories for evidence that I was never meant to marry that person in the first place. Then I’d beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory pointed to the same conclusion: we were never supposed to be together. How could it have taken me twenty years to realize this?

So I decided to try not to think about it at all.

Since I’d shared twenty years of my life with this person, that meant wiping out a good chunk of genuinely happy memories along with it. I went further still and reasoned that my childhood had led me to this partner in the first place, so I wrote off those memories too. My whole life path had funnelled into one single point of failure: divorce. Failure kept looping through my brain. All I had left, or so it felt, was one failed marriage, no career, and unhappy kids.

People, and plenty of self-help books, told me to hold onto the good moments I’d shared with my ex, hoping to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing, letting my past overshadow my present and future. Because that’s exactly what was happening. I was projecting my past straight into my future, and it was stopping me cold. What was the point of a future that looked just like my very unhappy past?

My coach helped me find a way out of that loop by helping me shift how I saw my present.

She started by telling me it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was my relationship with one specific person. From there, she helped me define what success actually meant to me, on my own terms, and helped me find real evidence that I’d already succeeded by that definition.

Once I started seeing that, my past began to look different too. I was focused now on where I’d actually succeeded, by my own measure. And once I could see that clearly, she pointed out something else: my past had gotten me exactly to where I was standing. All those things I’d filed away as mistakes were really just lessons, specific to me, moving me closer to what I actually wanted out of life.

None of this was a quick fix. It took real time and real practice.

But the recipe itself is simple: look for the success already present in your current life, and the evidence you find there will reach backward into your memories and forward into a future worth having.

The Rules We Make up and then live by

by | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Rules We Make Up and Then Live By

I think about a certain kind of conversation I’ve had more than once over the years, always some version of the same shape. Someone in the middle of a hard divorce, scared of what a judge might decide, has quietly built a set of rules for herself that make her fear feel like fact rather than fear.

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The shape usually goes something like this. She’s the higher earner in the marriage. Her ex works in a less lucrative field, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. Everyone else assumes she loves her work: successful, outgoing, good at it. Then it comes out that she doesn’t, not really. She stayed because someone had to earn enough to support the family, and she’s quietly dreamed for years of doing something else entirely. But she believes she can’t act on that now, because a court might read a career change as a deliberate attempt to dodge support obligations.

Then the resentment starts flowing toward the ex: if he’d just go back to a higher-paying job he’s clearly capable of, this whole calculation would look different. Why should she be the one stuck carrying an obligation that traces back to a choice he made.

The underlying belief, stated plainly, usually sounds something like: everyone has to work; that’s just how it is. Which really means: everyone has to take the highest-paying job available, whether they’re happy in it or not, and choosing otherwise is either selfish or naive.

I’ve pushed back on this kind of thinking before, and it tends to get a little heated, because underneath it are a few unspoken rules that feel like settled fact to the person holding them. Something like: you have to take the best-paying job you’re capable of if you have kids and responsibilities; otherwise, you’re flaky. Work generally sucks, and if you actually like what you do, it doesn’t really count as work. And life is inherently unfair, so whatever position you happened to hold at the moment of separation, you’re now locked into for good.

What strikes me every time is how quickly these get treated as facts about the world rather than one person’s fear-based read on their own situation. They’re not the only possible outcome. They’re just the outcome that becomes far more likely once someone decides the rule is true and stops looking for any other path.

That’s the real trap. Not the divorce, not the finances, but the rules someone builds for themselves along the way and then quietly agrees to be governed by, permanently.

If I could say one thing to anyone caught in that pattern, it would be this: hold your own rules up to the light before you decide to live inside them forever. Ask what you actually want, separate from the fear driving the rule. There’s usually more room to move than the rule wants you to believe.

Rules for Email

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Email

When my ex and I first separated, I spent a long time carefully crafting every email to him, trying to make sure there was nothing in it that could be read as offensive. I didn’t want another attack coming back at me; reading those was genuinely painful. How could this person I’d been partnered with for twenty years, who I’d had children with, who I’d put first for most of my adult life, write the things he was writing?

So I spent hours on each email. Clear, concise, no blame, no judgment.

I’d still get an attack back. Something always got misread or twisted.

I’d try to defend myself, take just as much care crafting that reply, and still get something upsetting in return.

It was brutal. He kept finding ways past every defence I put up, every boundary I tried to hold.

One day something finally pushed me over the edge. I was exhausted by the endless back-and-forth. I needed out of that cycle, whatever it took.

So I built myself some rules:

  • Keep emails short. Five sentences, maximum.
  • Wait a day or two after an upsetting reply before responding.
  • Don’t defend myself, especially when asked to. That’s just handing him another opening to attack my values.
  • Don’t discuss the emails with anyone else afterward.

These rules are hard to actually stick to. I get plenty of practice failing at them and trying again. If you’re newly separated, I’d bet you’re getting the same practice.

Eventually the emails got shorter on both ends, and further apart. Not because either of us changed, but because I stopped feeding the cycle new material to work with.

What an attack email does

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

What an Attack Email Does

My ex sent me a doozy of an attack email the other day. He sent it on Monday, and it’s now Wednesday. It was a good reminder of everything I’ve learned this past year, and of the havoc these kinds of emails can cause. I actually have to thank him for it, since it’s inspired me to write something that might help other people and given me a chance to test my own theories on communication in real time.

Let me start with what the email actually did to me. Despite all the work I’ve put into myself this past year, I still take his words in, and I still have to run them through my own internal processing system before they stop provoking a reaction. I’m writing this partly for anyone tempted to fire off a good zinger of an attack email themselves. If you understand what it actually does to the person receiving it, maybe that gives you pause. It helps stop me, at least.

Here’s how I process one:

The first thing that happens is I don’t want to open it. Monday’s was fourteen paragraphs, seven hundred and seventy words. I knew before I read a word that it wasn’t going to be good.

I do a quick speed-read for offensive or attacking language. This one had plenty.

I try to pull out whatever actually needs a response, skip past the barbs, and reply only to what’s necessary, resisting the urge to attack back.

I do a little internal happy dance and pat myself on the back for staying strong and not engaging further. Look at that, all this work actually paid off. (I think about what would’ve happened without the work: I’d have fired something back, and based on past experience, the conflict would’ve dragged on for a solid week.)

Then I try to get back to whatever I was doing before the email landed, in this case, working from my desk. Except now there’s a cloud sitting over the rest of my day, and my billable hours take the hit either way.

I realize I need to actually process this before I can concentrate on anything else.

I journal. I go back and reread the email, break it down, see how it fits the usual pattern, and analyze it properly.

I think about calling a friend to vent. I don’t. I already know that doesn’t actually help. (More on that here.)

I think about what an idiot my ex is.

I think about how to get even. I resist getting even.

I scrub my porch.

I go for a walk.

I go to bed.

Tuesday, I’m better. Productive all day.

Wednesday, it creeps back into my head, though I feel pretty good about how I handled it. Should I follow up with him, walk through what happened so it doesn’t repeat?

Nah. I’ll write this blog post instead.

And then I’ll write this one. (How to write an email to your ex.)

Getting through the Acute Stage of Divorce

by | May 19, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Getting Through the Acute Stage of Divorce

Divorce is horrible. That’s an understatement. I had no real idea how horrible until I went through it myself.

Okay, maybe not for everyone. Some couples mutually agree it’s for the best and manage to work out the details amicably. Wouldn’t it be great if divorce were reliably that simple, if life coaches spent more time helping people build their dreams than helping them survive another conversation with an ex? Based on what I’ve actually seen, though, most people don’t get the amicable version.

This post is for those who don’t have the amicable version. For people who suddenly find themselves in the middle of a divorce and aren’t entirely sure how they got there.

This is meant to get you through the acute stage specifically, roughly the year or two surrounding your separation date. It’s for people too emotionally overwhelmed to sit down with a three-hundred-page book on how to divorce well, and who can’t stack a coach or psychologist’s fees on top of everything else they’re already paying for.

First thing to understand: divorce is conflict-based by definition. Two people trying to go their separate ways, each with a different idea of how to actually do it. If you agreed on the how, you’d be in the amicable category, and you wouldn’t need this post.

Second thing to understand: it’s not the divorce itself that makes things unbearable. It’s mishandling the conflict, avoiding it, caving to it, or getting some perverse charge out of it that does the real damage, especially to any kids watching. That’s not an oversimplification.

So what does handling conflict properly actually look like? Plenty of professionals have built careers researching exactly that. Here’s what I’ve found actually works:

Agree not to settle things in court. Court is built to escalate conflict, not resolve it. While you’re in it, you’re gathering ammunition against your ex instead of figuring out what you both actually need to move forward. Mediation and the Collaborative Legal approach exist as real alternatives.

Build a communication plan together, in advance, and hold yourself to it. Some basics that work:

  • Only contact your ex by email, text, or phone between 9 am and 5 pm, unless it’s a genuine emergency. Define what counts as an emergency together ahead of time, ideally with help if you can’t agree on it alone.
  • Keep every email short. Five sentences, maximum. Something like: “I bought the kids’ shoes. Would you cover half?”
  • When a reply comes back in a way you don’t like, don’t respond for at least a day, maybe two. This is genuinely hard to do. Eventually you’ll start recognizing the pattern of what happens when you engage in an email war, and that recognition alone becomes enough to stop you from starting the next one.
  • Acknowledge you received the email and let them know when you’ll respond.
  • Don’t defend yourself or argue your case in an email, or even in person, without a neutral third party present. It’s almost impossible to make your case without your ex reading it as an attack, which just gives them the opening and motivation to attack back. Defending yourself tends to read as an invitation for someone to go find the holes in it.
  • Decide what actually matters enough to you that you can’t let it go. Set up a meeting specifically to discuss that one thing. If it starts going sideways, stop talking. Adjourn, take at least a day, and reassess how important the issue really is. If it still matters, meet again, this time with a neutral third party present, ideally a mediator or lawyer.
  • Don’t discuss the details of your communication with your ex with other people.
  • Don’t try to work through serious issues in public unless you’ve both agreed to do that beforehand.
  • Don’t criticize, gossip about, or badmouth your ex. I know this is hard. I still slip. But complaining about my ex to other people keeps me stuck in a negative headspace, and I don’t want the main memories of this stretch of my life to be built entirely out of resentment. I want room left over for joy too.
  • Forgive yourself when conflict pulls you back in anyway. It takes real time and real practice to get better at this.

The five-minute fix

by | Apr 23, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Five-Minute Fix

People love telling you that time heals all wounds. It takes time. You’ll look back on this and laugh someday. And yet, if you ask around a bit more, plenty of people will also tell you honestly that some of the hurt never fully leaves; it just gets quieter and comes back at odd moments for the rest of your life.

I know my own hurt from my divorce hasn’t fully disappeared, though I feel like myself again most days now. But that’s not actually what I want to write about here.

I want to write about short-term time, because I’ve realized that even ten minutes can be enough to genuinely shift how I feel, and just knowing that fact has gotten me through some seriously painful moments.

My divorce coach was the first person to show me this. I’d just found out my soon-to-be ex had filed for divorce without telling me first, and then refused to find anywhere else to stay. I’m not saying I had no part in how things got there, but I was in shock at the time. Almost anything could trip me into anxiety or a low spiral in those early days. Every other day, I packed an overnight bag to stay with a friend just to avoid sharing space with him. Walking away from my life and my kids, who I’d never spent a night away from before, left me emotional in a way that basically became constant, with sharper spikes hitting every hour or so.

Any time I tried to explain what was going on, even to my own coach, I’d relive it and start crying all over again. So she taught me a technique to calm myself down enough to actually function: tapping, also known as EFT. There’s a whole body of theory behind how and why it works, but all I really knew was that it interrupted whatever thought was making me cry and bought me five or ten minutes back. After tapping for even that short a stretch, I was always calmer. More than once I ended up laughing at myself while someone nearby clearly wondered what on earth I was doing.

Over time I picked up other techniques too: meditation, which I still genuinely struggle with, switching tasks entirely, writing, or just sitting still and letting whatever I was feeling move through me without fighting it. All four of those, in their own way, are just different methods of injecting time, and over the past couple of years I’ve noticed I always feel better once I’ve taken some.

What’s actually made the biggest difference is recognizing that time itself is doing the work. That’s been a hard lesson for someone as type-A as me, someone who’s always measured efficiency by output. Sitting on the couch staring at a wall never used to register as productive.

Now, instead of trying to muscle through emotional pain to stay efficient, I let time do what it does. If I’m having a bad moment, I reach for one of my usual strategies to buy some space.

If I’m in conflict with someone, sitting through a mediation session with my ex, say, and we’ve hit a wall, I get up and take a five- or ten-minute break.

If a conflict is turning into a back-and-forth email fight, I stop myself from replying for a full day.

If I’m just sad, I let myself cry for twenty minutes, or however long it actually takes until I feel like doing something else. Almost without fail, after twenty minutes, I do.

If I’m angry, I sit down and write the email to the person I’m angry at, then send it to myself instead.

I remind myself of what I now know to be true: I might feel sad, or angry, or like everything’s hopeless right now, but in a day, sometimes even less, I won’t be able to summon this exact feeling anymore, because I’ll already be feeling like myself again.

Processing Verses Ranting

by | Apr 15, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Processing Versus Ranting

In the years leading up to my divorce, I’d get together with friends and, occasionally, sit around discussing how irritating our partners were being that week.

As things got worse between me and my ex-husband, that became basically the only thing I ever talked about. I kept a running mental list of every way I’d been wronged, and I’d go around collecting everyone’s opinion on whether I was being reasonable. I got very good at laying out the full sequence of events leading up to the latest incident, and I took pride in how fair and objective I thought I was being. When I got the support I was fishing for, I felt even more justified in feeling a little sorry for myself.

I thought this was a solid self-care strategy until the day I realized my friends and family, however much they loved and supported me, couldn’t actually stop my ex from doing the things that upset me. Nobody could. A wave of hopelessness hit me that day: the realization that I’d be dealing with this person, difficult as he was, for a very long time; my kids were still young. I’d started to think of my list of grievances almost like a case filed in the court of my own brain, argued and decided with a jury of friends and family, and I was just sitting there, waiting for a sentence that was never actually coming.

That day, I’d projected the whole catalogue forward into my future. I’d be dealing with this person, and these same kinds of incidents, indefinitely, and he was never going to be sentenced in any way that would actually satisfy me.

I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.

So I started paying attention to what actually made things worse, and what made them better.

I noticed that surrounding myself with people right after something upsetting happened, and ranting to them about it, actually made it take longer to move past. Days later, someone would ask how I was doing, and that alone would drag me right back into reliving the whole thing, injustice and all.

I noticed that ranting into an email I sent only to myself took some of the pressure off needing to rant to anyone else.

I noticed that if I actively looked for something positive that had come out of the incident, I moved past it faster too. As an example: I genuinely have to credit my ex for teaching me how to deal with difficult people. That might sound a little cheeky, maybe even facetious, but nobody gets along with everyone, and before my divorce, my strategy for difficult people had always just been avoidance. I can’t avoid my ex. So I had to actually learn how to deal with him without it wrecking me. That skill has changed a lot for me since.

I noticed that time spent building a case for the court of public opinion was time not spent on my own growth or happiness, and entire days could vanish into nothing but anger.

And I noticed that the moment I stopped talking about an incident with friends, it started fading out of my head on its own.

So next time you catch yourself gossiping or complaining about someone, it’s worth asking: who is this actually serving?

Defending the Battlements

by | Apr 14, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Defending the Battlements

Last night I went to a workshop on personal boundaries: identifying them, maintaining them, and communicating them to other people. I went mostly out of curiosity, since I’ve always assumed I had reasonably good boundaries and think of myself as a strong, independent, fairly confident type. Also, it was free, and the accountant in me never turns down free training.

I got a little twinge when the facilitator listed off some signs of unhealthy personal boundaries:

  • Going against your own values to keep other people happy
  • Giving as much as you possibly can, just for the sake of giving
  • Taking as much as you can, just for the sake of taking (yes, see above)
  • Feeling guilty or bad whenever you say no

This landed a little close to home, since I’d just spent the entire day in a back-and-forth email “conversation” with my co-parent. I’ll call him that instead of my ex, mostly to keep my thoughts about him somewhere in the neutral zone. We were in disagreement over something he thought I was obligated to do, and I didn’t.

He sent the first request at 8:30 am and followed it up with four more emails over the course of the day, all variations on the same argument for why this was clearly my responsibility.

Oh, and one more sign of unhealthy boundaries I should mention:

  • Expecting other people to meet your needs automatically

Writing this out, it’s pretty clear that both my ex- sorry, co-parent- and I are catching ourselves again, and I have work to do on our respective boundaries. I actually started mine about a year ago, and he’s been an unwitting training partner ever since.

The core principle behind that year of work: do not defend myself.

This is genuinely hard for a self-proclaimed people-pleaser who mostly just wants everyone to get along and be happy.

Every email he sent yesterday felt like a little prod, practically begging for a defensive, justifying response. I actually had to physically get up and leave my workspace so I wouldn’t accidentally send one.

I also had a friend on standby reminding me not to respond.

I knew I still needed to get it out of my system somehow, so I wrote the response and sent it to myself instead. Surprisingly, this works. There’s something about writing out the full blaming, attacking, justifying email, and actually hitting send, even to a dummy account, that gets it out of your body. One tip: delete the real recipient’s address before you start writing, or you might be tempted to “accidentally” hit send once you’ve admired your own devastatingly well-argued response.

So why don’t I defend myself, even when I know I’m right and being reasonable?

Because I’m being reasonable according to my own boundaries, which are clearly not the same as his.

What I’ve learned is that anyone operating from a different set of boundaries than mine can find the holes in whatever defence I put up. Build a wall, and someone motivated enough will find a way through it. Then you spend the rest of the day patching holes with more defensive material, and by the time you look up, you’ve lost an entire day you could have spent doing literally anything else, instead of defending the battlements.

I still have work to do here. In a way, this whole post is me defending my strategy of not defending myself. Time is helping too, but that’s a topic for another day.

Noticing the Thoughts

by | Apr 4, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

Noticing the Thoughts

In her book The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist writes about how many of us wake up with the same automatic thought before we’ve even had a chance to question it: not enough sleep, not enough time, some version of “not enough” running before the day has properly started.

The first time I read that, I wanted to know how she’d gotten inside my head. My own waking thoughts ran along similar lines: I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. What’s even the point of getting out of bed?

These were just thoughts, and they never actually stopped me from getting up; my kids saw to that, but I’ve come to realize there was a stretch where I genuinely believed them. No wonder every day felt like a fight, and my enthusiasm for anything had quietly disappeared.

Once I noticed the pattern, I started keeping a kind of mental tally of how often these thoughts showed up. Just noticing them, at first, turned out to be its own kind of depressing. That led straight into another round of negative thoughts: I must just be a negative, unmotivated person.

I did this for a long time. I let the thoughts define how I judged myself.

And then one day, I stopped.

Because while I was busy tracking the negative thoughts, I was also noticing something else: how much harder my days felt because of them. If I deliberately did something, anything, that pulled me away from buying into a negative thought, the rest of the day got noticeably easier. It became a bit of a balancing act. Too much distraction, and I’d lose the self-reflection I actually needed. Too little distance from the thoughts themselves, and I’d be wiped out by the end of the day either way.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it shifted, a month in, two months, somewhere in there. All I know is that eventually it did. These days I wake up, notice the thoughts are still sitting there waiting for me, laugh at them a little, and get up anyway to live the day I actually want.

When you’re in the middle of rebuilding your life, it matters to remember that whatever’s running through your head first thing in the morning isn’t actually you. For me, it took real time and real noticing before something finally clicked.

If negative thoughts are dragging you down, start by just noticing them and questioning them when you can. Don’t beat yourself up on the days they still pull you under. Give yourself the time it takes to build some real distance between your thoughts and whoever you actually are underneath them. It’s just one step, but a real one, toward the change you’re actually after.

So You’ve Just Signed Your Separation Agreement

by | Mar 17, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

So You’ve Just Signed Your Separation Agreement

Congratulations. Finalizing a separation agreement is a real achievement, and it usually comes at the end of a genuinely stressful, emotional stretch of your life.

Signing it will likely hit you harder than you expect. It’s tangible proof that the life you once had hopes and dreams for is actually, finally, over. That can leave you feeling strangely aimless, since the agreement itself has probably been the singular focus of your life for a long stretch, and now it’s just done. But the agreement isn’t the end. It’s the actual beginning of your new life.

The first thing you need to do now is stop.

You’ve been running hard, and you’re still carrying the momentum from your old life forward with you. You’re on autopilot, mostly just trying to survive the days of this new reality.

But this is your life now, and you get to build it the way you actually want.

One of the first things worth doing is simply giving yourself time to process what just happened. The day I signed mine, my lawyer told me, “Don’t underestimate the emotional impact this is going to have on you.” Even hearing that directly, I still wasn’t prepared. I’d built up this expectation that my life would suddenly be fine now that I didn’t have to deal with my ex anymore. Instead, sadness and a sense of failure moved in and took over. It took time and real grieving before I understood that only one part of my life had actually failed, my relationship with him, not the whole thing. Giving myself that time was what let me actually move forward.

Time also taught me I could design my life however I wanted going forward. I didn’t have to try to reassemble the pieces of my old one as the only available path. I had to actually take the time to figure out what mattered to me now. For a lot of newly separated people, that’s a genuinely dramatic shift, since up until separation, you were likely living according to shared values, or in some cases, mostly your spouse’s. Taking real time to reassess what actually matters to you now is essential if you want this next chapter to actually work.