The Blame Game

by | Jun 15, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

Blame and Happiness

I went to a great workshop a few weeks ago put on by Dr. Sue Goldswain and John Boland. If you’re ever in the market for a marriage counsellor, they’re worth looking into.

One thing that stuck with me: it takes two people to build a relationship, and two people to take one down. If a marriage ends in divorce, both people played some part in that.

It was a relief to hear it wasn’t entirely on me.

It got me thinking, though. I hear a lot of different versions of how a marriage failed or is failing, and I’ve noticed something consistent: the person doing more of the blaming tends to be the one hurting more.

I know this because I lived it. I hated my ex when we first separated, and I was miserable. How could I have married someone so horrible? As the blame slowly faded, it actually turned into something closer to gratitude, and I got noticeably happier along the way.

How do you feel about your own relationship right now? If you’re doing a lot of blaming, is it actually fixing anything?

You Still have to Talk to them

by | Mar 9, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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You’ll Still Have to Talk to Them

From my very unofficial polling of people I meet, money and parenting issues are the two biggest causes of divorce. I had a slightly funny, slightly tragic conversation with a friend recently. We were commiserating over both having separated from our spouses because we couldn’t get on the same page about money or parenting. Then we looked at each other and said, at almost the same time: yup, and we still have to deal with our exes on exactly those two things, even now that we’re divorced.

For anyone newly separated, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this.

That’s the irony. Getting divorced doesn’t get you out of discussing parenting and money with your ex. If anything, it requires more communication, not less, since you’re now doing it across two households instead of one, usually with someone you’re not especially motivated to talk to in the first place. You’ll likely hire lawyers and counsellors and spend real money figuring out how to communicate at all during the process. Then, once you finally have a separation agreement, you’ll spend a couple more years figuring out how actually to implement it. Because even when something is written down clearly, you and your ex will probably interpret it differently anyway.

When we signed our agreement, I felt such relief. I thought we finally had a map, something clear enough to settle every future parenting and money question. I was wrong. It was naive to think we’d suddenly interpret things the same way, when we’d never managed to before. We kept fighting over what individual sentences meant. Our kids kept getting caught in the middle.

The agreement itself never solved anything. The only thing that actually helped was learning to communicate with each other based on our individual communication quirks, needs, and values, something I resisted for a long time before finally adopting it, after a full year of being repeatedly blindsided by how differently my ex read the same words I’d read.

Eventually, you’re going to have to learn to actually communicate with your partner about the big things, parenting and money chief among them. The only real choice is timing: do it after things have already gone sideways, or do it proactively, before you build a life and a family with someone, to find out whether you actually can communicate with them at all.

Ex Flare-Ups

by | Jan 10, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Ex Flare-Ups

Some things in life flare up on you. No warning, no pattern you can predict; they’re just suddenly there.

That’s how I’ve come to think of dealing with my ex. Not constant, not even frequent, but when it happens, it happens fast and hits harder than you’d expect for something so infrequent.

I’ve noticed these flare-ups tend to cluster around the predictable stress points: birthdays, holidays, the usual suspects. And I have exactly as much control over the timing as you’d expect: none.

I know the honest counterargument here: I chose to marry him, and whether something he says or does actually counts as a “flare-up” is really just my own interpretation. It’s not an illness. It’s a reaction. That distinction matters, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But the useful part of the comparison holds anyway: whether something is a genuine crisis or just my own reaction to it, having a strategy for managing the reaction still matters. So over time, I built one.

The flare-ups come on suddenly, out of nowhere, infrequent but sharp. I never see them coming. Instead, I built a response system for after they hit.

First, I write out my full, unfiltered, knee-jerk emotional reaction, everything, no editing, no restraint, in an email. I ensure the “to” field is empty before I even start typing, so there’s no chance of accidentally sending it to him. When I’m done, I send it to a dummy account of my own instead. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it does. Something about hitting send, even into the void, gets it out of my system.

Then I give myself time. I don’t run straight to my support network to vent about whatever the latest thing was, not for a few days at least.

I breathe. I try to meditate. I remind myself that things rarely turn out as badly as my imagination insists they will.

None of this makes the flare-up disappear. But it does take the edge off the worst symptoms, the sleeplessness, the short temper, all of it.

More importantly, it gets me to a place where I can actually deal with him productively. Before I had any of this in place, my instinct was either to fight or to avoid entirely. Fighting feeds the flare-up. Avoiding leaves you sitting in dread, waiting for the next one.

So this time, I emailed him and proposed we talk in person, with some ground rules set in advance to keep the conversation collaborative.

After a few conversations, things settled. We’re back in a good routine, and I’m still working on ways to keep these flare-ups further and further apart.

Choosing Not to be a victim

by | Dec 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Choosing Not to Be a Victim

Last week’s post is missing. Where did it go?

It got wiped out by two weeks of negative internal chatter and a brain stuck firmly on the worst-case future. When I finally climbed out, this week’s post showed up on its own: your victimhood perspective is what’s keeping you stuck.

You know the victimhood perspective. Life is harder for you specifically; your circumstances are uniquely difficult; you can’t do it; none of it is fair- those thoughts.

They’re the thoughts that lead to bad choices, or no choices at all, just avoidance stacked on avoidance. Instead of tackling what needs doing with some hope attached, you end up dragged into it, kicking and screaming only once things have gotten bad enough to force your hand.

I can think of one thing people avoid constantly this way. Taxes, anyone?

Taxes aren’t actually my issue; I like doing those. What I avoid, when I’m caught in this particular thought pattern, sounds more like: I’m too busy. My life is harder than everyone else’s. There’s basically a conspiracy against me pulling this off. I can’t do it; I’m not capable.

That was me last week, feeling forced into something I didn’t want to do.

I started by trying to let it roll off me. My last post, before this gap, was actually about waiting to see what would unfold.

That approach failed. Turns out I have very little patience for uncertainty. It felt like a countdown running in the background of my life, and I had zero control over it.

So I broke my own rule and started talking to people about it, mostly because I felt sorry for myself and wanted some sympathy.

I got the sympathy. Did it help? No. It just fed the “my life is so unfair” file a little more.

Some people told me, gently or not, that I needed to be an adult about it. I heard them, and promptly filed that too under more proof that my life was unfair. Why do I always have to be the adult? Not fair. I’m always the adult.

So I sat with it for a couple more days and felt progressively worse. I hadn’t felt that low in a while.

Eventually I pulled out my usual tools and started tricking my brain back into a better place. I wrote a lot of angry, unsent emails to myself. I started several blog posts that were mostly blame dressed up as reflection. I began writing down three things I was grateful for every morning, and got my kids doing it too, no yelling that particular morning, coincidence or not. I journaled. I basically tried to channel Pollyanna, which is funny given that in my twenties, a friend once accused me of being too much like her, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. That trait got buried for years running with a crowd of Eeyores.

Eventually I landed on a line I kept repeating to myself: I’m choosing not to be a victim. I can deal with whatever gets thrown at me. I always have. That’s just life, and everyone’s dealing with something. Some of it really is terrible, some of it really is unfair, and we all still have to deal with it anyway. I get to choose how.

Then I sat down and actually became the adult. I addressed what had been making me feel like a victim, in the way I actually know how to address things.

And that was it. I got my life back. I started moving in the direction I actually wanted again. I reached out to people I’d been avoiding, caught up on my work backlog, and felt like myself again.

So if you’re feeling stuck and unhappy, check your perspective first. Are you telling yourself life is unfair right now?

If the answer’s yes, that’s the actual work.

Waiting to See What’s Revealed

by | Nov 26, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Waiting to See What’s Revealed

I have a friend with two decks of cards, Life Cards and Angel Cards. Every so often she pulls them out of the cupboard, and we each draw one from each deck without looking. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, but it drags us back into the present and shakes loose whatever future-focused spiral we’ve usually wandered into. We’ve turned it into a semi-regular thing, mostly so we remember to actually pause once in a while.

This week I pulled Revelation and Patience. Every week the cards seem to land on something eerily relevant to whatever’s actually going on in my life, and this week was no exception. It’s also the same theme that keeps coming back for me, over and over: wait, slow down, let things resolve on their own. I suspect it keeps showing up because I haven’t actually learned it yet.

Revelation told me to wait for life to reveal itself. Patience just said, well, patience, presumably while I wait for the revealing part. Two completely separate decks landing on the same message in the same week. A little eerie.

I’m not patient. I hate waiting. I like controlling the outcome.

What about you? Are you someone who sorts life into neat piles and tries to bend it into the shape you want? Do you see a problem and immediately start plotting the fix? Do you set yourself mental deadlines for when it all has to be resolved?

That’s me. That’s exactly what I do. I’m also a bit of a stress case because of it.

I’ve noticed that sorting life into tidy boxes mostly just sets me up to feel frustrated when reality refuses to fit inside them. Life never quite matches whatever I’d pictured. I’ve worked myself into the ground over deadlines, stressing myself and my kids out in the process, only to have the deadline move, or the whole project shift so much that all that frantic work stopped mattering anyway.

Logically, I know all of this: life never goes the way you expect, no matter how much energy you throw at it. I also know I can handle whatever comes my way. Which means I could, in theory, relax, take my time, live according to my own values, gather information, stay curious, and let the actual outcome emerge from the interplay of circumstances and people rather than from my own forcing it. I know this. I don’t live as I know it.

I was reminded of exactly this looking into my oldest son’s room recently. Disaster zone, as usual, now with a fresh layer of Halloween candy wrappers he apparently likes to keep around as souvenirs. I started in immediately: these have to go, this room is a mess, you need to clean it up. He mumbled, “I will.”

He won’t. He won’t because I never actually let him get there. I start freaking out and yelling long before he’d ever reach his own limit, so he cleans up grudgingly, under pressure, and learns nothing about his own tolerance for mess.

So, inspired by the cards, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to be patient and let life reveal itself for once.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to control the outcome. What I’m actually hoping for is something closer to what happened to some friends of mine. Early twenties, living together, one of them decidedly not tidy. For about two years, their place followed the same pattern: mess building until the tidier one snapped and cleaned it herself. Over and over.

Eventually, she just stopped. She’d hit her limit on the number of times she could blow up about it, so instead she waited to see what would happen. I love this story.

Their place got bad. Genuinely bad. The kind of bad where a visiting dog could find a full meal on the floor.

Then one day, the person who’d apparently had no tolerance limit at all stood in the middle of the room, threw his arms up, and just yelled. He’d finally noticed. He started cleaning, entirely on his own, no nagging required. From that point on, he never let it get that bad again.

I’m hoping I can hold out as long as she did, though it might take a while. Mostly, I’m just curious what gets revealed. Will it play out differently? Will it make as good a story?

I’m hoping training myself to wait on the small stuff builds a kind of muscle I can eventually use on the bigger things too.

That’s my challenge to myself for now. Want to try waiting to see what gets revealed too?

Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

by | Nov 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

Not sure how many of you watched Seinfeld when it originally aired, but I did, and one episode has been resonating with me lately. George spent that episode torn between two versions of himself: Independent George and Relationship George, with Relationship George slowly killing off everything fun about Independent George.

I have the exact same problem. Relationship Renée (“RR”) is making life difficult for Independent Renée (“IR”), and IR doesn’t get off easy either; plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

IR seems to completely forget what RR’s life is actually like the moment the kids leave to spend time with their dad. To stave off loneliness, IR piles on work commitments, volunteer commitments, social commitments, anything to fill the empty hours. IR must be productive. IR must not wallow.

Then the kids come back, and IR becomes RR. Suddenly RR is making three meals a day, driving kids to activities, and trying to finish whatever unfinished work IR left behind during her supposedly productive free time. The kids interrupt everything. How is RR supposed to get anything done?

At this point, the kids aren’t really dealing with RR anymore. They’re dealing with GR. Grumpy Renée.

GR longs for the peaceful solitude IR had access to. Lonely, IR thought? GR will show her “lonely.” GR would kill for a moment of it right now, in the thick of everything. So GR looks ahead at IR’s calendar and slashes it to nothing. That ignorant IR, GR thinks. I’ll teach her to overschedule and overcommit. She’s doing absolutely nothing this weekend. She’s going to rest, recharge, and get ready for the week ahead.

Then, faster than you’d believe, IR is back, staring down the empty weekend GR just built for her. IR recharges in about a day, and peaceful solitude curdles straight into loneliness again. IR piles things back on to fill the gap and starts drafting rules for RR. RR must go to yoga during the week. RR must get more work done after the kids are in bed. No more Netflix, RR!

Then RR is back, negotiating with rules IR left behind. IR clearly hasn’t been using her brain, RR thinks. She has no idea how exhausting it is to work all day, fight over bedtime, and then somehow also write blog posts and self-improve between nine and eleven at night. I can’t do this, RR thinks. RR spirals a bit and starts wondering what the point of any of it is. There has to be a better way.

As with everything, it comes down to communication. Like the movie Memento, RR and IR have started leaving each other notes on their shared desk.

From RR to IR:

Before taking anything on, ask yourself if it actually fits your values.

What are you really taking this on for?

Would you still do this if you were genuinely short on time, or are you just doing it to stay busy?

(Yes, they’re all some variation on the same theme.)

From IR to RR:

I’m giving up some of my weekend fun time to catch up on the grunt work. Please try to actually let go when you’re with the kids and be present with them.

I’m recharging right now so you don’t turn back into GR. Remember your time with them is short, and the most important thing is being present and taking care of yourself.

Remember to find time to get your work done while you’re RR. Schedule a reasonable amount for it, and don’t forget to schedule something fun for me to look forward to as well.

IR usually adds a bit more, since she has more time to reflect than RR does: I know it’s hard, RR, but remember you do eventually get some solitude. Think of the single parents out there without a co-parent at all. Try to stay grateful.

Slowly, the notes are starting to actually land.

The one message they keep leaving each other, over and over: it’s going to take time to get this right. Be kind to yourself in the meantime. I’ll forgive your mistakes. We learn best from them anyway.