People Turn Up When you need them

People Turn Up When you need them

by | Oct 21, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

“People turn up in your life when you need them.”

Someone said this to me recently, essentially predicting her own appearance in mine. At the time, what I was actually thinking was: I do not need this person in my life at all. She’d blown in the door and immediately started “advising” me on how I was living wrong. Within two minutes of meeting her, she’d decided I was too analytical and needed to think with my heart instead of my head. Then she went further: being analytical, she informed me, was the actual reason I was unhappy.

I was a little thrown by this and immediately started analyzing it, which, yes, is exactly the thing she was accusing me of. I take in information, I sort it, I decide whether it supports or contradicts what I already believe. She’d read me correctly, and honestly, it was a little impressive how fast she’d figured that much out. So I agreed: yes, I’m analytical. But I’m also pretty happy that way, so her actual argument, that this was making me unhappy, didn’t hold. Thinking with my head has never been the problem, whatever she believed.

She didn’t love that response and spent the next hour explaining exactly why I was wrong and needed to adopt her belief system instead. She upped the pressure by informing me I looked older than my age, also apparently a symptom of my unhappiness.

You might be wondering why I sat there listening for that long. I’ll direct you to my earlier post on personal boundaries. In hindsight, the better move would have been to just stop defending myself and walk away much sooner, something I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life, since the people-pleasing gene runs strong in me.

Eventually I did walk away, and went to read How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. That book showed up exactly when I needed it. The timing was funny too: my attacker had just told me I needed to dye my hair, and here was Caitlin Moran questioning why women spend so much energy maintaining a youthful appearance while men spend that same energy trying to get ahead.

Eventually the woman got the hint and left me alone, and I sat with what had just happened. (I’m analytical. Of course I sat with it.)

What I landed on was the difference between coaching and advising. My own coach listens to what I actually say and helps me work out what matters to me and what’s actually driving me forward. That’s a completely different thing from someone who’s already decided how life works and is trying to install that belief system in you. Coaching worked for me. I don’t have to force myself into things; I already want to do the things I end up doing. Advising worked too, for a while, back when I actually followed what people told me to do. But eventually the gap between how I was living and what I actually valued left me stuck. Living someone else’s version of my life stopped moving me forward at all.

After all that thinking, I landed on the one thing she said that I actually agreed with: people do turn up in your life exactly when you need them. It just sometimes takes a bit of work, and a bit of analysis, to see why.

Empathy Works Both Ways

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

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Empathy Works Both Ways

Empathy is an interesting thing. I’ve always felt like I have a bit too much of it. I empathize easily with someone in pain, and I’ll spend a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to help them. If I can’t, I feel bad about it.

For a long time, I thought of this as a trait that mostly benefited other people and mildly cost me, all that energy spent trying to solve problems that weren’t mine, followed by guilt whenever I couldn’t fix them.

Recently I had a bit of a rethink. Empathy has actually been helping me more than I realized. Understanding that other people are carrying their own real struggles helps put my own in perspective, and my own problems often start looking a lot smaller by comparison. My life starts looking pretty good. I get happier. Things flow better.

This came up recently while thinking through a hypothetical I sometimes use with clients: two co-parents, newly separated, splitting time with their kids roughly evenly, each trying to rebuild their own life around a new schedule. One of them is stepping back into paid work after years focused on the kids, and she’s scared her kids will feel abandoned and that she’ll miss them on the weeks they’re gone. The other is taking on a much bigger share of hands-on parenting than before, and he’s stuck on the fact that he’s still paying support while doing more parenting than he ever has.

In a conversation like that, it’s easy to watch two people get more and more entrenched in their own position, each one certain they’ve drawn the short straw; each one stops actually hearing the other. Once people get to comparing whose situation is worse, they’ve usually stopped listening entirely.

Watching a dynamic like that, what strikes me is how much unseen fear is actually shared between them. Both people are stepping into something new. Both are afraid of what they’re about to lose. If either one could actually see that the other person’s fear is just as real as their own, they’d probably stop spending all their energy defending their own hurt and start being curious about the other person’s instead.

That’s what real collaboration looks like when it happens naturally. And it comes from exactly one place: empathy for the person on the other side of the table.

Sometimes the gap is too wide in the moment, the dislike too fresh, the fear too loud. In those cases, the best move is usually just a break. Time and distance, given enough of it, tend to let a little natural empathy creep back in on its own.

Step 9

by | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Step 9

Divorce is usually the end result of a fairly typical progression:

  1. You get married.
  2. You begin navigating married life together.
  3. You and your partner start facing real challenges.
  4. You realize you approach those challenges differently.
  5. You try to negotiate a way through it together.
  6. That negotiation fails, sometimes slowly, over a long stretch of time.
  7. One or both of you decide the marriage is over. By now you’re both emotionally exhausted.

Then comes the hard part. People often get stuck right at step 7. They know the marriage is done but have no idea what to actually do next. It can feel so daunting that some people just stay married anyway. Others hand it entirely to lawyers. Some try mediation or the Collaborative Approach. Others simply live apart while staying legally married.

At step 7, my ex and I tried a bit of everything. Lawyers, mediators, and eventually we landed on the Collaborative Approach, because we figured the obvious next step, step 8, had to be getting a separation agreement. You need one to get divorced, after all. We wanted to stay out of court, and Collaborative seemed like the best route there.

By this point in the process, both partners are usually running on empty, and neither one particularly wants to sit down and hash things out with the person they can barely stand at that moment. It’s a fair bet that if you’ve reached this stage, you dislike your spouse enough that working with them on anything feels unbearable. You couldn’t agree inside the marriage. Why would drafting its ending go any better?

Still, the separation agreement had lodged itself in both our heads as the obvious next milestone. We worked hard at it, nine months with our Collaborative team. I wanted that agreement at almost any cost, because once I knew we were done, I needed the whole thing sewn up and settled. My ex wanted the same. We both wanted a rulebook that would define how our new lives would work.

We got our agreement. Done, right?

Not even close. We had a document, but two very different understandings of what it actually said. We spent another three months arguing over its meaning and made almost no progress actually implementing any of it.

Every time we tried to work through a section, I’d get angry, and I know he did too. We kept hitting deadlock, and the conflict never really eased. Eventually we ended up in court over a single disputed section. We were supposed to be finished. Instead, here we were.

Turns out having the agreement didn’t mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.

I wasn’t done with my own anger, and I still couldn’t have a level conversation with him. Judging by his emails, he wasn’t done with his either.

Which brought me to a step nobody had listed: step 9, heal and let go.

That step took a long time, and it had plenty of sub-steps of its own. But now that I’m actually through it, our divorce finally feels done. Truly done.

Plenty of people had told me to do step 9 first, and at the time, I simply wasn’t able to. Looking back, I wonder if that order would have served us better. If we’d both been in a steadier emotional place, we might have actually heard each other, and the agreement we built together might have reflected something we both genuinely understood the same way.

I’m not sure it’s realistic for most people to fully heal before starting the separation agreement process. With hindsight, I’d probably choose a different order if I could do it again. But at the time, I wanted that agreement, whatever it cost me.

Where are you in the process? And what steps are you choosing to take next?

Know Yourself First

by | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Know Yourself First

When I realized my marriage was over, one of the first things I started thinking about was how much harder my life was about to get. Everything was going to be harder. I was becoming a single parent for half my waking hours, starting that new chapter with drastically reduced finances. Those thoughts were part of why I’d tried to hold the marriage together for as long as I did; it genuinely seemed easier than starting over with a whole new set of harder circumstances.

I went into my divorce carrying a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. I also felt like everyone else- my ex, my lawyer, the broader machinery of how divorce is “supposed” to happen- was the one actually controlling my life. I didn’t feel like I had any say in what came next.

So I switched to autopilot and tried to get through the entire process as fast as possible.

I drove myself through the divorce without ever pausing to actually figure out what I wanted. We used the Collaborative Approach, and after five months of meetings, we had a draft agreement and were essentially done. It took five months mostly because we could only manage one four-way legal meeting per month; coordinating three- to four-hour sessions across four busy schedules wasn’t fast. Our lawyers kept trying to get us talking about what actually mattered to each of us. Mostly I just thought, can we skip the needs and values part and get on with it?

Then I went through a six-week back-to-work program for women. The same thing happened during the early self-analysis portion: can we get on with it? I need to write my resume.

Eventually I was done. Divorce finalized, resume in hand.

But I was no closer to actually knowing what I wanted. Still running on fear. Still convinced the best part of my life was already behind me.

And nothing was working. No job offers. Resumes disappearing into total silence. I was stuck, scared, and unhappy.

Things only started moving once I actually took the time to figure out what mattered to me. Yes, I went on the full mid-life soul-searching bender, because I finally hit the point where fear stopped pushing me forward and started freezing me in place entirely.

Figuring out what actually drives you is an ongoing thing; it never really stops, but about six months into that search, I had a list of my seven core values, because I’m a type-A accountant and I like my lists, and I put it up on my wall.

That list turned out to be genuinely useful for decision-making, especially around money. It helped me figure out both how I wanted to earn it and how I wanted to spend it.

If you’re finding money decisions hard, the way through is some good old-fashioned self-reflection. Once you actually know yourself, it stops being hard to tell when a spending choice is wrong for you, and it becomes obvious when one is right.

Divorced and Still on the Hook

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Divorced and still on the hook

Growing up, I was always told I’d be responsible for paying my own way through university. My parents wanted me to go, but they also wanted me to learn financial independence early. I’m honestly not sure if that was a deliberate philosophy or just how things had always been done in the family; both of my parents had paid their own way through school too, and my dad had sold his beloved ’57 Chevy Bel Air to cover his tuition. There might have been a little martyrdom baked in: I sacrificed my car, so you can sacrifice too.

I lived at home during university and paid tuition out of my summer job earnings. My parents helped some, covering half a car and its insurance for the years I was in school, and living at home saved me a considerable amount on its own.

So when I think about my own kids and university, I don’t automatically feel obligated to fund it. That said, things cost a lot more now. My tuition ran about $2,000 a year. Today it’s closer to ten thousand, and minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping pace with that jump. I’ve also always felt like I missed out on something by staying home for school. So I’ve been going back and forth, leaning more toward wanting to help fund my kids’ education if I can, while still believing that support at that stage is a choice, not an obligation.

Then I learned something that reframed the whole question. A friend of mine was still paying child support for a stepdaughter in her late twenties. It turns out parents remain financially responsible for a child pursuing their first university degree, unmarried, essentially regardless of age.

That got confirmed again during my own divorce, when my lawyer walked me through it directly: under the Divorce Act, child support obligations end when a child marries, becomes self-supporting, or turns nineteen, unless that child remains a “child of the marriage” because they’re unable to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, pursuing an education, or another qualifying reason.

Here’s the interesting part: divorcing your spouse can actually leave you with a greater ongoing financial obligation to your kids than staying married would have. Married parents can simply agree together that their adult child is on their own now. Divorced parents, if a child chooses university, generally can’t make that same call unilaterally.

I understand why the law exists. I’ve seen how badly things can go without it: a parent encourages the kids toward a school far from home, then refuses to help pay once they’re there, leaving the other parent to fund the bulk of it alone, occasionally with some help from the kids themselves. I’ve watched a situation like this play out over several years, court decisions repeatedly siding with the parent seeking support, and payment still not materializing. The frustration of getting a ruling in your favour and still not seeing the money is its own particular kind of exhausting.

Even with the law clearly on your side, enforcing it can turn into a long, draining process. Much of the difficulty lies in the details: figuring out exactly what amounts should be split and tracking and accounting for them over years.

The way to avoid landing there yourself is communication, early and often. Talk to your spouse about what you both envision for your kids’ education. If you’re separating, get clear, specific language about postsecondary funding written directly into your agreement, not vague gestures at “supporting education,” but actual clarity on amounts and how they’ll be calculated and tracked. If your current agreement is silent on this, start that conversation with your co-parent now, ideally before your kids have already set their hearts on a school far from home.

If your co-parent genuinely isn’t on board with sharing the cost, that’s worth a hard, honest conversation with yourself: can you fund it alone, or do you need to start helping your kids adjust their expectations of what this stage of their life is actually going to look like?

And if you do decide funding their education matters enough to you to do it regardless, take a real look at your financial situation to see whether it’s actually possible, and if it’s not yet, what would need to change to get there.

When you Remember the Discussion Differently from the agreement

by | Sep 2, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

When You Remember the Discussion Differently Than the Agreement

I’ve noticed something about how my ex and I approached decisions differently during our separation negotiations, and it’s made me think more generally about how mismatched decision-making styles can quietly sabotage even a well-intentioned agreement.

I tend to gather information until I run out of time or simply have to decide. I’ll tell the full story, get into the minutiae, circle a topic from every angle before I feel ready to commit to anything. My ex, from what I could tell, worked the opposite way: too much information and he’d start to shut down, mentally stepping back from the decision entirely rather than wading through it all with me.

I think about our actual negotiation meetings now and can see exactly where that mismatch caused real damage. I’d tell story after story, walk through every detail I thought mattered. At some point, I now realize, he simply stopped absorbing any of it.

How do I know? Because we’ve had disagreement after disagreement since, both of us convinced the other broke the agreement. I’ll think: how does he not remember we agreed to this out loud? We discussed it for at least an hour, on three separate occasions. But our written agreement doesn’t always reflect those lengthy conversations, partly because time and money pressure eventually pushed me to sign it before every detail was fully nailed down.

At the time, I was certain the agreement captured everything we needed. In some ways, I still think that it’s one of the longer, more thorough agreements I’ve come across. But when it comes to actually applying it to real decisions, we still get stuck, because we walked away from those meetings with two different understandings of what we’d actually settled.

I’ve thought a lot about how to prevent that gap from forming in the first place. What I’ve landed on isn’t a guaranteed fix, just a few things worth trying if you and your ex are heading into real conflict over an agreement:

Keep the agreement’s flexibility limited where you can. Vague, adaptable language sounds reasonable in the room, but it leaves too much room for two different memories of the same conversation.

Make sure the final document actually reflects everything you both deemed important enough to spend real time discussing. If it came up more than once in your meetings, it should be written down, not just assumed.

Get it reviewed by someone whose perspective differs from your own, not necessarily by gender, but by how you and your ex tend to process things differently. I had my dad review mine, and looking back, I doubt he actually read the whole thing; it was long enough that even I understood why. That alone should have told me it needed simplifying. I never had anyone review it who processed information the way my ex did, and that gap might have caught something before it became a recurring fight.

Build in a trial period for anything that doesn’t need to be locked in immediately. Testing a new arrangement in practice, before it’s permanent, tends to surface misunderstandings faster than any amount of additional discussion would.

I have been thinking about how to prevent this from happening, and all I have are suggestions. If there is considerable conflict between you and your ex, then you need to:
  1. Have limited flexibility in your agreement.
  2. Ensure that it reflects everything you deemed important enough to discuss in your meetings.
  3. If you are a woman, have both a man and a woman review the agreement on your behalf and vice-versa. I had my dad review mine, but in fact I don’t think he even read it because it was so long. That should have been a clue that we needed to simplify our agreement. I didn’t have a woman review it, and that might have pointed out where I went wrong.
  4. Have a trial period testing out your new agreement for things that do not need to be decided right away.