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.

Borrowing Trouble

by | Nov 24, 2014 | Divorce and Separation

Borrowing Trouble

My coach used an old idiom with me the other day: that some people have a habit of “borrowing trouble,” and it landed. I’ve always avoided borrowing things generally (except my neighbour’s tools, after my ex walked off with ours in the split), but it turns out I borrow trouble constantly. I borrow it every time I let my thoughts drift into a negative future.

When I start thinking ahead, I get fearful, and my imagination reliably jumps to the worst possible outcome, even though experience has taught me the worst almost never actually happens. My default future setting seems to be worst-case scenario. I’m still not sure if that’s something I was born with or something I learned.

I grew up in the eighties, when the big cultural fear was nuclear war. Movies like Mad Max, The Terminator, and Threads cast a real shadow over how the future felt back then. School reading lists had The Chrysalids, Brave New World, and 1984. As that particular fear faded, roughly around the time I graduated in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, new ones rose to take its place: conflict in the Middle East, climate change. I’ve spent my whole life absorbing whatever the ambient cultural fear happened to be and layering it on top of my own personal ones: tragic death, poverty, unhappiness.

I lived inside an imagined, fearful future, and the worst part was how much it warped my present. I’d change things dramatically in the here and now just to make that imagined future feel less certain. Or I’d do the opposite: rip the bandage off early, forcing the bad thing into the present just to get used to it ahead of time. No wonder I was unhappy. I was spending all my actual present moments either dodging an imagined future or bracing for it.

Then I became aware of what I was actually doing. The divorce, and the downward spiral that came with it, triggered it. I couldn’t understand how I’d ended up this unhappy. Eventually I realized my own thoughts were the actual culprit, with a lot of help sorting that out, some from Byron Katie’s work, some from my life coach.

My coach would point out, in real time, whenever I drifted into future-thinking, and I started tracking just how miserable that habit reliably made me.

That was step one. Noticing. Step two has been actually building better futures to picture instead, which is much harder. My thoughts still default to bad, and I can get stuck there for a while. Today I lost a good four hours to it, after my ex started arguing about how we’d split the kids over Christmas. I went straight to ripping the bandage off, picturing myself utterly alone for the full two weeks of the break. Then I remembered what I’ve actually been practicing, and started building a different picture instead. A good one: I’d get the kids in the morning, when they’re still buzzing with excitement, and he’d get them for dinner, right around the time I’m usually running on empty anyway. That’s actually what he wanted too. It would work.

I only landed on that after burning a whole day borrowing trouble first. I’ll get there faster next time.

I can do it

by | Nov 10, 2014 | Divorce and Separation

I Can Do It

There are a lot of negative thoughts out there that keep a person stuck in place. I know, because these particular ones kept me stuck for years. I let them steer my actions without ever really questioning them.

One that kept showing up in my life was “I can’t do it,” usually paired with some version of “I’m not smart enough, driven enough, deserving enough,” insert whatever positive adjective felt out of reach that day.

I don’t know exactly when I internalized that thought or started building my life around it, but I didn’t notice it was actually in the driver’s seat until my divorce. Since then, I’ve been actively working to loosen its grip. I know it’s working because instead of me saying, “oh, I could never do that,” I’ve started hearing other people say it to me. “Wow, you’ve accomplished so much. I could never do that; I’m just not as smart, or driven, or whatever, as you.”

Four different people said some version of that to me in one week recently, which genuinely surprised me. How had I gone from being the person who said “I can’t” to the person other people were saying it to?

The first real step was noticing that most of my inner dialogue, for most of my life, had been defeatist, occasionally tipping into something closer to self-loathing. So I started journaling. I can already hear the objections: I can’t journal. I used to say the exact same thing to myself, and unsurprisingly, that turned out to be a fairly self-fulfilling belief.

I started anyway, documenting the actual thoughts running through my head. They were pretty grim. And then, naturally, I got self-loathing about being self-loathing. For at least two weeks, maybe longer, I was stuck telling myself I can’t do this, and how could I ever be expected to, since apparently I was just born this way. That was its own small vicious whirlpool for a while.

Then I came across a different idea: those thoughts weren’t actually mine. They’d been handed to me by the world around me, absorbed rather than chosen.

That reframe made the whole thing start to feel almost like a game. When my mood started slipping, I’d try to catch the specific thought pulling me down. There was always one there. They’re sneaky, and they can pull you under before you even notice what’s happening. The game became catching them before they got that far.

That was essentially the whole practice. It took a long time to land on, but I finally did. What’s remarkable is how directly it connects to the idea that your thoughts shape what you build. For a long stretch of my life, I was building around “I can’t.” Now I’m building around “I can.” It really did come down to noticing, and then choosing what to believe.

Do you listen to the thought that tells you you can’t? Do you find yourself telling more successful people, “well, you’re just smart, or driven, or lucky,” as a way of explaining why you couldn’t do the same? I’d push you to look at that thought for exactly what it is: just a thought, one that’s only true because you’ve let it be.

You can change this. I know it because I’ve lived it, a genuinely old, deeply worn pattern that took real, sustained work to loosen its hold on me.

But you’re the only one who can actually do that work. I think you can.

Thoughts – Alone

by | Nov 7, 2014 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

Thoughts – Alone

Do you sometimes think to yourself, “I am alone”?

I do. Usually right after dropping my kids off at school on the first day of a five-day stretch at their dad’s.

It doesn’t matter that thirty minutes earlier they were driving me completely bonkers with the noise and the fighting, and I couldn’t wait to get them out the door. The second I give them a hug and a kiss goodbye and walk away from the school, reluctant every time, the thoughts take over.

Here’s a sample:

I don’t get to see my kids for five days. Actually six, if you count Wednesday, when they’re at school anyway.

It’s not natural for a mom not to see her kids.

I can do this. I know this is just a thought.

I’m sad. That’s allowed. This is a sad situation.

I have things planned for this time. Two days ago I was actually looking forward to having it. Remember that feeling.

I am alone.

That last one is the one that really gets me. I’m not sure there’s a more demotivating, devastating thought out there. It pulls me right out of living the day the way I actually want to, with hope, joy, and some sense of purpose.

I’m writing this down mostly to name exactly what that thought does to me when I let it take the wheel. Awareness is supposed to be the first step. I’m hoping that’s true.

Redesigning your Life around your values

by | Nov 6, 2014 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Redesigning Your Life Around Your Values

You’re stuck somewhere in your life. In debt, in conflict, something’s just happened, and you’re running on autopilot just to get through the day. If any of that sounds familiar, I’m asking you to stop, take a real break, and get clear on your personal values.

I can guess you’re having some version of the thoughts I had in that exact spot: that’s crazy, I don’t have time to stop, I’ve got things to take care of, and if I pause for myself even for a minute, everything’s going to fall apart.

So you keep going. You force your way through a life you don’t actually buy into, not deep down.

You can do that for a long time. I did. Then I hit my wall: divorce. I got there because I wasn’t clear on my own values, my ex wasn’t clear on his, and naturally, neither of us was clear with each other. We were both living in a situation neither of us liked or understood, and we took that confusion out on each other instead. It’s not hard to see, looking back, how we ended up exactly where we did.

Eventually, the cost of not living according to your values surfaces one way or another. A lot of us seem to hit that particular wall in our forties. Midlife crisis, anyone? My ex and I were together ten years before we got married, and we managed fine that whole time; there wasn’t much at stake yet. Then we got married and suddenly had real decisions to make together. Getting married probably should have been the first hard one, but we assumed it couldn’t be that difficult since we’d coasted so long without much friction. We bought a house. We had kids. We moved countries, then moved back. Then we got divorced.

I’m grateful for the divorce now, since it forced me to actually go looking for my values in the first place. I finally made the connection: setting myself aside was driving my unhappiness all along. I spent months resisting the whole process of figuring out what my values even were, and now I spend my time retraining myself to actually operate from them. I still struggle with it. But I know it’s the only way forward.

I can hear the excuses you’re building right now, because I build the same ones for myself most days, excuses to quietly slide back into my old patterns. But I can’t unsee the connection between setting myself aside and my own unhappiness, and I can’t undersell how much joy shows up when this new way of living actually works, because I’m finally living according to what I actually value.

Building a new habit takes real time, and it’s easy to slip back into the old one. Consider this another nudge toward redesigning your life around your actual values.