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.