Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

by | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

Are you in the middle of a transition day?

There are two types of transition days: the ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent, and the ones where they come back to you. Let’s deal with the leaving days first.

The first thing to do is make sure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye are good ones. Minutes, yes. This is your first real challenge, and it is one. Getting kids packed and ready to leave is stressful on its own, and in my experience, kids rarely cooperate. It’s hard to stay calm when your child won’t stop what they’re doing long enough to put their shoes on, and it’s doubly hard when part of you doesn’t want them to leave at all.

So how do you stay calm instead of spending those last minutes yelling? Practice. Practice reminding yourself this is genuinely a hard situation. Practice giving yourself a break if you do end up yelling anyway. Apologize to your child if it happens, and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you’ll see them soon. Remind yourself you’ll get plenty more chances to practice this, and that it does get easier with time.

While you’re getting your child ready, pay attention to the feeling rising in you that tends to lead to yelling. This is a good moment to remind yourself the kids are leaving soon regardless, and it genuinely doesn’t matter if they forget something or run a few minutes late. It’s also a good moment to remember your kids are capable, and this is exactly the kind of situation where natural consequences can do some of the teaching for you. Help them remember what they need, help them pack, then wait for them outside once they’re ready. Sit down. Take a few deep breaths while you wait.

Set a rule with your kids that they always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There’s nothing worse than watching your child sprint off without a backward glance, whether they’re leaving straight from your home or somewhere you’ve driven them. You don’t want your last memory before two days, four days, or a full week apart to be the back of your child’s head running away from you, thinking, I didn’t even get to say goodbye. What if something happens to one of us?

Then they’re gone. You might have somewhere to be, or you might not. You might fill the time deliberately so you don’t sit with the absence, or you might find yourself with more open time than you know what to do with. If it’s the latter, grief tends to creep in. Let it. Sit with it for a while. Powering through a feeling, or burying it, just means you never actually learn how to move through it. Face it directly, give yourself grace for being sad, and over time, these grief stretches tend to get shorter.

Then remind yourself that none of it will go exactly to plan. Things happen. Don’t beat yourself up if whatever plan you made for “how the next transition will go” doesn’t play out the way you pictured. You made that plan while the kids weren’t even there, and the actual push and pull of parenting rarely follows the version you designed in their absence.

That said, don’t stop making the plans. Pieces of them do eventually find their way into your real transition days, in a good way, even if the whole plan never survives contact with reality.

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.)

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.