The Rules We Make up and then live by

by | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Rules We Make Up and Then Live By

I think about a certain kind of conversation I’ve had more than once over the years, always some version of the same shape. Someone in the middle of a hard divorce, scared of what a judge might decide, has quietly built a set of rules for herself that make her fear feel like fact rather than fear.

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The shape usually goes something like this. She’s the higher earner in the marriage. Her ex works in a less lucrative field, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. Everyone else assumes she loves her work: successful, outgoing, good at it. Then it comes out that she doesn’t, not really. She stayed because someone had to earn enough to support the family, and she’s quietly dreamed for years of doing something else entirely. But she believes she can’t act on that now, because a court might read a career change as a deliberate attempt to dodge support obligations.

Then the resentment starts flowing toward the ex: if he’d just go back to a higher-paying job he’s clearly capable of, this whole calculation would look different. Why should she be the one stuck carrying an obligation that traces back to a choice he made.

The underlying belief, stated plainly, usually sounds something like: everyone has to work; that’s just how it is. Which really means: everyone has to take the highest-paying job available, whether they’re happy in it or not, and choosing otherwise is either selfish or naive.

I’ve pushed back on this kind of thinking before, and it tends to get a little heated, because underneath it are a few unspoken rules that feel like settled fact to the person holding them. Something like: you have to take the best-paying job you’re capable of if you have kids and responsibilities; otherwise, you’re flaky. Work generally sucks, and if you actually like what you do, it doesn’t really count as work. And life is inherently unfair, so whatever position you happened to hold at the moment of separation, you’re now locked into for good.

What strikes me every time is how quickly these get treated as facts about the world rather than one person’s fear-based read on their own situation. They’re not the only possible outcome. They’re just the outcome that becomes far more likely once someone decides the rule is true and stops looking for any other path.

That’s the real trap. Not the divorce, not the finances, but the rules someone builds for themselves along the way and then quietly agrees to be governed by, permanently.

If I could say one thing to anyone caught in that pattern, it would be this: hold your own rules up to the light before you decide to live inside them forever. Ask what you actually want, separate from the fear driving the rule. There’s usually more room to move than the rule wants you to believe.

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?

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.