Divorcing Better

When I was freshly separated, I was under terrible stress and in extreme emotional pain. My days were consumed with anger and sadness, and I remember wondering if anything could be worse than going through a divorce.

According to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, death of a spouse tops the list as the most stressful known event, followed closely by divorce. Reading further, you can build a stress score by adding up all the significant events that have happened to you within a year. If you’re going through or recently went through a divorce, here’s what adds up:

Divorce, 73. Separation, 65. Change in financial state, 38. Change to a different line of work, which often comes bundled with divorce, 36. Trouble with in-laws, 29. Change in living conditions, 25. Change in social activities, 18. Change in sleeping habits, 16.

And that’s before counting all the other stressors that tend to show up alongside divorce. By this point your total score is already around 300. That puts you at real risk of illness. I’d never actually added mine up before writing this, but that number speaks for itself.

Everyone told me I’d get through it eventually, and life would get better, and they were right. It did get better. But it took real time, two to three years of living with above-average stress. And being a mom, I passed some of that stress along to my kids. I know their dad, dealing with his own stress, did the same. Nobody wins in that situation.

So how could it be better?

I’ve been trying to figure that out. My first idea was that marriage should just be a lot harder to enter into, maybe banned outright. That’s obviously not happening, and I decided I didn’t want to be everyone’s dream-killer. These days when someone tells me they’re getting engaged, I just smile and say congratulations.

Instead, I decided to put my energy into helping people divorce better. If enough people start divorcing better, maybe the stress that comes bundled with divorce starts to drop across the board too.

So what does divorcing better actually look like?

Learn how to do conflict properly. Doing conflict badly is probably what got you to divorce in the first place, and continuing to do it badly is exactly what makes the divorce itself so brutal.

This isn’t a quick fix. We’ve spent our whole lives learning our own particular way of handling conflict, and deciding to change doesn’t undo that overnight. It takes real work and real practice.

You’ll likely need a support system built specifically to help you do conflict the right way. Don’t hire pitbull lawyers who thrive on court and war. Hire people who will support both you and your ex as you each figure out a more positive path forward, now that you’ve decided to part ways. Hire people who will help you build the tools you’ll actually need to thrive afterward.

Spend your divorce dollars and energy wisely. Don’t put them toward support that pulls you further from a better life. Put them toward whatever actually moves you closer to living with hope.