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.