by Renee leNobel | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce
When you think of your life up until this point does it make you happy or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?
How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you are living with challenging circumstances, it is hard not to let your current situation influence your thoughts about the past, present and future.
When I was going through my divorce I was looking for proof of how I had gotten to that point. In the thick of my divorce process, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I would mine my memories for proof that I was never meant to marry that person. Then I would beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory indicated that we were not supposed to be together – how could it have taken me 20 years to realise this? So I decided to try not to think about it at all.
As I had shared 20 years of my life with this person, I wiped out a good chunk of happy memories. In addition, I reasoned that childhood had led me to my partner of 20 years and so I wrote my childhood memories off as well. My life path had led me to one big point of failure – divorce. Failure kept going through my brain. All I had left was one failed marriage, no career and unhappy kids.
People and self-help books advised me to remember the good moments I had shared with my ex, to hopefully prevent me from what I was doing which was allowing my past to overshadow my present and future. Because that is what I was doing; I was projecting my past into my future and that was stopping me in my tracks. What was the point of having a future that looked like my very unhappy past?
My coach helped me find a way out of these circular and self-defeating thoughts and she did this by helping me change my thoughts about the present.
My coach first told me that it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was simply my relationship with one person. Then she helped me define what success means to me and helped me find proof that I had succeeded according to my own terms of success.
After that, my past started to take on a different hue. I was now focussing on how I had succeeded in life according to my own definition of success. Once I started to see how I had in fact succeeded, my coach pointed out that my past had gotten me to where I was. All those things I perceived as mistakes were actually lessons designed specifically for me to get me closer to what I wanted out of life.
This was by no means a quick fix. It took time and practice.
But the recipe is clear. Look for success in your present life and the positive evidence you find will carry back to your past memories and forward into your hopeful future.
by Renee leNobel | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce
I had an uncomfortable conversation with a friend last night. She is in the middle of a very bitter divorce and she is feeling fearful of the outcome which will be decided by a judge.
A brief history of her situation.
Let’s call her Sara. Sara is getting divorced from her husband. They have two young children and she has been the main breadwinner in their family although her husband has been working in a less lucrative career.
I had always assumed that Sara loved her job. She is outwardly successful, very outgoing and has a good group of friends that she both works with and socialises with. Last night I found out that I had made a wrong assumption. Sara does not love her job and has really only stayed in it to support her family. Her dream is to start up her own company but she now feels like she can’t because the court will perceive that she is simply attempting to get out of her obligation to pay spousal support and child support.
Then she went further and talked about how her ex has been purposely underemployed for years (he stepped away from a well paying job to start his own business just before the kids were born) and it is his obligation to go back to a job that he is perfectly capable of doing and that pays more than his current situation.
Essentially, what she was saying is that it is naive to think we can all follow our dreams. Our discussion got a little bit heated and she stated at one point “everyone has to work, it’s just a rule of society.” The other thought behind her comment was that everyone has to take the best paying job they can get even if they are not happy. Sara’s ex is currently choosing to be underemployed and she has to bear the brunt of his choice. She has to stay in a job she doesn’t like because the rules of society say so.
After my discussion with Sara I thought about everything she had said. I was rather upset about a number of things which I will refer to as Sara’s rules:
The first rule: everyone has to suck it up and take the highest paying job they are capable of if they have kids and responsibilities. To do otherwise is flaky and selfish.
The second rule: work generally sucks. Everyone would rather retire if they could. Within this rule is a sub-rule. If you like what you’re doing, it’s not work.
The third rule: life is inherently unfair. Simply because Sara held the higher paying job at the time of her separation from her husband, she would forever have to pay child support and spousal support based on that situation.
I must say our conversation kept me up last night. I immediately got defensive and I lay there in bed coming up with arguments against the rules. Thank goodness that when I finally fell asleep my brain let those arguments go and gave me some better thoughts for when I woke up.
The first thing that my brain reminded me was that defensiveness keeps us locked into buying into made up rules and opinions. Because I was putting up opposing arguments to Sara’s rules, I was turning them into facts instead of just one person’s opinions. I was holding Sara’s arguments out as truth and was trying to pick holes in them. Instead, I now recognize that her rules are just one person’s opinion (and yes, I would say her rules are the prevalent opinions in society). They are opinions based in fear and the worst case scenario. They are not the default outcome for Sara’s life. They are outcomes that likely have a higher probability of occurring. Especially if Sara resigns herself to the fact that these rules are true and that life is unfair.
This led me to the second thought which was that Sara’s ideas are keeping her trapped.
It appears to me that Sara has given up on her dreams. She is hiding behind these rules she has created for herself; she has turned her rules into hard and fast facts of the world that she has no control over.
So I’m going to call Sara back. I want to hold out her rules for her to see and I’m going to ask her if they are the ones she wants to live by.
Instead, I hope Sara agrees to letting me help her find out what drives her and what gives her hope. I will help her get clarity about where she is in life from a financial perspective and from a personal values perspective. Then I’m hoping Sara will see that she does have choice in her life and it is not these rules that she has created for herself and bought into that are controlling the outcome of her life.
