by Renee leNobel | May 20, 2015 | Divorce
My ex sent me a doozy of an attack email the other day. He sent it on Monday and it is now Wednesday. It was a good reminder to me of what I’ve learned this past year and the havoc these types of emails cause. I really have to thank him for it because he is giving me the inspiration to write blog posts that can potentially help others, in addition to giving me a chance to test my theories on communication.
Let me start with what the email did to me because despite all my work this past year on myself, I still take what he says in and I still have to work his words through my processing system before they become inert and no longer provoke an emotional response. I am writing this to help those people that are tempted to send off a good zinger of an attack email. If you understand what it does to the person on the receiving end, then perhaps it will stop you from doing it. It helps stop me. Here is how I process an attack email:
The first thing that happens is that I don’t really want to read the email when I see it in my inbox. The one I got on Monday was 14 paragraphs and 770 words, so I instinctively knew it was not going to be good.
I do a quick speed read for offensive or attack words – in this case there were quite a few.
I try to pick out the important information while avoiding the attacks and barbs and I reply what is needed while resisting the urge to attack back.
I do a little happy dance and pat myself on the back for being so strong and for not engaging any more. Wow – my work this year has really paid off. (Imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t done all this personal work. I would have sent an attack back and the conflict would last a good week…based on my experience).
Then I try to get on with what I was doing before I got the attack email. In this case, I was working from home at my desk. Oh darn, billable hours got impacted. My day had a little cloud inserted that now I have to deal with.
I realize I need to do some stuff so I can go back to concentrating on my work.
I journal. I go back and re-read the email. I break it down and see how it fits the pattern and analyse it.
I contemplate calling my friend, but I don’t. I know that doesn’t work (see my blog on ranting).
I think what a complete idiot my ex is.
I contemplate how to get even. I resist getting even.
I scrub my porch.
I go for a walk.
I go to bed.
Hey! On Tuesday I’m better and work productively all day.
On Wednesday I start thinking about it again. I feel pretty good about it. Should I follow up with my ex and go through what happened to prevent it from happening again?
Nah – I’ll write this blog post instead.
and then I’ll write this one.
by Renee leNobel | Apr 23, 2015 | Divorce
“they say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!”
– George Orwell
I’ve been getting a lot of lessons lately about how time heals all wounds. People tell me it takes time, things will get better in time and I will look back on this and laugh in the future.
That said, according to other people (and the quote above), the hurt never really goes away.
I know my hurt and pain from my divorce has not gone away yet but I do feel back to normal on most days. But that is not what I wanted to write about.
I want to write about short term time because I’ve come to realize that even just ten minutes can be enough to make me feel better and it is knowing that fact that gets me through some fairly emotionally painful situations.
The first person to introduce this concept to me was my divorce coach. I had just found out that my soon-to-be ex husband had filed for divorce without telling me and then he refused to find somewhere else to stay. I’m not saying I didn’t play a part in this but at that time I was in shock. Almost anything could trigger me and put me into a state of anxiety or depression in those early days of divorce. Every other day, I was packing an overnight bag so I could go and stay with a friend so I didn’t have to be in the same space as my soon-to-be ex. As I walked away from my life and my kids (whom I’d never been away from before), I would get very emotional and I basically stayed in that state full time with reoccurring spikes on an hourly basis.
Anytime I started to explain my situation to anyone, like my divorce coach, I would relive the pain and start crying so my coach taught me a trick so I could calm myself in order to function. This trick was called tapping or EFT and there is a lot of theory behind it and how it works, but all I know is that it stopped me from thinking the thought that was making me cry and injected five to ten minutes of time into my life. After tapping for as little as five minutes I was always more calm. In a lot of situations I was laughing at myself as people wondered what the heck I was doing.
As time went along, I started learning new techniques and strategies, such as meditation (which I still struggle with), stopping what I’m doing and starting something else, writing and just being in the moment and letting the emotion flow through me. All four of these techniques involve time and I’ve noticed over the past two years that I always feel better after having taken some form of time.
What I’ve also noticed is that it is this recognition of how time saves me that makes my days easier to get through. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn as I’m a type A personality and I’ve always tried to use my time efficiently and in the past, sitting on the coach and staring at the wall was not what I considered efficient.
Now, instead of getting bogged down in emotional pain and fighting my way through it so I can be efficient, I let time do the work. If I’m having a bad moment, I use one of my strategies to inject time.
If I’m in conflict with someone, such as sitting through a mediation session with my ex-husband, and we are stuck, I will get up and take a five to ten minute break.
If I’m in conflict with someone and it is turning into a back and forth argument over email. I stop myself from replying for a day.
If I’m just generally sad, I will cry for twenty minutes or for however long it takes until I feel like doing something else. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly actually), after twenty minutes of crying, I always feel like doing something else.
If I’m angry, I sit down and write an email to the person I’m angry with, and then I send it to MYSELF.
I tell myself what I now know to be true. I may be sad, angry and feeling like things are hopeless, but I know in two days and maybe even just one, I will not even be able to remember that emotion because I will be feeling good again.
by Renee leNobel | Apr 15, 2015 | Divorce
In the years leading up to my divorce I used to get together with my friends and we would (ahem – occasionally) sit around and discuss how irritating our partners were being at the moment.
As things got more dire between myself and my ex-husband this became the only thing I ever really talked about. I kept a mental list of how I had been wronged by my ex and I would go around and get everyone’s opinion on whether I was being reasonable or not. I got very good at explaining everything that had happened to lead up to the latest incident and I prided myself on how I was interpreting the situation in a fair and objective manner. When I got the support I was looking for, I felt even more justified in feeling (just a tad) sorry for myself.
I used to think this strategy of talking out my grievances was an effective self-care strategy until I realized one day that while my friends and family love me and support me, they could do nothing to stop my ex from doing the things that upset me. In fact, no one could. One day a huge wave of hopelessness overtook me as I realized that I would have to deal with this unreasonable person for a very long time (my children are young). I like to think of this list of grievances as complaints I had taken to the court of my brain. They had been filed with the court, argued and decided with the help of a jury of my friends and family. I was waiting for my ex-spouse to be sentenced.
On this day when the wave of hopelessness overtook me, I had projected this catalogued list of grievances into my future. I would have to deal with this unreasonable person who would continue to do things that upset me for the rest of my life and I realized he would never be sentenced for his wrongs in a way that would satisfy me.
That day I knew I couldn’t continue as I had been.
I started to keep track of what made me feel the worst.
I noticed that when I immediately surrounded myself by people after an upsetting incident and ranted and complained it took a lot longer for me to get over the incident. In fact, people would ask me how I was doing a few days later and that would trigger me to relive the incident and I would get upset at the injustice of it again.
I also noticed that when I ranted and raved about the incident in an email that I sent to myself, it slightly helped take away my urge to rant to others.
I noticed that if I tried to pick out positive results of this latest incident, I also got over it faster. For example, I really have to thank my ex-spouse for helping me learn how to deal with difficult people. This may sound cheeky and like I’m being factitious, but no one can get along with everyone and prior to my divorce I would either get along with everyone or avoid them. I cannot avoid my ex-spouse and so I am learning how to deal with him so I don’t feel upset. This skill has changed my life.
I noticed that if I spent my time gathering evidence for the court of opinion, I had no time to focus on my personal growth and happiness and entire days of my life would be lost to feelings of anger.
And I noticed that when I stopped talking to my friends about incidents they went away from my brain.
So the next time you find yourself gossiping or complaining about someone, ask yourself, who are you serving?
by Renee leNobel | Apr 14, 2015 | Divorce
Last night I went to a workshop on personal boundaries: identifying them, maintaining them, and communicating them to others. I went out of interest’s sake as I’ve always thought I had fairly good personal boundaries and I see myself as a strong independent confident type of person. Plus the workshop was free and the accountant in me loves getting free training and ideas (more on that below).
I got a bit of a twinge when the facilitator read off some of the signs of unhealthy personal boundaries such as:
- going against personal values in order to please others
- giving as much as you can for the sake of giving
- taking as much as you can for the sake of taking (um… see above)
- feeling bad or guilty when you say no,
as I had just spent the day having a back and forth email “conversation” with my Co-parent (I will call him that as opposed to my Ex to maintain positive thoughts when I think of him). My Co-parent and I were in disagreement over something he thought I should do and which I thought I shouldn’t.
My Co-parent sent the first request at 8:30 am and proceeded to send four follow up emails throughout the day to try to convince me do something he clearly thought was my duty to do.
Oh – I should mention that another sign of unhealthy personal boundaries is:
- expecting others to fill your needs automatically
Now that I’m writing this I can see that both my Ex and I have some work to do on our personal boundaries. I actually started my work about a year ago and my Ex (oh wait, I mean Co-parent, I’m getting a little caught up as I write this) has been helping to train me ever since.
The main principal behind the personal training I started a year ago is…………..DO NOT DEFEND MYSELF!
This is hard hard work for a self-proclaimed people pleaser who wants everyone to just get along and be happy.
Every email my Co-parent sent yesterday was like a little prod for me to send off a defensive and justifying response. I literally had to get up and remove myself from my work-space so I didn’t accidentally send an email back.
I also got my friend to remind me not to send a response.
I also knew that I had to send a response so I sent it to myself (this surprisingly helps). Just the action of writing all my anger out in a blaming, attacking, defending email and then actually sending it to someone, even it is just my dummy email account, makes me feel better. Tip – make sure you remove the email address on the email that you are replying to before you start replying or you might be tempted to “accidentally” hit send when you read your well justified and incredibly well written response).
Why don’t I defend myself when I know I’m right and I also know I’m being reasonable?
Because I’m being reasonable based on my own personal boundaries and they are clearly different from my Co-parent’s.
I have learned that my Co-parent and actually any person with personal boundaries that are unique from mine, can pick holes in my defense. You put a wall up and someone who is motivated to do so will find ways in.
Then what happens is you spend time plugging the holes with more defensive material and the next thing you know you just lost a day where you could have spent doing something you wanted to do as opposed to manning the battlements.
I still have work to do on this, as in a way this blog post is a defense of my strategy. Time is helping, but I will leave the topic of time for another day.
by Renee leNobel | Nov 24, 2014 | Divorce
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
-Lao Tzu
I’ve always avoided borrowing things in my life (ok, except my neighbour’s tools after my ex got ours in the split) but thanks to my aunt who gave me this idiom today I realised that I borrow trouble. I borrow trouble with my negative future focus.
When I start thinking about the future I get fearful and start imagining the worst will happen, even though experience tells me that the worst never does happen. My default future focus seems to be worst case scenario. I’m still debating with myself if my fear outlook came preset at birth or if I learned it.
I grew up in the 80s and at that time the concern was nuclear weapons. Movies like Mad Max, The Terminator and Threads cast a shadow over the future for me at that time. Books I was reading in school were the likes of the Chrysalids, Brave New World and 1984. As the threat of a nuclear holocaust faded (about the time I graduated in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down), other threats rose to take their place such as the war in the Middle East and Climate Change. All my life I have taken these fears on as my own and combined them with with personal fears such as tragic death, poverty and and unhappiness.
I lived in a fearful imagined future and the worst part about it? I would change my present to avoid that future. I would alter things dramatically in the present so that imagined future would become less clear. Or I would rip the bandaid off. Ever do that? I would force the bad into the present just to get used to it. It’s no wonder I was unhappy. I was spending my present moments trying to dodge an imagined future or getting myself used to it.
Then I became aware of what I was doing. The trigger to my self awareness was my divorce and the spiral downward that accompanied it. I could not fathom how I had become so unhappy. I started to realise my thoughts were the culprit. I got a lot of help with this – from Byron Katie and my life coach.
My life coach would point out when I was thinking about the future and I started noting how miserable my future focus made me.
That was the first step. Noticing. The second step has been to come up with positive futures. This is hard. My thoughts still go to bad and I can get trapped there for a while. Today I spent a good four hours in bad future when my ex started arguing about how we would share the kids at Christmas. I immediately went to rip the bandaid off and pictured myself all alone for the entire two weeks of the Christmas break. And then I started to remember what I’m learning. I started practicing a different picture of Christmas. A good one, where I would get the kids in the morning (when they are still filled with excitement) and he would get them at dinner (when I’m usually exhausted by it all). This is what he wants. It would work.
I’ve come to this realisation after a day spent borrowing trouble. I’ll cotton on quicker in the future.
