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 | Apr 4, 2015 | Divorce
In Lynne Twist’s book, The Soul Of Money, she writes:
For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it.
When I first read the above quote I wanted to know how Lynne Twist knew exactly what was going on in my head everyday when I woke up. My waking up thoughts also ran along the lines of “I can’t do it,” “I don’t want to do it,” and “what’s the point of getting out of bed anyway?”
These were just thoughts and while they never actually stopped me from getting out of bed (my needy kids made sure I would get up), I’ve come to realize that at one point I truly believed these thoughts. It is no wonder that every day felt like a battle and my enthusiasm for life was gone.
Once I became aware of these negative waking thoughts, I started to keep a mental catalog of how often I had them. I started to notice them. I have to say that noticing how often my thoughts were negative was fairly depressing in itself. This led to further negative thoughts along the lines of “I must just be a negative, unmotivated person.”
I did this for a long time. I attached myself to my thoughts and used them to judge myself.
And then one day I stopped.
Because while I was noticing my negative thoughts, I was also noticing how much harder my days were. I was noticing that if I chose to do something else, and it could be anything that would stop me from buying into and believing my negative thoughts, my overall day wasn’t as hard to get through. This became a bit of a balancing act. I did not want to become too busy and lose all time for self-reflection, yet at the same time I had to learn to distance myself and not buy into my negative thoughts or I’d end up exhausted at the end of the day.
I’m not exactly sure when I stopped: a month, two months from the day I first started tracking my negative thoughts? All I know is that I did stop because now when I wake up I acknowledge those thoughts are still there and then I laugh at myself, get out of bed and get on with living the day I want to live.
When you’re in the midst of starting over and trying to change your life, it is important to recognise that the thoughts going through your head do not define you. For me, it took time and noticing to move me past getting drained and sucked into my negative thinking. Eventually something clicked.
If negative thoughts are getting you down, start noticing them and questioning them. Don’t judge yourself when you do get sunk by them and give yourself time to build a boundary between your thoughts and what defines you as you. This is just one step in helping you create and maintain the change you want in your life.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 17, 2015 | Divorce
Congratulations. Finalizing a separation agreement is a major achievement and usually comes at the end of a very stressful and emotional period in your life.
Signing a separation agreement will likely have a strong emotional impact on you. It is tangible evidence that your old life, the one you once had hopes and dreams for, is finally done. Signing your agreement can leave you feeling aimless as suddenly, the agreement, which has been your entire focus for your life in recent memory, is complete. But the separation agreement is not the end. It is the beginning of your new life post divorce.
The first thing you now need to do is stop.
You have been running hard and still have momentum from your old life driving you forward. You are on automatic pilot and are just trying to get through the days of your new reality.
But this is your new life and you get to design it the way you want.
One of the first things to do is give yourself some time to process the fact that you just signed your separation agreement. The day I signed, my lawyer said to me “Don’t underestimate the emotional impact that signing this agreement will have on you.” And even though she said this to me, I was still unprepared. I had big expectations that my life was suddenly going to be fine now that I no longer had to deal with my ex-spouse. Instead, feelings of sadness and failure took over. My current understanding that only one part of my life has failed, my relationship with my ex-spouse, came to me after allowing myself time to grieve. Giving myself time enabled me to more forward.
Time also helped me understand that I could design my life the way I wanted to. I did not have to try to cobble together the pieces of my old life as the only way forward. I had to take time to figure out what was important to me. For many newly separated people, this is a dramatic shift. Up until separation, you were leading a life based on shared values or even leading a life based on a spouse’s values. It is important to take the time to reassess what is important in your new life if you want to successfully move forward.
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.
by Renee leNobel | Nov 10, 2014 | Divorce
There are many of negative thoughts out there that keep a person stuck in one place. I know because these thoughts kept me stuck: I let those thoughts control my actions.
One thought that keeps turning up in my life is “I can’t do it.” This is accompanied with “I am not good, smart, ambitious, deserving. (insert any positive adjective here) enough.”
I don’t know when I internalised this thought and then started living my life according to it, but I didn’t discover that this thought was in the driver’s seat of my life until my divorce. Since then I have been aware of this thought and working at ways to not let it rule me. I know it is working because now instead of it being me saying “oh no, I couldn’t do that.” I have people saying to me – “wow, you have accomplished so much…. I could never do that, I not smart, driven (insert positive adjective here) like you.”
I had four people say this to me last week in one form or another and it was quite surprising. How had I gone from being the person saying “I can’t do it.” to the person that is saying to others “you can do it”?
The first step for me was recognising that most of my inner dialogue throughout my life had been defeatist, often verging on self-loathing. I started journaling (I can hear the protests now: “I can’t journal” from some of you reading this. I always thought I couldn’t journal either. I told myself that and guess what? That was pretty self-fulfilling).
Ok, so I started journaling and documenting my inner thoughts. They were pretty negative and then I got self-loathing about that! For about two weeks I was saying to myself, “I can’t do it and how can I ever be expected to do it because I was born self-loathing.” Actually, that might have been more than two weeks.. That was a bit of a vicious whirlpool I was in for a while.
So then I read something else. Those thoughts that I was having? They weren’t mine. Nope. They were put there by society (darn you society).
At that point, it started becoming slightly funny and almost game-like. When my mood started to go down, I would try to identify the thought that was taking me there. And there was always something. Those thoughts are sneaky and can sometimes catch you unawares and send you spiralling down before you notice. That is the game for me, catching them before they do that.
That is essentially all I had to do. It took me a long time to figure it out but I finally did. What is amazing is that it completely ties into the idea that you manifest your thoughts. For a good chunk of my life I manifested “I can’t do it.” and now I am manifesting “I can do it.” It was simply a matter of recognition and belief.
Do you believe and listen to the thought that you can’t do it? Do you often say to others who you perceive to be more successful “but you are smart, driven, lucky etc.” and use that as an excuse as to why you can’t do it? I want to challenge you to recognise this thought for what it is. It is just a thought that is only true because you have made it so. You have manifested that thought in your life.
You can change. I know you can because I have first-hand experience. I have overcome a 40 year deeply entrenched personal mantra of “I can’t do it” within the space of a year.
But only you can do this… and I know you can.
