by Renee leNobel | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce
Divorce is usually the end result of a typical progression of circumstances.
It usually goes like this:
- You get married
- You begin navigating your married life with your partner
- You and your partner start experiencing challenging life circumstances
- You and your partner begin to realize you approach life’s challenges differently
- You attempt to negotiate with your partner on how to proceed with your marriage
- Your attempts to get along with your partner fail. (This step can take considerable time and energy)
- You, your partner or both of you decide the next step is a divorce (and by this point, you are both likely emotionally exhausted).
Now comes the hard part. Not to minimize steps 1 through 7, but people often get stuck at step 7. They decide they are done with the marriage but have no idea how to proceed to getting a divorce. It seems so daunting that some people decide to stay in the marriage. Others let the lawyers take over and others try mediation or collaboration. Some others just go their separate ways and stay legally married but live apart.
At step 7, my ex and I tried a little bit of everything. We talked to lawyers, we talked to mediators and then we picked the collaborative approach to divorce because we thought the next step after step 7 was: get a separation agreement. Because you need a separation agreement to get a divorce right? So step 8 must clearly be… get a separation agreement. We picked the collaborative approach to divorce because we wanted to stay out of the court system and the collaborative approach seemed like the best choice.
As noted, both partners are likely emotionally exhausted by the time it gets to the discussion on how to proceed with obtaining a separation agreement and both partners probably do not even feel like discussing it with their respective partner. I don’t think I would be underestimating things if I said that if you are this point, you probably really dislike your partner and do not want to have to work with them at all on anything again. After all, you couldn’t reach agreement in marriage – why should you be able to reach agreement when drafting a separation agreement?
That said, a separation agreement was fixed in my brain and my ex’s as the next step. We started working really hard at getting that agreement. We worked for nine months with our collaborative team to get that agreement. I wanted a separation agreement at all costs because now that I knew we were done, I wanted our divorce all sewed up and sorted. I know my ex did as well. We wanted to know what the rules outlining our lives were going to be so we could start living according to those new sets of rules that would be defined in our separation agreement.
We got our separation agreement. We were done right?
It did not appear that way. We had an agreement but we both had very different understandings of what it said. We spent another three months arguing over what our agreement meant and during that time we made very little progress with implementing any part of our agreement.
Every time we tried to discuss anything in our agreement, I got angry and upset and I know my ex did as well. We often reached deadlock and our conflict levels did not decrease. In fact, we ended up in court because we could not agree over one section of our agreement. What happened? We were supposed to be done once we had our agreement, but here we were in court!
It turns out that just because we had that agreement, that did not mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.
I was not done with my anger and I still could not have a constructive discussion with my ex and judging from some of the emails I was getting from my ex, he was still very angry with me.
This led me to an additional step – step 9: heal myself and let go.
Step 9 took considerable time for me and it involved many different sub-steps.
I am done now with step 9 and the interesting thing about that is that our divorce is finally truly done and over.
Many people had tried to advise me to do step 9 first and I just wasn’t able to at that time but now I wonder if it might have been a better progression. If I had been in a better emotional space (and ditto for my ex) we would have been able to listen to each other and understand each other. Our separation agreement would have been a better representation of what we both understood it to be.
I’m not sure it’s possible for most people to heal themselves before entering the process of getting a separation agreement. I would like to think with hindsight I would choose a different way if I could do it again, but I know at that time, I wanted a separation agreement at all costs.
Where are you in the process and what steps are you deciding to take?
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 | Nov 6, 2014 | Finances
You are stuck in some area of your life. You’re in debt, you’re in conflict, something has just happened to you and you are operating on autopilot just to get through the day. If this sounds familiar, I’m asking you to stop, take a break and get clarity on your personal values.
I can imagine you have similar thoughts to what I had in a similar situation: “That’s crazy! I don’t have time to stop, I’ve got things to take care of and if I stop to take time for myself, everything is going to fall apart around me!”
So you keep going. You will force yourself to get through a life you subconsciously do not buy into.
You might be able to do this for a long time, I did and then I hit my wall. Divorce. The reason I got to that point was because I wasn’t clear on my personal values, my ex wasn’t clear on his and thus it follows neither of us was clear with each other. We were both living in a situation we didn’t like, neither of us understood it and we took it out on each other. it’s not hard to see how we ended up where we did.
Eventually the impact of not living according to your values will surface. I think many of us are on a similar path in life and hit the that zone in their 40s. Mid-life crisis anyone? My ex and I were together for 10 years before we got married and we managed fine during that time. There was nothing big at stake. Then we got married and started having to make some big decisions. Getting married should have been the first one, but we thought that it couldn’t be that hard as we had been together so long without many bumps. We bought a house, we had kids, we moved countries. we moved back and we got divorced.
I am now grateful for my divorce as it forced me to search for my values. I finally made the mental connection that putting myself aside was leading to my unhappiness. I spent months resisting discovering my values and now I am spending time retraining myself to operate from my values. I still have a hard time with this, but I know I have to do this to move forward.
I can hear the excuses you are making not to do this, I can hear them because I make excuses every day to give up on this way of doing things and settling back into my old ways. But I can’t ignore the connection I have discovered between putting myself aside and my unhappiness and I cannot underestimate the joy I feel when my new life works because I am living my values.
It takes time to develop a new habit and it is easy to settle back into your old ways of doing things. Consider this one more message to help prod you in the direction of redesigning your life according to your values. And if I can’t convince you, perhaps Oprah and Deepak can.
