People Turn Up When you need them

People Turn Up When you need them

by | Oct 21, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

“People turn up in your life when you need them.”

Someone said this to me recently, essentially predicting her own appearance in mine. At the time, what I was actually thinking was: I do not need this person in my life at all. She’d blown in the door and immediately started “advising” me on how I was living wrong. Within two minutes of meeting her, she’d decided I was too analytical and needed to think with my heart instead of my head. Then she went further: being analytical, she informed me, was the actual reason I was unhappy.

I was a little thrown by this and immediately started analyzing it, which, yes, is exactly the thing she was accusing me of. I take in information, I sort it, I decide whether it supports or contradicts what I already believe. She’d read me correctly, and honestly, it was a little impressive how fast she’d figured that much out. So I agreed: yes, I’m analytical. But I’m also pretty happy that way, so her actual argument, that this was making me unhappy, didn’t hold. Thinking with my head has never been the problem, whatever she believed.

She didn’t love that response and spent the next hour explaining exactly why I was wrong and needed to adopt her belief system instead. She upped the pressure by informing me I looked older than my age, also apparently a symptom of my unhappiness.

You might be wondering why I sat there listening for that long. I’ll direct you to my earlier post on personal boundaries. In hindsight, the better move would have been to just stop defending myself and walk away much sooner, something I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life, since the people-pleasing gene runs strong in me.

Eventually I did walk away, and went to read How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. That book showed up exactly when I needed it. The timing was funny too: my attacker had just told me I needed to dye my hair, and here was Caitlin Moran questioning why women spend so much energy maintaining a youthful appearance while men spend that same energy trying to get ahead.

Eventually the woman got the hint and left me alone, and I sat with what had just happened. (I’m analytical. Of course I sat with it.)

What I landed on was the difference between coaching and advising. My own coach listens to what I actually say and helps me work out what matters to me and what’s actually driving me forward. That’s a completely different thing from someone who’s already decided how life works and is trying to install that belief system in you. Coaching worked for me. I don’t have to force myself into things; I already want to do the things I end up doing. Advising worked too, for a while, back when I actually followed what people told me to do. But eventually the gap between how I was living and what I actually valued left me stuck. Living someone else’s version of my life stopped moving me forward at all.

After all that thinking, I landed on the one thing she said that I actually agreed with: people do turn up in your life exactly when you need them. It just sometimes takes a bit of work, and a bit of analysis, to see why.

Empathy Works Both Ways

by | Oct 15, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Empathy Works Both Ways

Empathy is an interesting thing. I’ve always felt like I have a bit too much of it. I empathize easily with someone in pain, and I’ll spend a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to help them. If I can’t, I feel bad about it.

For a long time, I thought of this as a trait that mostly benefited other people and mildly cost me, all that energy spent trying to solve problems that weren’t mine, followed by guilt whenever I couldn’t fix them.

Recently I had a bit of a rethink. Empathy has actually been helping me more than I realized. Understanding that other people are carrying their own real struggles helps put my own in perspective, and my own problems often start looking a lot smaller by comparison. My life starts looking pretty good. I get happier. Things flow better.

This came up recently while thinking through a hypothetical I sometimes use with clients: two co-parents, newly separated, splitting time with their kids roughly evenly, each trying to rebuild their own life around a new schedule. One of them is stepping back into paid work after years focused on the kids, and she’s scared her kids will feel abandoned and that she’ll miss them on the weeks they’re gone. The other is taking on a much bigger share of hands-on parenting than before, and he’s stuck on the fact that he’s still paying support while doing more parenting than he ever has.

In a conversation like that, it’s easy to watch two people get more and more entrenched in their own position, each one certain they’ve drawn the short straw; each one stops actually hearing the other. Once people get to comparing whose situation is worse, they’ve usually stopped listening entirely.

Watching a dynamic like that, what strikes me is how much unseen fear is actually shared between them. Both people are stepping into something new. Both are afraid of what they’re about to lose. If either one could actually see that the other person’s fear is just as real as their own, they’d probably stop spending all their energy defending their own hurt and start being curious about the other person’s instead.

That’s what real collaboration looks like when it happens naturally. And it comes from exactly one place: empathy for the person on the other side of the table.

Sometimes the gap is too wide in the moment, the dislike too fresh, the fear too loud. In those cases, the best move is usually just a break. Time and distance, given enough of it, tend to let a little natural empathy creep back in on its own.

Know Yourself First

by | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Know Yourself First

When I realized my marriage was over, one of the first things I started thinking about was how much harder my life was about to get. Everything was going to be harder. I was becoming a single parent for half my waking hours, starting that new chapter with drastically reduced finances. Those thoughts were part of why I’d tried to hold the marriage together for as long as I did; it genuinely seemed easier than starting over with a whole new set of harder circumstances.

I went into my divorce carrying a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. I also felt like everyone else- my ex, my lawyer, the broader machinery of how divorce is “supposed” to happen- was the one actually controlling my life. I didn’t feel like I had any say in what came next.

So I switched to autopilot and tried to get through the entire process as fast as possible.

I drove myself through the divorce without ever pausing to actually figure out what I wanted. We used the Collaborative Approach, and after five months of meetings, we had a draft agreement and were essentially done. It took five months mostly because we could only manage one four-way legal meeting per month; coordinating three- to four-hour sessions across four busy schedules wasn’t fast. Our lawyers kept trying to get us talking about what actually mattered to each of us. Mostly I just thought, can we skip the needs and values part and get on with it?

Then I went through a six-week back-to-work program for women. The same thing happened during the early self-analysis portion: can we get on with it? I need to write my resume.

Eventually I was done. Divorce finalized, resume in hand.

But I was no closer to actually knowing what I wanted. Still running on fear. Still convinced the best part of my life was already behind me.

And nothing was working. No job offers. Resumes disappearing into total silence. I was stuck, scared, and unhappy.

Things only started moving once I actually took the time to figure out what mattered to me. Yes, I went on the full mid-life soul-searching bender, because I finally hit the point where fear stopped pushing me forward and started freezing me in place entirely.

Figuring out what actually drives you is an ongoing thing; it never really stops, but about six months into that search, I had a list of my seven core values, because I’m a type-A accountant and I like my lists, and I put it up on my wall.

That list turned out to be genuinely useful for decision-making, especially around money. It helped me figure out both how I wanted to earn it and how I wanted to spend it.

If you’re finding money decisions hard, the way through is some good old-fashioned self-reflection. Once you actually know yourself, it stops being hard to tell when a spending choice is wrong for you, and it becomes obvious when one is right.

How Do You View the Past?

by | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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How Do You View the Past?

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’re living with challenging circumstances, it’s hard not to let your current situation colour your thoughts about the past, present, and future.

When I was going through my divorce, I was looking for proof of how I’d gotten to that point. In the thick of it, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I’d mine my own memories for evidence that I was never meant to marry that person in the first place. Then I’d beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory pointed to the same conclusion: we were never supposed to be together. How could it have taken me twenty years to realize this?

So I decided to try not to think about it at all.

Since I’d shared twenty years of my life with this person, that meant wiping out a good chunk of genuinely happy memories along with it. I went further still and reasoned that my childhood had led me to this partner in the first place, so I wrote off those memories too. My whole life path had funnelled into one single point of failure: divorce. Failure kept looping through my brain. All I had left, or so it felt, was one failed marriage, no career, and unhappy kids.

People, and plenty of self-help books, told me to hold onto the good moments I’d shared with my ex, hoping to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing, letting my past overshadow my present and future. Because that’s exactly what was happening. I was projecting my past straight into my future, and it was stopping me cold. What was the point of a future that looked just like my very unhappy past?

My coach helped me find a way out of that loop by helping me shift how I saw my present.

She started by telling me it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was my relationship with one specific person. From there, she helped me define what success actually meant to me, on my own terms, and helped me find real evidence that I’d already succeeded by that definition.

Once I started seeing that, my past began to look different too. I was focused now on where I’d actually succeeded, by my own measure. And once I could see that clearly, she pointed out something else: my past had gotten me exactly to where I was standing. All those things I’d filed away as mistakes were really just lessons, specific to me, moving me closer to what I actually wanted out of life.

None of this was a quick fix. It took real time and real practice.

But the recipe itself is simple: look for the success already present in your current life, and the evidence you find there will reach backward into your memories and forward into a future worth having.

The Rules We Make up and then live by

by | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Rules We Make Up and Then Live By

I think about a certain kind of conversation I’ve had more than once over the years, always some version of the same shape. Someone in the middle of a hard divorce, scared of what a judge might decide, has quietly built a set of rules for herself that make her fear feel like fact rather than fear.

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The shape usually goes something like this. She’s the higher earner in the marriage. Her ex works in a less lucrative field, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. Everyone else assumes she loves her work: successful, outgoing, good at it. Then it comes out that she doesn’t, not really. She stayed because someone had to earn enough to support the family, and she’s quietly dreamed for years of doing something else entirely. But she believes she can’t act on that now, because a court might read a career change as a deliberate attempt to dodge support obligations.

Then the resentment starts flowing toward the ex: if he’d just go back to a higher-paying job he’s clearly capable of, this whole calculation would look different. Why should she be the one stuck carrying an obligation that traces back to a choice he made.

The underlying belief, stated plainly, usually sounds something like: everyone has to work; that’s just how it is. Which really means: everyone has to take the highest-paying job available, whether they’re happy in it or not, and choosing otherwise is either selfish or naive.

I’ve pushed back on this kind of thinking before, and it tends to get a little heated, because underneath it are a few unspoken rules that feel like settled fact to the person holding them. Something like: you have to take the best-paying job you’re capable of if you have kids and responsibilities; otherwise, you’re flaky. Work generally sucks, and if you actually like what you do, it doesn’t really count as work. And life is inherently unfair, so whatever position you happened to hold at the moment of separation, you’re now locked into for good.

What strikes me every time is how quickly these get treated as facts about the world rather than one person’s fear-based read on their own situation. They’re not the only possible outcome. They’re just the outcome that becomes far more likely once someone decides the rule is true and stops looking for any other path.

That’s the real trap. Not the divorce, not the finances, but the rules someone builds for themselves along the way and then quietly agrees to be governed by, permanently.

If I could say one thing to anyone caught in that pattern, it would be this: hold your own rules up to the light before you decide to live inside them forever. Ask what you actually want, separate from the fear driving the rule. There’s usually more room to move than the rule wants you to believe.