Divorce is like a parting of the ways
Your divorce is going to be one of the major change points in your life and it is going to change drastically. One of the most important things you can do right now is to take some time to think about how you want your life to be in the future.
Perhaps you’ve initiated the divorce, perhaps your partner did or it might even be a mutual decision that you have both come to. No matter what it is easy to get trapped into looking backwards. Regrets or recriminations can occupy your thoughts and stop you from paying enough attention to where you are going.
Life is a journey and like any journey it’s important to know where you are going or else you can spend a lot of time and a lot of energy going around in circles. It’s easy to see divorce as a destination. There is lots to think about and plan but divorce is really just a divergence in paths.
Your journey as you flow through life is like a river. You were flowing along your life path and the path of your husband or wife was next to yours like a road running alongside a river. Now that is changing and you will be required to separate and head off in different directions. Only you can choose which way your life will flow.
Can you see why it might be important to think about what you want your life to be like in the future?
I know that is easier said than done, especially if you were not the one who left or initiated the divorce proceedings. You might still be going through the process of accepting the fact that your marriage is over. So reaching that acceptance may be the first step for you to get on with your life.
Is your marriage really over?
Only you know if your marriage is really over. If you think it is in the control of your spouse, think again. For many people, especially those who have been married for a long time it takes time to accept that your marriage is really over. You might have periods of making up or perhaps dates and make up sex only to realise in the light of day it’s not going to work.
It’s generally easier to see that the marriage is over if one or the other of you takes a new partner but even then you can find yourself waiting till they get that out of their system and come back to you.
So how do you decide that your marriage is really over?
One way is to use some of the writing and journal writing techniques to connect to what your inner wisdom already knows.
Sometimes it can seem like our thoughts are like a mouse on an exercise wheel. We go round and round with the same thoughts in our mind. Writing can break through that to go deeper beyond our superficial thought into our true knowledge of our situation.
Journal Writing
Write down what you are thinking and feeling and then later come back and re-read it and write about what that makes you think and feel.
If writing isn’t your think you can record your thoughts on a tape recorder or other recording device and play it back. There is something that really seems to connect from putting pen to paper though, perhaps it’s the involvement of your body in the process so do give writing a go.
The two handed technique
A very powerful approach to connect the left and right hemispheres of your brain and bring out some of your unconscious thoughts is to use the two handed writing technique.
Use your journal or other paper if having a neat journal is important to you and draw a line down the middle of the page. Using your preferred hand write yourself a question.
Is my marriage really over? for example. Switch the pen to the other hand and write an answer. Don’t worry if you can’t read it very well. You know what you wrote. Now go back to the other hand and ask a question about that answer.
You will find yourself going around in circles and often you might feel blocked like there is nothing to write. Just keep asking a question like Why? until you break through.
Do this exercise for a set period of time, twenty to thirty minutes perhaps, every day and your real feelings and knowing will become clear to you.
Coaching or other outside help
Unless the strain of the situation has taken too hard a toll on your mental health I prefer coaching as a methodology over counselling or psychology unless you can find a forward facing practitioner. Raking through the entrails of your dead marriage will only cause pain and bitterness and often leads your thoughts to polarise.
If that happens rather than remembering your marriage as it was you can end up seeing your spouse as being in the wrong and you being the victim. It’s never good to imagine yourself as a victim and when we are talking about a relationship ending it is not even true. Fault finding is a waste of your time.
Yes by all means take the learnings, think about the things that you would do differently in your future but don’t allow anyone to cast you into a powerless victim role. Friends and other people who love you may do this without meaning to as they attempt to support you so be careful of that.
If you do let yourself think you are a victim you’ll loose the chance to learn what you need to learn and may find yourself repeating a similar relationship in the future. You don’t want that! You want an even better one.
Focusing on strength, resilience and learning now and designing your future are much better ways to occupy yourself.
It’s over. Now what?
If you know that your marriage is over then it’s time to let the past fall away behind you and to turn your thoughts to the future.
What do you want to be, do and have in your life?
- What will it look like?
- Who are the people you want to have in your life?
- What kinds of relationships with other people do you want to have?
- Where do you want to live?
Where would you like to be in six months? In twelve months? In five years from now?
Perhaps you feel like you are blocked and having to wait while you finalise your divorce but that doesn’t mean you can’t begin to think about your future.
Do you have children?
If that is the case then your life isn’t flowing off alone at all. They are probably going to be having their lives running alongside yours. If you are sharing custody with your ex then there will be changes to how it was in the past. Like a road along side a river they will run parallel with you some of the time and other times will not.
Spend some time with your journal writing about what you want your future to be like. Once again this can be challenging if you are still finding the future clouded but remember it’s your life. If you don’t decide what you want then you’ll get what you get.
I’m not talking here about the specifics of your marriage settlement or child custody arrangements. You’ll have professionals helping to guide you through the process of coming to those agreements and negotiating the legal frameworks that those arrangements are bound by. It will make it much easier though if you have some clarity about how you want your future to be.
The Collaborative Divorce Process is the best way I know to manage the divorce process. My husband is a collaborative lawyer so I know the ideals and intentions behind this still small group of lawyers who are working to popularise this method. They want to give the power in the process back to the people who are most affected and provide support to couples ending their marriages in a respectful and collaborative way. Most of the Collaborative Lawyers I know had either walked away from family law or were doing the minimum of cases they could because of their distress about the impact of the traditional process on families. They are excited about the opportunity to participate in a more constructive process.
Forgiveness process
The next bit of this post might get a bit “woo woo” for you but I believe it’s important to the healing process and and I ask that you at least consider it.
When we are with people we connect with them energetically.
Science really isn’t good at understanding things that can’t be seen or measured and so in western cultures we tend to pretend that things that can’t be scientifically proved don’t exist. Our human Energy is a classic example of this.
We know that some people “feel” good to be around and others are really draining. We’ve all experienced being around someone we care about and knowing that something wasn’t right with them although they didn’t say or do anything obvious to indicate that.
Many of us have experienced some of the eastern healing modalities or other body work by a practitioner who understands energy. We might not know what happened but we know we feel better after the session. In the east energy is understood through centuries of study and experiential knowledge passed down from generation to generation.
When we are married to someone or even if we spend a short time with someone we connect energetically. I was married for over twenty years and for me the energetic tie with my ex husband was like a massive cord connecting us and not easily let go of.
The process I used was one from NLP called the Forgiveness Process which is used to cut the energetic ties so that you can either reconnect in a new, more empowering way or allow the person to go off and live their own life while you do the same. From personal experience I can say that it made all the difference to me in my ability to move forward with my life and in reducing my ex husbands ability to hurt me with his words or actions.
There are without doubt other methods of achieving the same end and I’d recommend you contact an NLP practitioner near you (this is a process you would probably want to do in person rather than over the phone) or talk about it with your practitioner if you are working with someone else who understands energetic connections.