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Regardless of whether you left or were
left, there are negative coping behaviors that you will want
to avoid because they make matters worse.
Negative coping behaviors include:
Also see THE Four Stages Of Grief
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- Isolating. Pulling away from other people
like a deer on the side of the road to lick your wounds.
Isolating leaves you prey to your imagination. It makes
it difficult to keep perspective.
- Obsessing. Often accompanies isolating. The
more you obsess the less you are able to function, care
for your children, and the longer it will take for you
to get through the divorce.
- Compulsive activities. Frustration, anger
with no one to take it out on and fear often trigger
increased eating, drinking, and spending to try to
relieve upset. However, what makes you feel better for
the moment often causes you to lose self-respect and
experience shame later on, two things you don’t need to
feel any more of.
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- Getting even. You will be very tempted to get
even with your ex and you’ll find more than enough
reasons to justify it. But when you focus on retaliating
it makes the divorce more costly and more painful. The
children are also hurt more by this reaction, as they
feel thrust into the middle of this mess.
- Wearing out your friends and family. This is
the opposite extreme from isolating. This is when you
lean on and on top of your friends instead of leaning
into them for support. Even good friends can become
exhausted when you keep saying and doing the same things
and “Yes, butting” all their suggestions. When you come
off as too needy you will burn out people out and
they’ll start to avoid you.
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- Feeling sorry for yourself.
When you think of yourself as a victim and wait for
the world to fix your problems and life, you’re in
for a very long wait.
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Just as there are negative coping behaviors, there are
positive coping behaviors that can actually help improve your
situation. These include: Be around people. Pain is pain;
suffering is being alone with pain. If you push yourself to be
with people in your misery, suffering that you can’t live with
becomes pain that you can. TOP
- Do things that give you back some sense of power and
control over your life such as keeping your divorce papers
in order (with the originals in a safety deposit box and
copies in a file at home), changing your assets that are
listed in both you and your ex’s names to yours, letting
creditors know of your divorce and having them notify you as
soon as your ex stops making payments to protect your credit
rating, keeping good records of your ex’s payments so you
don’t let it build up to a larger amount, keeping records of
children’s expenses, and sitting down with financial
advisors to review your investments.
- Try what your close friends suggest. If you get to share
your pain with your most caring friends, they get to have
you try their helpful suggestions if you can’t think of any
alternative solutions.
- Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Have a realistic
attitude and approach to your ex. Don’t count on him to make
it easy for you. If he does, considerate it gravy. A helpful
tool to aid you in being realistic is called the Him/You
Inventory.
For example with regard to Children, you might write: I can
rely on him to be caring when he’s with the children; I can’t
rely on him to be on time and be consistent with his
visitation; He can rely on me to be civil to him and not
bad-mouth him to the kids; He can’t rely on me to be friendly
when he tries to joke his way out of being unpredictable about
picking up and dropping off the kids. After you fill out the
chart send it to your ex with a blank one. Tell him you’d like
him (if he’s willing) to make corrections on yours from his
point of view and then to fill out the blank chart with regard
to you. Then consider using this as vehicle to work toward
having more constructive conversations with him (again if he’s
willing). TOP
Healing — why settle for being scarred or scared?
Dealing with your upset rationally is okay, but don’t
intellectualize and try to convince yourself that you’re okay
when you’re not. Like an abscess that can’t heal until it’s
drained, awful feelings can’t be healed until you feel them.
The three steps to
doing this are:
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1. Admit all your feelings to
yourself (including anger, hurt, depression, fear, disap-
pointment, etc).
2. Feel your feelings by filling
in: “When and why I felt most depressed was
________.”
Then do the same with all your other feelings. Keep in
mind that just because you think you won’t be able to
endure them, doesn’t mean you can’t.
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3. Express your
feelings to someone who is receptive to your pain. Start
your conversation by imagining they have just said to you:
“What is the worst part of this whole situation for you?”
Then be specific vs. general. The more specific you are
the easier to feel your feelings. TOP |
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On the subject of choosing the right people to
tell your feelings to, seek out different people at different
stages of your divorce. Early on seek out sympathetic people
who will let you vent and blame things on your ex. Then move
on to empathic friends (or a therapist) who will offer you
more understanding than sympathy and finally move on to wise
friends whose opinion you respect and who will not enable you
to remain stuck in self-pity.
Dealing with your feelings with the proper people will
assist you if you are ever going to meet the greatest
challenge to healing, namely forgiving and forgetting. You
will never heal if you do not accomplish this. Instead the
thread of bitterness toward your ex will contaminate the rest
of your life. TOP
You’ll forgive when you no longer need to blame. Initially
you need to blame your ex for several reasons. Blaming him
prevents you from realizing your own contribution to the
failure of your marriage that can trigger guilt, shame and
feelings of inadequacy resulting in intense depression.
Accepting your share of the responsibility for causing the
divorce will lessen your need to blame. Why do this? Because
blaming will eventually make you bitter. And bitterness is its
own punishment. You’ll forget when you no longer need to
remember. This occurs once you have learned all the right
lessons from this relationship and made them a part of who you
are and how you act. For instance one lesson you might take
from your divorce is that you really don’t know someone until
you have an argument and can totally resolve it, rather than
sweeping it under the carpet unresolved only to build up and
become worse.
Moving On — the fine art of building new memories
After you have healed to the best of your ability, it’s time
to move on. This means stepping out into life. After you’ve
learned what you would do differently if could do your
marriage over, including knowing how and why you chose to
marry him, it’s time to begin thinking about starting another
relationship. TOP
As I wrote in my book, GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY:
Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior (published by Perigee
Books), the best way to leave a loss such as divorce behind is
to build new memories. You need to build new memories to
dilute the hold that the terrible memories about your marriage
and divorce have on you. You build new memories by actions
taken not by thoughts thought or by good intentions.
Compare your life to the cross section cut trees that have
hundreds of rings, each signifying a year. Some rings indicate
when the tree flourished, some rings reveal years when it
endured fire or drought. Taken together all the rings
demonstrate the history and character of that tree. If you
borrow from the tree analogy and build new memories, then the
year of your divorce just becomes a single rotten year. But
two years from now could be the year you started met and began
dating a guy you respected and who loved you, and four years
from now, the year you re-married and started to live happily
after. TOP
If you don’t take action and don’t build new memories to
dilute the effect of the bad ones, the bad memories build and
become overpowering and can also ooze into and spoil other
parts of your life.
It will not be easy to do this and maintain it, but keep in
mind it takes 30 days for a change in behavior to become a
habit and a minimum of 6 months for a habit to become part of
your personality.
Even if you have coped and healed you may feel you’ll be
better off it you don’t try again. Maybe so, but maybe not if
the old adage “Better to have loved and lost than never to
have loved at all” or its newer version, “The only thing worse
than being married is being single” holds true.
Will Divorce Make
You Happier?
TOP | BACK
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