00:00 

Well, hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 170, "Rewriting Your Divorce Story." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright. Hey there, my friends. Glad to have you here with me today. Thank you for joining me. I love doing this podcast. Have I told you that lately? I'm so grateful to have the tools,to be able to share this kind of content and to be in a space where I have learned these things and I understand them better and I can share them with you. I know that I spent so many years not knowing these things and feeling stuck and feeling like I didn't know how to move forward. And I remember when I was married just thinking, "listen, I'm a good person. He's a good person. I can't figure this out. Why can't we make this work?" And now I feel like I understand the answer to that question because of the work that I've done and because of the things that I now understand and because of the personal growth that I've gone through in the process of doing this work. And I'm so grateful for the path and the journey that I've been on. 

01:16 

And so in that process, I was thinking this last week about the divorce journey that I've been on and how it has impacted my life and where I am as a result of the divorce. I think I am personally in such a better place because of the divorce and the place that it put me in to be able to learn, and to see, and to understand. And you know, as I look around and I see people on Facebook who are getting divorced and I see them post little snippets about their struggle and about what they're going through, it kind of breaks my heart because it is a tough thing and I know that it's really hard. But I also know that that there's a space of growth and potential here that may not be available in the marriage and I know that that's been the case for me. And so I want to talk to today a little bit about what I'm calling "rewriting your divorce story." 

02:15 

And I'm going to say, first of all, that if you're not divorced, not planning on a divorce, not thinking that maybe this is where I'm headed, this still applies to you. I'm going to talk about this concept in the context of divorce but I want you to understand that whether you are divorced or not, whether regardless of where you are, that these concepts apply to you, how we choose to rewrite our past story about things that we've gone through and struggles that we've encountered. So here's what I want us to understand, first and foremost. We get to create whatever story we want. I know this sounds crazy but we do. Every thought in our head is a made-up thought. We just make it up and then we think that we believe it. We think that it's the truth because it comes into our head. And I remember a few weeks ago when we talked about when your brain lies to you, our brains lie to us all the time, all the time. And yet we sit there and we go, "oh brain told me told me something. It must be true." No, not true. Right? When our brain tells us that we're worthless? Okay, so not true. When our brain tells us that we can't do something? So not true. How many times has your brain told you you can't do something and then you go ahead and you do it anyway? Right? Like our brains do that to us. And when we create a story about our past, whether it be a divorce or whether it be something else, that story is made up. It's just thoughts. Every thought in our brain is made up and we get to choose the stories that we want to make about our lives. What do we want to create? We get to do whatever we want. 

03:58 

So it's kind of like, you know, that analogy where they talk about all these blind people who are touching different parts of the elephant. And one says, "well, it's smooth and a little bit curved" because they're touching the ivory tusks. And somebody else is like, is touching the tail. And they're like, "well, it's, it's like a rope and it's hard and kind of rubbery." And, and somebody else is like, "no, it's not like a rope. It's like a, like a big tube." And because they're touching the the trunk. And somebody else is touching the leg and they're like, "it's like a tree stump." And all of these people are looking at a different part of the elephant. They're touching a different part of the elephant and they're all having a completely different experience because they're touching different parts. And none of them are false, but none of them are the complete story either. And so when we look at this, we get to choose whatever perspective we want to take on, in this instance, what I'm talking about here today, on our divorce. 

05:00 

Okay, for you, it may not be a divorce. It may be your marriage. It may be your parenting. It may be how you were parented. How you grew up. It may be whatever, right? Today, again in the context of divorce, but I get to choose whatever Pprspective I want to about my divorce Okay, I get to choose my story. I get to create whatever I want. And I will tell you going through divorce, something really difficult like that, it is so easy to slip into victim mode, to feel like my life is horrible, everything's wrong. I've been completely wronged by my ex-spouse by his family, by our friends who sided with him, blah blah blah, right? So easy to slip into victim mode and to think that everything is our former spouse's fault. So like my brokenness is his fault, and my finances, and my children's issues, and my living arrangements that are now not so nice, and my happiness, all of that is because of my former spouse, because of what happened between us. It's all his fault. Okay, or maybe you take this side. Everything is my fault. I have worked with clients on both sides of this. I have had a divorced client who feels like everything was their fault, right? Their brokenness, their struggle with finances, their children's issues, their decreased living circumstances, their unhappiness. Everything was their fault. They took all the responsibility for that. But here's the deal. So that puts them in a victim mode as well. 

06:37 

But here's the thing: nothing progresses when we are in victim mode, when we are in blaming mode, whether we're blaming other people or whether we're blaming ourselves. Nothing progresses. We just get stuck. And stuck is a construct of our brain. When we think about being stuck, and a lot of people use this phraseology in middle life, in mid-age, right? They're like, "I just feel like I'm stuck." Well, it's not like you're spulunking and you're stuck in a little tunnel. Right? It's not a physical stuck. It's a brain. You're stuck in your brain. Your thoughts are stuck. Your ideas are stuck. Okay, so this is when we get into blaming mode. We're in victim mode. And the only way to get to a better space is to start taking responsibility for the past and for the future. But we kind of do that in different ways. 

07:30 

So this is not saying that there aren't two people involved in a divorce. I, of all people know very well that, that there's two people involved. But, but I want to ask how is focusing on your former spouse's deficiencies serving you? How is blaming yourself for what you did in your situation? How is that serving you? Now, we might garner some information from there, which definitely is a place that we want to go, but is it moving you to a better space to stay in this space of blame? It absolutely is not. It's not moving us to a better space. And this also is not saying that we take 100% responsibility for everything in the past. It's important, so important, that we own our own from our past. We have to learn to become aware of our own involvement. We have to learn to see our own insecurities and our own weaknesses that showed up in our marriage that were harmful and hurtful and that broke down the trust and the relationship. 

08:36 

We have to be willing to accept responsibility for our part. I will tell you, as I look back at my previous marriage, I see my own control issues. I see and can accept my passive aggressive and my manipulative behavior. I can see my sexual identity issues that played into the demise of my marriage. Were all of these factors? Absolutely, they were factors. Did my former husband have issues that factored into the divorce? Absolutely. We both had a lot of issues, but healing and moving forward comes with two things. One: taking responsibility for what you brought to the table in the past, and two: taking 100% responsibility for everything going forward. 

09:29 

Alright, let's talk about the past issue first, okay? Taking responsibility for what you brought to the table in your marriage, right? This can be so hard at first, when the pain is so raw, when it feels like the heart is just flayed open, and everything that touches it is painful and hard. I will tell you that it took me about a year after my divorce to start seeing myself more clearly. And I feel like I started off my divorce in a better space than many, because I had known that it was coming for a while. I had taken the time to work through a lot of the grief and the hurt and the pain, so that by the time the divorce was final, I felt like I had already gone through the grieving process. And yet it still took me about a year to stop blaming him for all of it, and to start seeing myself more clearly. And I will say that a year mark was about when I started to see myself more clearly. Over the next several years, I was able to see so many more things that I didn't see that first part of the year, right? But seeing all of this stuff, what it's doing is it's helping me to make adjustments to my behaviors, to my mindset, to my ideas, so that I don't bring the same old crap that destroyed my marriage to the new table of, hopefully, a new marriage at some point, right? 

10:56 

So as I said, because I start moving into new relationships, I don't want to be the same person that I was in my previous marriage. I absolutely don't want to be that person because now I see the harm that that person created. I see the hurt that that person brought to the marriage. What I want to do is create new patterns of behavior. I want to respond in healthier ways. I want to show up more of the person that I really want to be. I feel like in my previous marriage, I did not show up the person that I wanted to be. I want to be a loving, kind, compassionate person. And I'll tell you what, I was not at times. Now, I'm not beating myself up for that. I'm just being realistic and I'm saying, "listen, I wasn't. I didn't show up that person," but I didn't know how to show up that person in the context of that marriage. I felt so lost. It's like I mentioned just a few minutes ago. He was a good person. I was a good person. And I could not figure out why we couldn't make it work. I was like, "what's going on here?" I felt so completely stymied by my unawareness, by not having answers, by not seeing it. 

12:03 

And so this time around, as I've started dating again and starting moving into this, I am seeking to show up a different person. I have worked really hard to understand what was going on and to create new patterns of behavior. And so this next time around, I want to respond in healthier ways. I want to show up more the person that I really want to be. And this requires a lot of awareness on my part, a lot of willingness to see the tough things, willingness to see my weaknesses and my frailties and the things that are not the way that I want to be. And coaching has helped me a ton with this. As I have done my own self-coaching and as I have worked with other coaches who helped me see my blind spots, we all have them. Just because I'm a coach doesn't mean I don't have blind spots to my own stuff. I definitely have blind spots. And if you're a coach, you have blind spots to yours, right? We all just do. We don't see our own lives the same way. So coaching has helped me a lot with creating awareness of how I showed up and what I did that was harmful and hurtful. So becoming aware, and then making a concerted effort to move into a new space to create something different. This is the first step that we need to do to rewrite our divorce story. We have to take responsibility for what we brought to the table and start moving forward on it. 

13:39 

The second piece, taking 100% responsibility for everything going forward. Okay. So it's really important that I say, listen, I can't change the past. I can learn from the past. I can understand the past, I can decide to choose something different by moving forward. Now can I control every circumstance? Absolutely not. I can't control my former spouse's behavior or his attitude toward me. I cannot control whether he talks to me or whether he blames me or whether he talks about me to other people or to my children or whatever. I cannot control how my children responded to the divorce. I'll tell you what, I have one child who has thanked me because they feel that it's moved them into a better space and I have another child who blames me and feels that it's moved them into a worse space. I can't control that. I can't control how other people view me. I will tell you, that at one point I did a Facebook post talking about healing and moving forward and being willing to let go and I had someone write me a scathing note, accusing me of advocating divorce and called me out and said "you're better than this. You shouldn't be doing this." I was just like "whoa," like, I'm not advocating divorce. Absolutely I'm not advocating divorce. So I have no control over how this person viewed me, viewed my Facebook post, how she approached me...I can't control if people think that I gave up too early on my marriage, or if they think that I wasn't Christlike enough or I wasn't strong enough or I wasn't forgiving enough. I can't control any of that. Now, I can wallow in all of this. I can step into a place where I blame myself for all of these things, I can second guess myself, I can beat myself down, I can tell myself I'm a failure, I can blame my parents for not teaching me how to manage conflict better, I can blame my ex-husband's parents for not teaching him the things that he struggled with, I can blame myself for not knowing things I should have known. 

15:49 

But let's stop for a minute. It can be so easy to spiral into this, right, to get into these thoughts that are not serving me, to get into these thoughts that are blaming and victim mentality. But let's ask again the question: "how are these thoughts serving me?" Are they moving me to a better place? Are there things I should have known? Maybe, but guess what, I didn't. So could it be true that I should have known things? Maybe we could. Maybe we could make an argument for that. Could it be true? Yeah. Could my parents have taught me better about conflict resolution? Absolutely, but is it is it serving me to to blame them and and say that they didn't? Is it serving me to keep going to that space? That's what I want to point out: it might be true, but is it serving me. It's not okay. If the divorce has happened, it becomes a circumstance from our past and circumstances are always neutral. 

16:57 

Now I know some of you are going to go, "wait, wait, wait, divorce is not neutral." Guess what? Divorce is neutral. It's our it's our thoughts about the divorce that make it positive or negative. Divorce is just two people choosing not to be married anymore. That is a neutral circumstance. Okay? So my thoughts are what make them positive or negative. And all of these previous thoughts are moving me into negative emotions. All the thoughts that I just gave you, they're moving me into negative emotions, which then create negative actions and negative results in my life. I don't want to create negative results. I want to take a tough circumstance like, like divorce, which that's just a thought right there, that divorce is tough, right? So I want to take a neutral circumstance like divorce. And I want to use it to help me move forward to grow and to create a better life, to create the results that I want. 

17:58 

Okay, the answer then is to take responsibility for all of it going forward. I cannot change the past circumstances. What I can change is how I respond to my future and what I choose to do. I cannot fix the hurt my children have felt. I cannot control or fix what they choose to think about me or their dad or about the divorce process or about the home life that we had when they were growing up. But what I can do going forward is I can show up in a loving and a supportive and a kind way. I can choose to listen to their struggles. I can't change how my ex-spouse views me or talks about me, but I can control how I think about him and how I talk about him to others. I get to choose everything going forward. 

18:57 

So here's an interesting thing. When I decided to marry my former spouse, it was a very quick decision that I felt was directed by God. We didn't know each other very well at all. That's actually kind of an understatement. And yet we felt that we were supposed to get married. And so we moved on what we felt was a spiritual prompting and we got married like three months later. And five weeks after that, my former spouse, he was gone to some training for work. And so we didn't know each other very well because then the remaining time that he was there, we were both working full time, going to school full time. I mean, our schedules were packed and we did not know each other very well at all. And so people often ask me if I feel that I really did have a spiritual experience directing me to marry my former spouse. Was it really God? And I will tell you that when I first got divorced, I asked that question a lot. Well, not even just when I got divorced. All those tough 24 years I asked that question a lot. "Was it really God? Was it really God that directed me?" And so that question, so it's interesting that a lot of people ask me that question. You know, do you really feel like it was God now that you're divorced. You feel it was? 

20:18 

And I finally just hit a point where I said, you know what? It doesn't matter. What I've taken responsibility for is that regardless of whether God led me into that or not, this is where I am. And I get to choose how to move forward. This is rewriting my divorce story. I could choose to think that God told me that and then He abandoned me and that I was such a horrible person that I couldn't fulfill my covenants and I wasn't righteous enough to figure it out. I could believe that story. That's a story that a lot of people choose to believe. When it comes to their divorce, they choose to believe that they're a horrible person, that they're not good enough, they're not Christlike enough, they're not righteous enough, that God abandoned them. Okay, maybe those things are true. I don't know. But here's the question. Are those thoughts serving you? Does it serve you to feel like God to think the thought that God abandoned you? Does it serve you to think that you're a horrible person and you're incapable of fulfilling covenants, to believe that you're not righteous enough to receive spiritual guidance? Does that serve you? I'm going to argue that those thoughts do not serve you. That's your divorce story. We need to rewrite that. 

21:41 

I chose to have the divorce story to believe that God knew that this was my path. God knew my path was to end up divorced. And that on this path of getting divorced, that I would be able to step into the possibility that God has for me because I'm now able to help other women and men who are getting or have gotten divorced. I feel that this path right here is part of the possibility that God has given me a way that I am an instrument in His hands, to bless and to serve the lives of other people. Because of the work that I have done, because of the my process of getting divorced and working through the grief and stepping into awareness and seeing my stuff and moving into this better space that I am, not perfect by any means, but because of the path that I have taken, I have the tools to help other people navigate this divorce process to create their own story, a better story. I can can help people rise from the ashes of what seems like a disaster and see instead the possibility of an amazing future. To help them gain the awareness so they can be stronger, healthier than they were when they were married. To help them become a person who will be prepared to create an amazing new healthy relationship with a new spouse. To help them use the lessons from their divorce to create stronger relationships with their children. To help them teach their own children how to be better prepared to create their own strong marriage relationship. Right? My story that I have rewritten is going from a place where" I'm broken, I'm incapable, I'm not righteous enough," all of these thoughts, right? I choose not to believe that story. I've chosen instead to create the story that this is what God prepared me for. God knew I would get divorced and he knew that in the process I would become a person who could help other people. That this is my calling in life. I feel that so strongly. It's just overwhelming sometimes. 

24:09 

So here's the question: is divorce our go to option when things get hard? Absolutely not. No way am I advocating divorce. When at all possible, my goal is to help strengthen the relationships of my clients and help them create the relationship with their spouse that they really want. Something close and intimate and accepting and loving. When I work with clients who are struggling with the divorce question, "do I go here? Do I? Do I not? What do I do?" My goal is never like "hey, let's just get divorced. Let's just be done with it. Easy". No, no, never. When at all possible I want my clients to step into creating something new and something better and stronger for themselves. New in their marriage, right? But when divorce does become the circumstance we're in, we don't have to shut down. We don't have to give up and spiral in depression and despair. Right? We can feel the pain, but we don't have to suffer. We can grieve and mourn the loss of our dreams for that marriage but also not give up on our dreams for a brighter and a stronger future. And possibly another marriage relationship in the future that is healthier. 

25:28 

And I'm not saying we get divorced and we have a huge celebration party by any means right? It's a tragic, sad thing. But sometimes it's the best option. What I am saying is that we can feel sad. We can feel disheartened, we can grieve the loss of these dreams, and the loss of that relationship. That we can experience the negative thoughts and the emotions that come with a circumstance like divorce, I'm also saying that we can create the story that allows us to look to the future with faith and with an eye of possibility of something even greater in our future. By learning to step into responsibility for our past contributions of the demise of our marriage and also into choosing to create a new more enlightened happier future, we can create any story we choose. 

25:44 

I was actually listening to a coaching call a few weeks ago. It's one of the things that I do with with continuing to keep up on my coaching skills, listening to someone coach someone else. And I loved the line that that the client came in with. This story about all of this that was going on and the coach used this line. She said, "so that's the story you're going with." And it just, I loved that line. I loved that. That's partially why I'm doing this podcast right here because I love that idea. "That's the story I'm going with." What story are you going with? What are you choosing to believe? You get to choose any story you want about your life and about your past. Choose wisely, my friends. Ask yourself, is my story serving me? And if it's not, let's tell a different story, because it's all just thoughts anyway. We get to create and choose whatever we want. Choose a story that serves you. 

27:30 

And if you need help with that. This is my zone of genius, my friends. I can help you. Do you have friends who are struggling with this? I can help them. Send this podcast to them. Get them in touch with me. Right? Let's get people the help they need so that we don't have to sit and struggle and wallow in misery and despair and suffering. Are things tough? Absolutely. I'm not saying we don't want to feel the negative emotions, because we do. Those are part of our human experience, but we can feel pain and not suffer. Right? Suffering is pain added to pain, doubling down on the pain because of our thoughts because we choose to get stuck in a story that doesn't service. 

28:22 

So if you know somebody who needs this, share this with them, please, someone going through a divorce, someone contemplating a divorce, someone who's already been through a divorce and is still struggling to get their feet under them, share this with them. Okay? This is important stuff. There's a lot of people hurting out there. A lot of people hurting and I can help them. I can help them. I can help you. We don't have to believe our past stories. We can create something new. Okay. That, my friends, is going to do it for me today. Pleasure. Such a pleasure to be with you today. Thank you for spending some of your precious, valuable time with me and investing in a better life for yourself. This is part of your investment, is the time and the effort and the energy, and possibly the money when you feel like it's time to accelerate and to move into more of what you want at a faster, deeper pace. Okay. Have an awesome week. I will talk to you next Monday. Ciao. 

29:30 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!