00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 292, "Healing and Moving Forward After Divorce." 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, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you here. Just a reminder, if you are interested in the class on physical and emotional intimacy, make sure that you are signed up for my weekend win. You can do that on my website and you can go to, let's say, I think you can go to the "contact me" button and scroll down a little bit. Once you get there, there will be a place where you can sign up for the "weekend win." I just send something out once a week. Occasionally if I'm doing a class you might get something a second time a week, just to remind you of what's going on, but I really try not to overload you with that because I know that I don't really love that myself. So but it's gonna be pretty great. I don't have all the details that worked out yet, but I'm looking at no more than 10 people, maybe 12 max, keeping it small. It's gonna be fairly inexpensive, but also just a place where everybody's gonna go out and gather amazing information and bring it back. We're just...I'm really just trying to create a group here of support in learning and understanding, and everybody's gonna find different stuff that just appeals to them, but we're gonna be able to put a lot of pieces together and really understand how we can create greater intimacy in our relationships. And just super excited about it. So look for that about the middle of February. We're gonna be starting that probably the second Saturday in March. It's gonna be an early Saturday morning thing. Get it do it on the weekend where it's available for more people, but also in the morning so that it doesn't interrupt the flow of your day. So that's what we're looking at. 

01:54 

Okay, let's go ahead and jump in. So I want to build on some of the concepts that we spoke about last week in the podcast about self-worth and divorce. So in that podcast I spoke a lot about how to step back into our self-worth after divorce, and one thing I don't think I dug quite as deep into as I wish I would have is the idea that our circumstances, regardless of what they are, and especially including divorce, do not determine or even influence our worth. It can feel like it when we experience the judgments of others, and even the judgments of ourselves, but really understanding and accepting that whether we are divorced or married, our worth is always the same. It does not change. When I start working with clients on how to heal and move forward after divorce, embracing our self-worth is a fundamental, foundational part of the work that we need to do. We covered that pretty in depth last week so with that last week's podcast as our starting point, let's move on to some of the other things we can do to really grow into this next phase of our lives. And some of this will be we touched on last week, but I'm going to dig a little bit deeper this week because I think it's all super important. 

03:03 

So another big piece of the puzzle of healing and moving forward after divorce is realizing that I am responsible for everything I have gone through. Okay. Now before you go, "what? Not true!" and you turn off the podcast, hear me out here. I want you to see what's going on. There are two things at play here: the circumstance and our response to the circumstance. Circumstances are the cold hard facts, the kind that can be proven in a court of law and observed by outside sources. Two things that would fit in this category are things that other people do or say. You are not responsible for those. Obviously people will say and do things of their own choosing and they get to do that. Okay? Circumstances generally happen to us. We can't control those. The weather is a circumstance, right? If you get cancer, that's a circumstance. Anything that somebody else does or says what you you're not responsible for those, but what you are responsible for is your response to those circumstances: what you choose to think about them, what emotions you feel and how you act. So your experience in relation to the circumstance is entirely of your own creation because remember, your experience, your thoughts, create feelings, feelings, create actions. Actions create the results in our lives. 

04:28 

So our whole experience to the circumstance is of our own creation starting with our thoughts. This is what you have been going through and this is what you are responsible for. You are responsible for your response. And this is where we often get so stuck. We continually want to blame our ex-spouse for the divorce, for the reasons leading up to the divorce, for our anger, for our loneliness, etc, etc. It can be so easy to see his contributions and blame him, but it's much more difficult to  see our own contributions and take responsibility for those. Blaming him takes away your power. Taking responsibility for your own actions and responses is empowering. We live in a very blame-prone society. There is so much finger-pointing and anger about it, and feeling as though we are powerless because everybody else is doing these things to us. And the truth is, we do experience difficult things at the hands of other people. Our spouses may turn and walk out of the room when we're talking to them. They may not look up from their phone when we try to engage with them. People at church may see us and duck down another hallway to avoid talking to us. Friends and family may tell us that we made, or are making, the wrong choice in choosing to get divorced. Your spouse may have had an affair. Your spouse may have lied to you about the finances. We do experience difficult things at the hands of other people. 

06:03 

Sometimes people make crappy decisions that go in our circumstance line and we get to work our minds around them. We even have to deal with the consequences of them sometimes. And that can be super difficult. It can be hard not to go into blaming mode. But one of the greatest parts about growing up is moving into something that we call "emotional adulthood." And this is the space where we take full responsibility for our emotions because we come to realize that we are the creator of every emotion we feel. Okay? Let me give you an example. Think about a time when you have moved yourself to tears just by having a thought about something. I remember so many times when I would go in and look at my little baby sleeping and I, you know, of course your brain goes crazy and I would think how much I love her and then I would imagine her dying. Like I would imagine me losing her for some reason and I would always just like be standing in the doorway with tears streaming down my face. It was just a thought. But that thought powerfully created emotions that made me cry. Okay? This is the power of our thoughts. When we decide to move into emotional adulthood by accepting responsibility for creating our thoughts and feelings, we can stop feeling and thinking as though we are the victim and move into a place of empowerment. 

07:37 

Now, does this excuse people's, meaning in this instance our ex-spouse's behavior? Absolutely not, but it puts us in charge of our own feelings and behaviors rather than letting their behavior dictate ours. Owning that I have created my anger, my frustration, my resentment, my apathy, through my thoughts about my circumstance, is a place of power for me. But also owning that I have the power to create happiness, peace, satisfaction, that is also a place of power. And if there was ever a time when we need to tap into our own power, divorce is one of those times. 

08:17 

Another piece of taking responsibility is choosing to stop being a victim. Okay, let me show you how victimization works after divorce. Okay, someone may ask you how things are going how you're doing since the decision to get divorced, and you step into a huge story about your ex or soon to be X did this thing and how so it's been so frustrating and how you're so angry and how you can't do this because he did this right, and then another soliloquy about how they should be behaving differently, and if they would do things a certain way it would be so much better and then can you believe it? They had the gall to say this thing to the kids or to have a certain expectation of you. So here's the thing: that's the story that, especially when divorce is new, it's so easy to step into that. And if you're listening to this and you're not divorced but you've had divorced friends or divorced family members, you've probably seen that kind of thing go on, right? But here's the thing...when we are caught in telling the story about our ex, who is the main character of the story? They are you're so focused on them and all the horrible things that they are doing, and in that space you are making yourself a victim. Because until they change their behavior, you can't feel better or you can't act better. Right? We make ourselves a victim because they have to change before we can feel better or act better. We're letting them be in charge of how we're showing up and whether we move forward or not, To stop being a victim means that you get to kick them out of the main character place and put yourself there. 

10:02 

So when someone asks how you are doing, the previous spouse most likely won't even come up You are doing great. You're learning this new thing. You're figuring out another aspect of how to move forward. You're listening to this amazing podcast and understanding some incredible things about yourself. Make you the main character and kick your previous spouse out of that spot. If they do need to come up, it is a comment in passing. They are a small extra part that hardly gets noticed by the camera. Maybe two seconds of screen time in a two hour movie as the camera just pans past. Okay, as soon as you move them out of being the villain, main character, then there is no longer a victim. And that leaves the hero, main character place, open. Victims are stuck in a world of problems, and heroes are thriving in a world of solutions. Okay, you getting this? We have to just stop thinking about them and talking about them and making everything in our world revolve around them. 

11:20 

Okay, another piece of taking responsibility is really choosing to learn and see how our behaviors contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. Okay, I am currently working with a client who didn't want to get divorced and through listening to the podcast she came to the realization that she may have had more to do with the dysfunction and unhappiness of her marriage than she previously thought. Okay, to clarify, her husband doesn't want to get divorced either. They don't want to get divorced but they've been in this dysfunctional marriage. And so as she started listening, she started to go, "oh, I think I'm contributing to this dysfunction." And before that, she thought that she wasn't at all. Okay, we have been working on helping her to see where she is showing up with one-up or one-down thoughts and behaviors. We've addressed her lack of vulnerability, was showing her weaknesses and her faults. We've talked about her lack of honesty in talking about back burner issues and just saying that everything is fine. And as she has worked on owning all of this, on taking responsibility for this, so much has changed in her relationship in just the six weeks we've been working together. And so just this morning when we were working, she reported that she now realizes that it was all her, that she had spent so many years blaming him for not showing up and being engaged. And as she's cleaned up her thinking and her behavior, and as he has quickly and fairly easily met her and changed his dance steps to match hers, their relationship has done a 180 and things are the best they have ever been in their 20 year marriage. So taking responsibility for her in a marriage has been healing and allowing her, and them, to move forward. 

13:02 

And it does the same even after marriage has dissolved. When we can learn to see our own failings, our own dysfunctional behaviors, when we can own them and address them and clean them up, we can begin the process of growing up and healing. We are stuck in blaming the other person, in this case our previous spouse, for all the things. We will never be able to see our own things. I'm not saying that he didn't engage in some pretty dysfunctional behavior as well. I'm just saying that focusing on his behavior will not change your behavior. I can look back at my first year of divorce and see this pattern so clearly. And I know that there is a space of time when we need to catch our breath, when we need to lick our wounds a bit, when things are just so painful. And we need some time to be a victim for just a minute. I think that's part of the process, the coming to terms with what's going on in my life thing. But then, after licking your wounds for a bit, you will hit a point where the victim thinking starts to feel a little uncomfortable. 

14:12 

Now, notice that your primitive brain will really like being a victim and will try to ignore that small nudge to do something different, to move out of victim mode, but when you feel the nudge, courage up and lean into it. This means it's time to stop focusing your brain on all the things having to do with your previous spouse and to start focusing on all things you moving forward. You taking charge of your life, you figuring out what you need to heal and grow. I can see this path through my pattern and I felt pretty stuck for several months after the divorce was final. Always willing to tell everybody how difficult my marriage was and how difficult my ex was still being. I was stuck in the problem. All things victim. Totally where I was, although I didn't see it at the time. But once I heeded that nudge, once I kind of got that, "okay, this doesn't feel good to me" feeling, and I started setting aside my victim story, then I started to find information that propelled me forward pretty quickly. I started learning new things and putting pieces together to help me create something different. So if you are struggling to heal and move forward, check your story. Who is the main character? If there's a villain in that spot, you are probably the victim. Start living your story without a villain and you will feel and see a huge change in your life because you will move into the hero slot. 

15:47 

Okay, another belief that will help you heal and move forward after your divorce is the understanding that you will come through this a better and stronger person. You know the phrase that says "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? Divorce fits in this category. There is so much mental and emotional injury in the years leading up to the divorce and then the divorce process and then the aftermath that it can be easy to feel beaten down, to get overwhelmed by your new life, to lose hope for a better life, to focus on the better that can come after the craziness of the process of divorce. However, the amazing thing is that humans are very resilient and the challenges and struggles we encounter are all just part of our human experience. They come in different shapes and sizes and colors, but we all have them and what they create are opportunities for us to learn and grow into better versions of ourselves. Yours, my friend, has come packaged in divorce. Others have been packaged in physical and mental illness, death, addiction, or any number of other challenges. When we look back at the different difficult challenges from our past, it can be much easier to see our growth and progression, and often we would never change what we went through because of the person we have become in overcoming it. I look at all  those difficult years of my previous marriage and they were tough. Some years really, really tough. And I look back and I just think I'm so grateful for those because the person I am today is a result of all of those years, all of those struggles, all of those challenges. I am who I am because of those. And I'll tell you what, I love who I am and I love what I'm doing and I love where I'm at in my life. 

17:48 

But when we're at the beginning or the middle stages of a challenge, in this case divorce, it can definitely seem insurmountable and difficult to see that it's gonna get better. We can easily get caught up in that victim mentality and this is the place where we feel powerless, where all we can see is the problem. And I think most of us go through this. It's part of our brain's protective mechanism where we experience something very painful and confusing. When we can learn to recognize when we're here and intentionally move ourselves out of it as soon as possible rather than wallowing in self-pity, we can begin the process of moving forward. Now, primitive brain loves self-pity because it doesn't have to take responsibility there, but we have to catch ourselves going into self-pity and we have to intentionally choose to move out. 

18:42 

And to reiterate, I'm also not saying here that we don't need time to lick our wounds. We do need time to put our hands on our knees, catch our breath, wrap our heads around our situations, but we don't need to stay there forever or even longer than necessary. There will be that natural tug and probably very subtle that says, "okay, girl, time to get moving, let's go." It can be super easy to ignore this nudge, but if we can learn to hear it and heed it and stand up and start walking again. We don't have to run right away. We just got to put one foot in front of the other. Then we can be on the road to healing. Most everything in your primitive brain will want to stay in that place of feeling sorry for yourself. But remember the motivational triad that we've talked about before. Our primitive brain wants to do one of three things or all of three things, right? It wants to avoid pain, it wants to seek pleasure and it wants to conserve energy. Moving out of that space, we encounter all three of those, right? Like saying, "okay, time to get moving." It's painful to move out. It's not pleasurable and it expands a lot of energy because we have to get ourselves moving. So of course, the primitive brain resists this. When we can courage up and take the first few steps, we can start to create momentum and movement always feels better than being stuck in feeling sorry for ourselves. Momentum doesn't just come from thin air. Momentum comes from movement. Get moving and the momentum will come. I promise you that coming out the other side, a better and stronger person is completely available to you. It may take some time to get your head in the game and it definitely takes a lot of intentional effort to get yourself moving in the right direction. But there are answers for your struggles and there is a better you waiting at the end of this divorce path. 

20:45 

When we learn to focus on the opportunities rather than the disasters, when we learn to look for understanding rather than feeling threatened or defensive, when we seek to love and forgive rather than harbor resentment and anger, we will experience a new us, a person we haven't known before who is capable of things that we have not been capable of before. I am such a different person than I was eight years ago when I had just gotten divorced. I am healthier both mentally and emotionally. I have better relationships with everybody in my life, with my new spouse, with my children, with other people in my life, my siblings. I have learned how to love and forgive and take responsibility for my life in a way that I didn't know how to before and what I create. I've taken responsibility for in a way that I didn't before. Whether that creation is healthy or unhealthy. I have taken all of these things and I'm applying them in my new marriage, and Sione and I are creating something that is so magical to us. We are creating intimacy and vulnerability and partnership and it is changing every other relationship in our lives. In every way I am a better and stronger person than I was before my divorce. You can be too. This is your path ,my friend. Accept it, learn from it, embrace it. It may look different than what you've ever planned. It may look different than anyone else's in your in your family or among your friends, but it is your path today and there's an amazing journey ahead of you if you will walk it with confidence and determination. Choose to believe that the best is yet to come because it is. 

22:40 

One last thing I want to talk about and this is it is so important that we learn to forgive, and going through a divorce sometimes we have to learn to forgive in a way that we never have before. So remember we don't forgive for the other person and our forgiveness has nothing to do with their path. Us forgiving them has everything to do with our path and our progress. I think sometimes we forget that God's forgiveness and our forgiveness are different. We use the same word but they mean totally different things. God's forgiveness has the capacity to clean someone of their sins, to, in essence, give somebody a fresh start, to take that sin away. When I forgive someone, it doesn't do that. It doesn't cleanse the other  person, it doesn't give them a fresh start. When I forgive, it cleanses me. It gives me a fresh start. Me forgiving somebody else really only benefits me. It cleanses me of my own judgment, my own hurtful and mean thoughts. It allows me to let go of anyone else's agency and accountability and to focus on my own agency and accountability. Me forgiving teaches me how to love more cleanly, to learn to offer grace in the way that God offers me grace. Me forgiving opens me up to truly accepting the Atonement of Christ and how it can heal my pain and suffering. 

24:29 

Forgiving is also part of us getting out of victim mode and into hero mode. It allows us to heal and move forward because we're not stuck in focusing on the villain in our story. Forgiveness allows us to get rid of the villain. Forgiveness isn't always easy. But I truly believe it is a vital part to our healing and our moving forward. And remember that forgiving doesn't mean we condone any harmful behavior that was done to us. It doesn't mean that they are getting off and it doesn't mean that we don't put appropriate boundaries in place. It does mean that we allowed God to take care of the part of forgiveness that He is responsible for, which is the other person, and that we take care of the part of forgiveness that we are responsible for, which is us. All of this, my friends, is an amazing part of growing up that is available to us in middle-age. Choose growing up because it's a pretty freaking amazing experience. I love growing up in middle-age and it's a brilliant, brilliant path. 

25:53 

Alright, my friends, let's talk coaching, okay? This is such a brilliant process, and it works. I am just seeing so many amazing things with my clients and I would love to work with you if you feel like this is your path. If you have questions and you're thinking, "maybe this is gonna work for me, maybe this can help me get over this hump, get out of this unstuck, get out of this stuck place that I'm in," let's give it a try. You can go to my website, tanyahale.com, you can click on the "free consultation" button, and I am now doing 90 minute consults. The reason I'm doing that is because as we talk about whether coaching's a good fit for you, what I wanna offer you is an opportunity to be coached so that you can experience it and see how it's gonna work for you. So, when you sign up for that 90 minute consult, I will do some coaching with you, and that's gonna help give you the data that you need to find out if you want to invest the time, the money, the energy, and effort into doing coaching. 

26:54 

I will tell you, coaching is hard. It is difficult for you when you come to coaching because we talk, it's hard to see your stuff. It really is, but I promise you, it is so worthwhile when you start cleaning things up, and then you kinda start getting excited to see your stuff because you see the difference it makes when you show up differently. So, that's what I have to offer you. Coaching is amazing. And I guess that's gonna do it for me. Have a really, really awesome week, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

27:28 

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.