00:00 

Hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 350, "Getting Back Up 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. 

00:22 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. So glad to be here, to be sharing some more content with you. A couple of things just right before we start. Talk with Tanya is tomorrow, March 11th, so if you're listening to this on the day it comes out, you can go to "group coaching "tab at tanyahale.com and sign up for that. That is free, and it is just an open webinar where we can just all chat and talk about whatever you want to bring. You can bring questions, you can bring ideas, we can just discuss something. If you're the only one that shows up, you can get some free coaching, which is kind of a brilliant, amazing thing as well. So look to get signed up for that if that's what you want. 

01:01 

Also sense of self classes start tonight and tomorrow, so if you have wanted to get signed up for those and you haven't, jump on and get that done so I can get you the syllabus sent out and you can be prepared for class. I have one class starting tonight on Monday night and two classes a morning and an afternoon on Tuesdays. So those are going to be great. And at the time of this recording there are still some slots available there. 

01:30 

Also, I do both individual coaching and couples coaching and it all works really brilliantly and I love it. And if at some point you feel like this would be a good option for us to look into or me to look into, you can go to tanyahale.com, you can go on the free consultation tab and get on my calendar. I would love to chat with you. 

01:54 

OK, let's go ahead and jump in today. We are talking about getting back up after divorce. So of all the difficult things I've done in my life. For me, my divorce ranks number one. It was the most heart-wrenching, overwhelming, and devastating and difficult decision I've ever made. And talking with others who have made the divorce decision, I am not alone in that. If it's not number one for them, it almost always ranks in the top two or three or four. Choosing to get divorced, or even having divorce thrust upon you if your spouse wanted it and you didn't, is just hard. It is rife with rejection and failure are two thoughts and emotions that are challenging to say the least and devastating on the other end of the spectrum. So I want to share some ideas with you today about how to rethink the divorce narrative you may have about your own divorce, and maybe somebody else's divorce story, and also how to get back up after what feels like a disastrous experience, a huge failure. 

02:56 

Let me start by sharing some of my own experience. I know that I've shared it before, but for those of you who are newer and haven't heard this, or even if you have, it always helps to put things into perspective. So my previous marriage was really hard for me from day one. I didn't know my husband well when we decided to get married and still didn't know him well when we did get married. We made the decision after feeling that God was prompting us to move in that direction and being full of early 20s faith, we were both 23 at the time, we acted quickly. Neither of us was particularly fond of the other. We weren't even friends, to be honest, but we felt we were supposed to get married and believe that if we were marrying the right person at the right time and in the right place, that God would bless our marriage and we would be happy. 

03:46 

Well, what I at least didn't understand at the time was what a huge decision marriage was and how much work. I was a bit naive in thinking that we were both good people and it would just work out easily and happily. We'd be nice and kind to each other. We'd support each other. We'd have sex, raise a family, live in harmony, and eventually grow old together. I just didn't understand the complexities of relationships because I hadn't really experienced complex relationships up to that  point. My family was just all kind of surface. We get along well. I always had good friends. I just didn't understand how challenging relationships could be. I had no idea that fusing two lives together in a marriage could be so painful and difficult, and neither of us had the skills and tools to step into vulnerability, to create emotional intimacy, to converse clearly. 

04:40 

I for sure didn't have the understanding of having a right to having wants and needs and being able to put them on the table. But I also believed that divorce was not an option for me. I had made a commitment. I was all in as far as staying with you was concerned. I didn't have other tools...but staying, I was all in. I wasn't a quitter. I refused to be a failure at marriage. I was a fixer and I was going to figure it out. 

05:06 

Meanwhile our relationship over the years became more and more toxic as both of us were constantly nursing our fragile wounds and gearing up for the next round of battle. It seemed we could hardly have a conversation about anything relationship -elated because both of us would jump into blaming, accusing, attacking, and criticizing so quickly. We both really believed the other person to be the cause of all of the problems in the marriage. And after 20 years of marriage I had two experiences that shifted me from my "divorce is not an option" stance to "divorce is an option." 

05:43 

The first, I started going to counseling and the therapist, who was an older man probably in his 70s, he was pretty frank and he just told me that the only way things were going to change was if I got divorced. Now he'd said that in so many words. He didn't use the word divorce, but his meaning was very, very clear. Being as he was an LDS counselor, an older man, I trusted him. That was really the first time that I considered divorce seriously was when we had this talk. And to be honest, I had been daydreaming about divorce since the first year of our marriage, but just never considered it a viable option because hello, I'm not a quitter. I'm a fixer and divorce would have meant admitting that I might have made a mistake. My pride couldn't take that. 

06:39 

So instead I would fantasize about divorce and I'll be honest, I also fantasized about my husband's untimely demise. Death just seemed like such an easier option than divorce. And to be clear, I was not planning his death. I was not doing anything along those lines, but I thought often about how it would be the answer to our relationship problems if he would just die in an accident or something. And I could escape from the pain of our relationship and the humiliation of divorce. Now, I know some of you are shocked by that admission. And I also know that a lot of you are thinking, "whoo, it's not just me." 

07:18 

So I get it. When it's not good, it can be so, so hard. And our minds go into problem solving with some pretty unbelievable thoughts. So the counselor was the first shift in my believing divorce was an option. Getting to this point and starting to really, I fantasized about it for years, but this was the first time that I really started to say, "wow, maybe this is an option." 

07:48 

The second experience came when I was listening to a women's conference talk by John Lund. He's an LDS psychologist, and he said something to the divorced woman. It was along the lines of "God may have known your marriage wasn't going to be eternal when you got married or received the answer to marry this person, but maybe he knew that this marriage was where you were going to learn the things you needed to learn in order to become who he needed you to be." Now, to be clear, a few years after listening to this, I checked the talk back out from the library and re-listened to it, and I did not hear those words, but it is what God spoke to my ears at that time when I needed to hear it, and I feel like it was definitely divine intervention, because when I heard those words, I felt one of the strongest spiritual confirmations of my entire life, though it may not be true for everyone. I felt it was, without a doubt, true for me. God knew our marriage wouldn't be eternal, but rather part of my path to get where God needed me to be and very likely part of my previous husband's path as well to get where God needs him to be. 

09:03 

These two experiences happened within a few months of each other and it became clear to me that divorce was an option and I started to look at my situation with new eyes and I started to set boundaries around things that I previously had no boundaries around and that, to be honest, caused some extra marital problems to be sure. But my counselor also helped me to understand what was okay and what was not okay with me anymore in the marriage and he helped to empower me to set these boundaries. 

09:33 

The difficulty of this decision, the just enormity of it, kept me in the marriage for another four years. I tried everything I could think of to fix what was broken and nothing seemed to be working for me. And during this time I kept praying about divorce and I would hit a wall, something would happen and I would pray and I just kept getting the impression of "not yet" over and over and over. Things would come up and I would just be at my wit's end and I would pray and I would just feel like, "nope, not yet," and I didn't understand, but I felt I could follow that prompting. Even though one night I distinctly recall being so upset about something that had happened and so angry and kneeling down to pray and being told once again to just wait and I remember looking up the ceiling and quite firmly saying, "are you freaking kidding me?" I just didn't have any idea how to move forward and how to get out of that and how to fix it and how to be better and happy in that marriage. 

10:42 

Finally, I hit a point where I'm thinking that I put down every piece that I had to play. And I also got to a point where I just thought, "okay, I guess I'm in this for the long haul until at least my kids are graduated from high school." And I made peace with it. And it was interesting that I did that on a Sunday night and Monday morning I woke up and my first thought was "it's time." And I was like, "whoa, wait a minute, like what?" And that week I fasted, I prayed, and I templed and just felt like it was time. Everything just said, "okay, it's time." And there was nothing left to do but file for divorce. 

11:23 

And it was such a tough decision. And it didn't happen immediately. It still took a while as my ex-husband and I tried to work out some other things and he wanted time for certain things, but it was such a tough decision. And obviously my kids were my number one concern. How would it impact them? What would happen to them? Would they be broken and would it ruin their lives? There were no easy answers and I had no idea how it would play out for any of us. 

11:53 

So during the previous four years, this had been going on four years since I had had that counselor and listened to that that talk from women's conference. During that time I had to grapple with a lot of questions about my self-worth. What did it say about me if I couldn't be successful in marriage? How broken was I really? Was I unlovable? Was I actually incapable of loving another person in a marriage situation? I mean, I just felt like there was there was no hope, right? Like, I couldn't make a marriage work. I saw my value as a person plummet as I anticipated carrying with me the title of "divorced woman" and it felt like there was judgment and disappointment everywhere I turned and the social implications of marriage failure felt huge to me. It took those four years of God saying "not yet" for me to wrap my head around those questions and believe that I was still valuable, that I was not a failure, that it was okay to get divorced and that me and my kids would be okay. 

12:58 

And even though I came to a place of acceptance with being divorced, I still felt like a failure for quite a while and I've never been a person to let failure keep me down for long. So I started digging in to find some answers and Brené Brown's work and coaching have been a huge part of the answer journey for me. There were a lot of people who were very supportive of me during that time. There were also people who suggested I was being hasty, maybe not looking at all the implications, maybe being too worldly, having too high of expectations. There were others who just ignored the whole thing, sometimes to include ignoring me because they probably felt so uncomfortable with my divorce and didn't know what to say and how to react. It was all really challenging, but that made me want to dig in even harder to come out the other side in a much better place. 

13:48 

When people were awkward at church, for me, it was just like, "okay, I'm showing up at church all the more." You know, it didn't turn me away, but it made me just say, "listen, I'm gonna be in your face and I'm gonna show up because this is where I belong." And I'd done a lot of work to feel like this was a good, strong, healthy decision for me. And I really didn't see it as my problem that they were struggling. And to be honest, it wasn't. 

14:18 

So anyway, on the other side of this enormous challenge of deciding to divorce and going through the process, I also wanna share some practical ideas that can help you pick yourself up from what can feel like the failure of a lifetime. 

14:33 

So first, notice and clean up your self-talk. We will often have a tendency to be pretty harsh with ourselves. And if anyone else spoke to us the way that we speak to ourselves in our heads, we would be appalled and walk away and sever a  relationship with that person. So very often you might find yourself saying things like, "I'm such a loser, I'm such a failure, I'm horrible at relationships, I can't do anything right, I'm destructive, I'm a victim, I'm fat and ugly," right? We might say those kinds of things to ourselves that we would never allow anybody else to say to us. And one way to clean up your self talk is to take out the powerful "I am" statements and soften them up. So instead of, "I am a loser, I am a failure," change the narrative to, "I didn't figure out how to make that marriage work." Or you can distance yourself even a little bit more from it by saying something like, "I'm having the thought that I failed." 

15:35 

When we say something like, "I am a failure," we are attacking our core self, our worth, our value, who we are. When we say, "I failed at my marriage," it is failing at something we did, not failing at being a human, right? Our worth is not at stake. Watch those "I am" statements because they are powerful. And another way to clean up your self-talk is just to, first of all, increase your awareness around it and stop allowing it. You may need to be a little bit firm with your primitive brain. For example, if you have the thought, "I'm such a horrible person, I can't even stay married," you get to let your brain know that this type of thinking isn't okay. You might say in your head, "actually that's not true. I'm not horrible. I had a tough marriage and where I am now is okay." We have to stop letting our primitive brain bully us with unkind and cruel statements. Use your prefrontal cortex to make a decision about how to talk to yourself, to stand up for yourself, to be loving and kind to yourself. and to be as firm and consistent as you need to be to slow down and quiet that harmful self-talk. 

16:52 

Alright, second suggestion. Allow yourself to feel the pain rather than brushing it aside or pretending it's not happening. Our brain's tendency with pain is to get rid of it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It will sometimes move us into some sort of buffering, which is doing anything on the outside to avoid the discomfort we feel on the inside. This might include things such as eating food that you're not hungry for, that's unhealthy for you, scrolling on your phone, or binging TV. It could also be exercising or doing family history or cleaning the house. The trick is to notice that you're doing an activity with the intention of distracting you from feeling the difficult feelings. They don't have to be super unhealthy, as far as what the buffering activity is, but the part that makes it unhealthy is that we are not allowing ourselves to feel to process the difficult emotions. 

17:53 

It's important, however, that when you feel the sting of failure or rejection around your divorce, that you literally sit down and feel the pain. Find it in your body, describe it as well as you can, and just breathe into it. Allow it to be there, and after a few minutes, it will start to shrink or to dissipate. Some people will refer to this as holding your pain or giving a safe space for your pain. They might even put a hand on their heart or on their head or their stomach, wherever they feel the pain. But creating a safe space for the pain to reside is paramount here. 

18:33 

The pain is not an indication that you are in danger, although your primitive brain will think so and want to escape it as soon as possible. It's just emotional pain. And though it can be extremely painful, heart-wrenching, it will not hurt you. You are not in danger. It's possible that everything in your body will be screaming at you to get up and do something, but slow down, sit down if possible, and just feel. When your brain wants to rush into solving mode or go back into drama response and expand the story or do some future telling, just keep bringing your brain back to the actual pain. 

19:21 

So it might sound something like this: "It's in my chest. It's like a hot, steel, metal ball growing and pushing out on my chest with a slow pulse. It's in my chest. It's like a hot, steel, metal ball growing and pushing out on my chest with a slow pulse. It's in my chest. It's like a hot, steel, metal ball growing and pushing out on my chest with a slow pulse. It's in my chest. It's like a hot, steel, metal ball growing and pushing out on my chest with a slow pulse." The reason that I find it helpful to say the same thing over and over and over is because my brain wants to start going, "oh, but if she would have said this, or if I would have done this, or if this would have happened," and my brain wants to start expanding the story, creating the drama, future telling. So by just focusing in on the pain, it's in my chest, this is what it feels like, right? It really keeps me focused. 

20:10 

So I will tell you after just a couple of minutes, usually two or three, you will feel, in this case, the heat will cool down. The metal ball will start to either dissipate or shrink, and it will release the pressure from your chest. The pulsing will soften, and then after a bit, you'll feel your shoulders release and you'll be able to take a big breath. This is what we call processing your emotions. Allow yourself to feel them and process them when they come rather than avoiding dismissing or resisting them. It  seems super counterintuitive, but give it a shot. These emotions will keep coming up, but take the time to process them and they will get less severe and less frequent over time. 

21:03 

During the years I was divorced, I had one guy that I dated for six months and when I broke up with him, I was devastated and so heartbroken. The situation was just unbelievable to me. I was so angry, so hurt and I would hold it together while I was teaching school. But as soon as I got home, I would go lay on my bed and just cry it all out. I laid there and felt the pain in my chest and I'd cry and eventually I'd work the pain out of my body. I'd process it and then I'd relax and maybe even fall asleep for a bit. And I did that for probably two weeks and then it became less and less frequent, less and less intense. You know, and we know how this works over time as we process and work through it. You know, now I rarely think of this person. You know, but it's a process. We have to learn to process our emotions, not just ignore them or push them away or avoid them. Okay. 

22:08 

The third suggestion I have: be kind to yourself. This means no beating yourself up on either end of the spectrum. We often have a tendency to think things on one end of the spectrum like it's my own fault. I should have known better. I was not, you know, paying attention or the other end of the spectrum is when we say things like, "alright, get off your fat bottom, get moving." We're not putting up with this kind of behavior anymore, right? Both ends of the spectrum. But there is a space, a space between the harsh judgment on either side. Either didn't do enough or we're now not doing enough. And that is a space of compassion and kindness. 

22:49 

Listen, you did the best you knew how. Was it perfect? Of course it wasn't, but it's not possible to have it be perfect. But it was your best. You never intentionally woke up with a decision to destroy your marriage, to say unkind things, to be critical or to attack. We just have all of these primitive brain protective responses. Give yourself the grace to be human. If one of our dear friends was in the middle of struggling through a divorce, we wouldn't show up and say, "you should have tried harder," or even the other end of the spectrum. "well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Right? Those are insensitive. They're unkind statements. They dismiss the pain and the anguish of the failed marriage. Most likely we would say something like "oh gosh, i am so sorry. I know this really really hurts. What do you need to for me right now or what what can i do to support you right now?" We can just sit there and hold their hand and help them cry. The overarching kindness that gives the other person space to struggle rather than the harsh judgment is the exact same thing that we need to give ourselves. And the stronger our sense of self the more capacity we have to give ourselves this kindness. 

24:14 

And last suggestion: be honest about what you did well and what you didn't do so well. For me this necessitated that I start learning from people who understood emotional engagement and intimacy better than I did. As i've mentioned before Brene Brown was my first huge aha into starting to see how I had contributed to the dysfunction my marriage. And the more i learned the more, I could see what I had done well and what I hadn't done so well. I was able to turn my situation into a learning opportunity. 

24:46 

And this is when the real healing started to take place for me when i could start learning and making adjustments to my behavior my thinking. Because when we understand our contribution to the failure and we acknowledge it with the kindness that we've talked about, it is safe to make adjustments. If we have a realization of some of our bad behavior and we beat ourselves up for internally for in our head our brain will will realize that "whoa, it is not a safe place to see areas for improvement," and your brain will stop looking. Because it's protecting you. That's what your brain wants to do, is protect us from pain. So if we beat ourselves up, that's painful, and our brain will say, "whoa, I'm not going to know that notice that stuff anymore." 

25:35 

But when I can acknowledge with compassion, my contributions, my destructive contributions, and use them as stepping stones to create something different and healthier, learn from those, my brain can feel safe making more realizations. My brain will go, "oh, it's safe to see these areas, it's safe to understand this," and then the growth game is on. Tell you what, divorce will knock you on your butt. It is not pretty, it is not easy, and it is hard to face our own judgment and the judgment of others. If there is ever a time in our lives that we feel like failures, it's when we're facing divorce, experiencing divorce, or sometimes on the other side of the divorce, having a hard time getting back up. 

26:27 

And yet approaching this "failure" with compassion and kindness is a brilliant way to create the safe space necessary to see ourselves and our behaviors more clearly so we can clean things up and create something different within ourselves. You know, as I look back on my journey, it was 10 years ago this year that I filed for divorce.,I had a lot of thoughts of failure, a lot of disappointment in myself and a fear for what the future would hold for both me and my children. And yet, if I go back to the thought I got while listening to that John Lund Women's Conference that maybe God knew this was where my marriage would end up but it was necessary for my growth. I can see it so clearly from this 10-year out vantage point. It's the hindsight is 20-20 vision concept right? 

27:24 

I am doing work here in my marriage to Sione and with my clients and with you as a listener of the podcast that I honestly feel I have been called by God to do. I feel like this is why I was created with my unique blend of talents, skills, intellect and ability to do this work and I could not be doing this work without my difficult marriage and divorce journey. That life and experience was foundational in creating everything I am now and what I'm able to contribute to you and to the rest of the world. So though it felt like a huge failure at the time maybe it actually wasn't. 

28:19 

And what if it's the same for you? What if your marriage struggles, and possibly your divorce, is part of God getting you where you need to be. What if it was just the next chapter in your textbook of life, and when you turn the page, the next chapter will appear and your story will continue? What if there's actually nothing wrong with you because you're getting 

divorced or because you recently got divorced? What if there's everything right with you and it's all just part of the plan for your life? 

28:56 

Last I checked, God doesn't turn His back on you when you get divorced. He doesn't say, "well, you're out of the will. You chose to get divorced." Everything from my experience, and of so many other people that I talk to, has God reaching out, wanting to help us to get back on our feet, wiping off our scraped knees, and get back on a life path that is fulfilling and beautiful. I hear Him telling me, "okay, so let's get back on the path. I know that hurt and probably will hurt for a while, but you'll be okay. Those knees will scab up and heal. You'll get through this dark forested part of the path and just up ahead, just you wait, is the most beautiful meadow you've ever seen. I've got you. This is the path to eternal life. You haven't lost it. This was the path all along." 

29:48 

Now, I'm not saying it isn't hard, because it is. I'm not saying it isn't painful, because it is. What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with you, that you are not a failure. Maybe you have a marriage that didn't last, but maybe even the marriage wasn't a failure. Maybe it completed its purpose, and now it is time to move on to the next phase of your progression. Give yourself a lot of grace for being human and for not always understanding the big picture yet. There's a lot of future out there still that we don't see or even know what's coming. And some of it, some of it is the best stuff of your entire life. I am proof of that. Sione is proof of that. We are experiencing that. Divorce is not the end. It's just a part of the path. You can get back up and create something that right now may seem unattainable and mind-boggling, but nevertheless, it is there if you will compassion up and courage up. 

31:06 

You've got this, my friend, and I've got you if you need some help. On any aspect of your divorce. This is tough stuff. And for many of us, it's part of our path. It's part of our growing up. I'm really grateful for my path. I wouldn't go back and change anything. Has it been a ride and a scary ride and a difficult ride? Absolutely it has been, but it has been a ride that at this stage in my life. I can't imagine having taken a different path because I could not be here where I am without everything that happened in my past. Life is good. You've got this. 

31:56 

Okay, that's what I've got for you today. Now, if you haven't noticed, if we have a topic like this and you go, "oh, that's interesting. I'd like to learn a little bit more about that." I have started in the note section of of my podcast. So go to the podcast app that you listen on, go down to the notes, and I will have several podcasts that have to do with the same topic. And so if this one was like, "oh, there were some things there that really spoke to me, I wanna hear a little bit more about what she has to say about this," go down to the show notes, and I will have a list of podcasts that you can listen to. That's gonna do it. 

32:34 

If you're loving this, share it. If you know someone who just recently got divorced, who's having a hard time catching their breath, please send this to them. Let's give people the tools they need to feel better and to move on and to give themselves the grace that God wants to give them. It's so much good stuff, my friends. Okay, hopefully I will see you at the Talk with Tanya tomorrow. If you're listening to this on Monday, it's the second Tuesday of every month. So if you don't get on for tomorrow, check and get on for the month after that. And Sense of Self classes start this week. I'm excited to work with those of you who signed up. So I will see you later and until next week. See you later, bye. 

33:17 

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.