00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 90, "Divorce Trauma." 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. 

00:20 

Well, hello there, my super fun friends, this is Tanya. I'm happy to be with you today and glad to have you join me. Thanks for being here. Today we are going to talk about divorce trauma. Alright, so before you think "well, I'm not divorced, this doesn't apply to me and I'm going to turn this one off," hear me out for just a minute. I really believe that a lot of what I'm going to speak about today also occurs in most relationships at some level. We could even call this relationship trauma. And even if you have a super healthy relationship, chances are you will know someone to whom this information applies and this can give you a better understanding of where they are, what they're working through, and what they're working against, and how you can be more loving and compassionate to them while they figure it out. 

01:10 

So let's just jump right in, shall we? Trauma is defined as "a disordered behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress." So let's break that down a little bit. A disordered behavioral state meaning behaviors that are disordered, disordered meaning not functioning in a normal, healthy way. So behaviors that are not normal and healthy continuing on that is caused by severe mental or emotional stress. I would dare say that probably the single most mental and emotional stressful thing I have encountered in my life was my divorce and the years leading up to it. And yes, there are two aspects of divorce that cause trauma. and all of the years leading up to the divorce. 

02:03 

So let's start off with the process of divorce since that's probably what most people think about first. So now, obviously not all divorces are created equally. Some divorces seem to be somewhat amicable, at least on the surface, while others are dragged on in the courts for years with constant contention over child custody, personal property, child support, and alimony. My divorce took just about 90 days from the time of filing until the divorce was actually final. I've had friends and acquaintances for whom the process has taken years of back and forth and figuring things out. But regardless of all of these different situations, what almost every divorce has in common is the ending of a dream. A dream of a long life together. The dream of having an eternal loving partner and companion. The dream of a relationship where you take care of each other, where you treat each other with respect and kindness and you work together to create something greater than the two separate parts. It's the separation of these two lives that have been entwined often for many years, and not just emotionally but physically as well. 

03:14 

How do you divide up memories and how do you divide up family pictures and how do you divide up treasured mementos from world travels and how do you divide up the children? We have this thing called "custody" but it's so hard on these sweet kids. In a previous podcast entitled "Divorce and the Kids," my daughter Allison referred to custody as feeling like a piece of luggage that was just shuffled back and forth. The mental and emotional stress of working through all of these situations can be incredibly difficult. And then we add on the feelings of worthlessness that so often accompany a divorce, feelings that you are not worthy of love and that no one could ever love you because you're so broken, and thoughts and feelings that you may not even be capable of really loving yourself. And then we have the incredible emotional pain of rejection and loss having been rejected by someone who you think should have had your back, who should have been the one to protect you but who instead has seemingly fed you to the lions, and you have the loss of not just a person but that is also multiplied by the rejection from that person. 

04:29 

And this is a lot to deal with emotionally. I know that I went to counseling for quite a while before I ever filed for divorce  because I needed to come to terms with so much of this stuff. I needed help seeing it clearly. And then after my divorce, I continued to seek help for a while. Part of my trauma was having zero interest in dating at all for about three years just because of so many of the issues we already talked about. I really thought, and sometimes do, that I won't be lovable until I'm perfect. In fact, for a while I had a sticky note up on the wall above my desk that says "I don't have to be perfect to be loved." I mean my trauma went into thinking that if I had been better I would have been able to make it work, right? 

05:17 

And as with death, in a divorce there's a grieving process that needs to be gone through. We have to work through the pain and heartbreak of the end of a relationship. We have to eventually get to the point that we can accept what has happened, that we can work through so many of the previously mentioned mental and emotional stresses, and we can get to the point where we no longer struggle at the same raw level that we did. And as with death, the pain can subside over the years and sometimes, probably most times, we get to the point that we're actually grateful for the divorce. We can work through this level of the divorce trauma, but it does take some concerted effort and awareness. And yes, time does heal some of these wounds, but it takes a whole lot more than just time. 

06:09 

And I think this is where so many people who get divorced struggle. They just wait it out, not working through the thoughts and fillings associated with the divorce, and then when they do start moving into a new relationship, they're still carrying the thoughts of unworthiness, of being unlovable, of a lack of trust, of being rejected. And when we take these wounds into a new relationship, they can make it really difficult to create a new healthy one. Because healthy relationships require two healthy people. One healthy person can often create a fairly functional relationship, but two unhealthy people have a very slim chance of making it. When both are insecure, deep down feeling unworthy and unlovable, and having a fear of being rejected, those thoughts are going to eventually start manifesting themselves in actions and in reactions. It's just how we work. We have a thought like, "I'm unlovable," and that causes us feelings of insecurity. Those thoughts cause us to act clingy or graspy or whiny. And then we start actually creating a situation where we don't love ourselves and where we make it difficult for the other person to love us as well. All starting from the thought, "I'm unlovable." And this happens especially if both people are working through similar thought models of "I'm unlovable." Can you just imagine these two people coming together, both of them thinking that they're unlovable? 

07:43 

So when we take two people who are not healed from the original trauma of their previous marriages and we start heaping on additional trauma from another dysfunctional relationship, end up with a huge mess, right? I heard once shortly after my divorce that for as many years as a person was married, that's how many months they should wait to start dating again. So where I was married for 24 years, the rule said that I should have waited 24 months before I started dating. Probably a good rule of thumb, but I think another huge issue other than just time is figuring out what I am doing within that time to understand and heal and come back to a place of self-respect and self-love. What am I doing to go through the grieving process and recalibrate my own life? What am I doing to center my life again on the things that matter most to me? What am I doing to fully start to own my own behaviors and attitudes that contributed to the breakdown of the relationship? Because both people in the broken marriage had something to do with it. 

08:49 

But I know for the first year after my divorce, I didn't see myself very clearly at all. I didn't recognize my dysfunctional behaviors, but boy, I could sure see what my ex-husband had done wrong, right? And I think that that's pretty normal. But as I started reading and listening to a lot of books, and listening to talks, and I started to see things I had never seen before about my own behaviors and attitudes, I could start to take responsibility because at this point, I started seeing my part. 

09:24 

It's a process to be sure, not just a time issue. During that time, I feel it is so important to be seeking help from somewhere: a coach, a counselor, books or conferences. If we're not seeking to understand ourselves and to work through the feelings of rejection, the lack of trust and unworthiness, our chances of getting to a healthy place where we can create a healthy relationship are slim. 

09:50 

But there's another aspect of divorce trauma that I don't think we talk about nearly enough, and that is all the patterns of behaviors and thoughts that are created through many, many years of a dysfunctional relationship. I know for me, our relationship started off pretty rocky and was on the edge for most of our 24 years. We definitely had times that we were making it work more so than others, but neither of us really ever found a place of contentment and companionship in our marriage. We got to the point where we were good roommates, but over time, even that deteriorated. 

10:25 

But here's the piece that needs to be addressed here. During all of those years, we both developed coping mechanisms that were unhealthy and destructive. We learned to think in certain ways that we believed were protecting us from pain, and they probably were at some level. We learned to respond in defensive ways in order to not get hurt, and we learned to take the offensive position when we wanted to save ourselves the hassle of being defensive later on. I know that I learned to have a really sharp tongue. When I felt backed into a corner, which I felt like I was often, I thought the only way I could be heard was to cut to the core with biting words. I also learned to emotionally withdraw so that I wouldn't be crying all of the time. I felt the need to protect my four children from having a mother who was depressed and unhappy and crying and miserable. So I shelved my difficult emotions and went into a happy place where difficult emotions weren't welcome. They weren't welcome for me, they weren't welcome for my children, and they weren't welcome for my husband at the time. Happy thoughts only, okay? 

11:38 

And I wasn't intentionally seeking to destroy the relationship and make it harder, but subconsciously, I was doing what I felt I needed to do to protect my sense of self-respect, not feel as though I was getting walked all over, to have the strength to raise four children the best I knew how. Subconsciously, I was creating long-term destructive behaviors that were protecting me from more pain in the short term. The trauma here, the "disordered behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress," was creating patterns of behavior that became so ingrained in my brain that I was doing them unconsciously. And these are unhealthy patterns of behavior, right? This is the disordered behavioral state. 

12:31 

Remember how we've talked about how we have about 60,000 thoughts a day? Most of those are things going on in the background of our brain that we are not aware of at all. The more we engage in a thought, the more ingrained it becomes, the more subconscious it becomes, and the more we're unaware of it happening. So here is how it works in a simplified version. We have billions of neurons in our brains. Between these neurons, we get these synaptic connections, which we'll call thoughts. The more we have the same thought, the thicker the connections between these neurons becomes. In fact, they start getting coded with what's called a myelin sheath. This allows, as well, these thoughts to travel faster and more of them at the same time. And before you know it, we are thinking this thought and we are completely unaware of it. 

13:22 

For example, you have tied your shoes probably thousands of times. When was the last time you needed to think about the processes of tying them? "Okay, take a lace in each hand, cross one over the other one, tuck one end through the hole, switch the laces to the other hand, and pull tightly." Yeah, we don't have to do that anymore. The synaptic connections fire that thought with no conscious awareness from us at all. I often use the example of a path in the forest. If we walk the same path multiple times a day for many years, that path will become a hard packed dirt path with no weeds, rocks, branches, or logs across it, right? It will be so easy for us to walk that we really don't even need to think about walking it. In fact, we could probably walk it in our sleep. And this is what happens when we have a thought, when we think it a lot over and over and over. We are creating a hard packed synaptic connection that becomes so easy to traverse that we do it without a conscious thought. 

14:30 

So take someone who has been in a difficult marriage for years. They have created these patterns of protective behavior, these synaptic connections or thoughts that are running in the background without any real awareness. So when we get into another relationship and something similar happens that used to happen in our previous marriage, our primitive brain will say, "oh, I've seen this before. I got it. I know what to do. Sit back and relax." And subconsciously we will start behaving in the same dysfunctional ways that we did before. And it will have nothing to do with the new person in our life. It will have everything to do with the patterns that were created years ago. 

15:12 

Just this last weekend I saw these patterns rearing their ugly little heads in my life. For the first time in quite a while I needed to work through something with my ex-husband. Well, I'm just going to say that "work through" is a pretty loose term. So when we started discussing a particularly somewhat sensitive topic, I immediately found myself responding in ways  that I used to. I was being very defensive and a bit angry. And when I look back on it right after it happened, I was amazed. Amazed because with all the work I've done in the last five years and all the learning and growing and changing and understanding, my primitive brain took over. I became a human and I responded just as I did when we were married. It was actually quite fascinating to look at in retrospect. At the time it was happening, I could sense that I wasn't acting in a way that I wanted to, but it was almost an out-of-body experience where I was doing it without full conscious awareness. There was a piece of awareness going on, which is good because I probably never noticed that before. 

16:26 

But this is the trauma. This is the "disordered behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress," right? This is where this human primal brain takes over. So the trauma of divorce isn't just the separation of lives and stuff. It isn't just the trust issues and the rejection issues and the sense of worthlessness and unloveability, it is also the years of conditioned, unhealthy thoughts, the patterns of unhealthy behavior that will show up without our conscious awareness. The thoughts behind this disordered behavioral state run deep and they don't go away just because we're in a different relationship. They will come calling again and it is so important that we're aware of them, that we're anticipating them showing back up and that we start to see them when they do. After all, our primitive brain is just doing what it was created to do. It's created to make habits out of repeated behaviors so that it can conserve energy by not having to think consciously about them or make another decision. It was created to streamline processes so that we can be more productive and accomplish more things. 

17:43 

But here's the thing about our primitive brain or our cerebellum. It has no concept of right and wrong, of good and bad, of healthy or unhealthy. It just knows that this has happened in the past and that it's what we've done repeatedly in the past. And it's not really interested in changing because changing is not pleasurable and it can even be painful. And this is something else that our primitive brain works on doing for us. It is always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. And creating and implementing a new thought goes against all three things our primitive brain seeks to do for us. We talked about conserving energy, creating pleasure and avoiding pain. 

18:27 

So, what is to be done? Are we just destined to have an unhealthy relationship after unhealthy relationship until the end of our lives? Absolutely not. But it is a process that takes great awareness and conscientious effort. Remember the path in the forest? If we want to create a new path, what do we need to do? We have to forge out into the thigh-high weeds tripping over rocks and branches and logs and we have to keep doing it time and time and time again until eventually that new path has beaten down all of the weeds until we've kicked all of the rocks and branches and hefted the logs away. It's not an easy process to create a new hard-packed dirt path. And I'll tell you what, the whole time our primitive brain will be whining to us and complaining that the other path is just so much easier to walk. 

19:23 

So, why don't we just go back to that one? And this one is just so hard. But we can get our prefrontal cortex in the game and override those thoughts. And it is completely possible if we are consistent and persistent. So first, we need to increase our awareness of our feelings or our behaviors that are not helping us. What defensive or offensive thoughts do I engage in that ultimately bring about unhealthy behaviors? This can be tricky because just like me this last weekend, I haven't really struggled with these types of reactions until I interacted with my ex-husband again. So it will just take being aware that they are there and seeking to notice them when they come around in your new relationship, or in my case, my old relationship, right? Because they will come back up. 

20:14 

Once we notice our unhealthy behaviors, it's important to just get really curious about them, working to identify the feelings and then the thoughts that created these behaviors. My main thought that I identified from my experience this last weekend was, "I'm not going to let you walk all over me." Now, it's also important to realize that this was entirely my own thought. It is connected to me and me only, not to my ex-husband's actions. I'm not blaming him for anything here. All of this was happening in my head, right? He actually has nothing to do with the fact that I had that thought. My thought is entirely my own responsibility, as are the feelings and the actions that follow that thought. 

21:00 

But also, we need to keep being curious. For me exploring the thought, "I'm not going to let you walk all over me," is an important step. What am I scared of? Why don't I want to be walked all over? What do I think I'm going to lose? What do I think is going to happen if I get walked all over? Questions like that work really hard to figure out the deeper thoughts underlying the initial thoughts. You will be amazed at what you figure out about yourself. And then once you start seeing what's really going on, you can start making decisions about those thoughts. Are they serving me or are they not serving me? Are they coming from a place of fear or a place of love? 

21:42 

Because, this is kind of a cool thing: you can think the same thought that is motivated by fear or love and it will cause different feelings and actions. For example," I'm not going to let you walk all over me" coming from a place of fear creates feelings of insecurity or anger or resentment. Whereas the same thought, "I'm not going to let you walk all over me" coming from a place of love for myself will create feelings of empowerment or self-respect or self-compassion. Okay, so that's a fascinating piece of this to look at too. What am I being motivated by? 

22:22 

But this is a process. And if we're going to get over the trauma of divorce and move into healthier patterns of thinking and hence healthier feelings and actions, we have to start figuring ourselves out and identifying the unconscious thoughts that are impacting our lives so heavily. Is it work? Definitely, but so, so worth it. And you may not be able to do it alone, and this is where I can help you as a life coach. I am trained to help you see your thoughts more clearly so that you can make intentional decisions about what thoughts you want running in your background and in the foreground of your brain. 

23:05 

Ultimately, "divorce" is a neutral circumstance, as is the fact that "I am a divorced person." We get to choose what to think about the divorce. We get to think. We get to choose what we want to think about ourselves as being a divorced person. But being aware of all the thoughts is the really tricky part, the part that requires a lot of self-reflection, self-honesty, and self awareness. But it's totally possible to work our way through this trauma and come out the other side a healthier and happier person, one who is entirely able to engage in meaningful and loving relationships. But we've got to want to see it. And sometimes that's the toughest part because it can be painful to see our human nature in all of its dysfunctional glory. But it's also the only way to create new patterns, new paths that will take us where we want to go and not to the same place we've already been. We already know that that path doesn't work so we've got to create a new one. 

24:11 

But before I leave I want to leave you with one last thought centered around self-compassion. My friends, these are tough things to work through and beating ourselves up over doing the best we knew how to do when we were neck deep in a difficult situation is not healthy either. And if our goal is to get to a healthy place, self-compassion for our humanness is the only way to go. I recently saw this quote on facebook that was attributed to the Black Butterfly and I'm not really sure who that is or what that is, but the quote fits perfectly here. It says "with time you'll see that the frantic, broken, anxious, unhinged version of you was nothing to be ashamed of. You were simply a kind-hearted person reacting to a very unkind situation." Isn't that beautiful? Not one of us was trying to create unhealthy, horrible situations in our lives. At the time, something seemingly unbelievable was happening to us and our primitive brain went into survival mode. It was doing the best it could with the tools available to it at the time. We weren't intentionally seeking to create neural pathways that were not healthy. We were seeking safety and survival. 

25:35 

But there does come a point in our lives where we need to recognize that those patterns of behavior are no longer created safety and survival but in reality are at this point doing almost the exact opposite. They are isolating us both physically and emotionally. They are disconnecting us from the people we love the most and they are continuing to perpetuate behaviors that create similar situations. So understanding that we have these deep trauma responses and starting to take responsibility for these responses for them taking responsibility for them is the only way out. At some point we have to stop blaming our ex for all of this crap in our lives. We have to realize that we have created it and are continuing to create it and step up into the responsibility for creating something different. 

26:32 

Another quote I ran across this last week that stopped me in my tracks and made me want to create some space for this idea is from Buckminster Fuller. He said "you never change things by fighting the existence of reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." This is like creating the new path in the forest, developing a new thought, and over time when the old pathway gets walked less and less, the weeds will start to grow in on the edges, the  branches and rocks and logs will fall on it, the rains will break up the soil and plants will grow, and eventually you would never know that a path existed there. And it works similarly with our thoughts. When we create a new thought, a new model, it will become the go-to for our brains and the old thoughts will eventually become obsolete. 

27:27 

So work through the process, be compassionate to yourself, and contact me if you need help going through this process. I promise coaching is amazing and yes, it's an investment in time, it's an investment in money and energy that you will not regret. As one of my clients recently told me, "coaching is the best thing I never knew I needed," right? That's so great. We don't always recognize that we need the help that we need, but I promise you this is a process that can be worked through and I can help you do that. Okay, growing up is awesome. I love it, don't you? I love understanding where I need to go and how to get there and what's happening. 

28:11 

So if you would love some personal help from me, get on my website tanyahale.com. Okay, you can go there and go to the contact me and you can set up a free coaching session with me to work through this. Your first session is always free. We work through it. I talk to you about how coaching works. I talk to you about the programs I offer. It is such an amazing investment and an investment that will pay off for the next 30, 40, 50 years. And my goal this year is to do 300. That's crazy. 300 of these free coaching sessions. So even if you just want to give it a shot, give it a shot. Give me a call and let me help you. 

28:55 

Okay, please share this, share this podcast. I know that we all know people who are divorced, who are struggling with divorce, going through it at the time, having gone through it and still struggling. Share this. I think there's some good information here that can really, really help us find a better place. And my friends, that is going to do it for me today. I wish you all the best. I just pray that as you become more aware of your thoughts, that you find a better place. Alright, wishing you the best. Have a great one. Talk to you next time. Bye. 

29:28 

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: 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!