About Me: How a Math Teacher Became an (Accidental) Expert on Divorce
Anxiety After Divorce
The dictionary defines anxiety as, “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” Well, it’s no wonder then that anxiety becomes a constant companion for many facing divorce, which certainly epitomizes an “imminent event…with an uncertain outcome.”
It’s normal to feel anxious before, during and after divorce. You’re experiencing a period of loss and transition at the same time you may be struggling to reconnect with your very identity and purpose. That’s stressful no matter how you look at it.
Anxiety around divorce can be focused on one or more specific areas, or it may be more generalized and diffuse. The feeling may be clear-cut and easy to recognize or it can manifest in more subtle ways. Regardless of the particular nature of your divorce-related anxiety, the more you understand it, the better you can learn to navigate – and eventually curtail – it.
What You’re Anxious About
The Practical Concerns
These are often the first worries that manifest – How will I pay the bills without their income? Where will I live? How will we manage custody? What will the legal process be like?
There are so many important details of daily life that divorce impacts. And most of these have to be dealt with yesterday. Add the very real financial costs of divorce and it’s no wonder you’re losing sleep.
Personal Strength and Fortitude
“I’m not strong enough to get through this” is one of the first thoughts that many people have when they realize that divorce is imminent. The emotions threaten to drown you and the sheer amount of tasks you have to complete is completely overwhelming.
Maybe you’ve never been tested like this before and so you have no track record with which to reassure yourself of your tenacity. Or maybe you’re worried about the duration of this transition – how can you keep going when the finish line isn’t even marked?
The Impact on the Kids
From the first moment you gazed into your newborn’s eyes, a need to protect them from all harm has permeated your every cell. Yet no matter how deftly you wield your shield, you cannot block all of life’s slings and arrows from reaching your child. And for many children, their parent’s divorce is the first major emotional injury they face.
It’s difficult to watch your child suffer. Their pain ricochets through you like an unreturned racquetball in an empty court. You feel helpless as your normal platitudes and kisses fail to sooth this particular wound and guilty that you failed to protect them in the first place.
It’s no wonder you’re anxious. You worry about the impact that this family transition will have on your children. You agonize over the pain they’re facing. You stress about how this might affect them moving forward. You lose sleep over the relationship they have with their other parent. And most of all, you constantly question if you’re doing the right thing, making the right decisions.
Emotional Reactions
I remember being so afraid of my emotional response. It felt like being pulled along by some powerful riptide, threatening to drown me at any moment.
The emotional reactions after divorce are strong, variable and unpredictable. You never know if you’re going to break down crying in the middle of a work presentation, burst into inappropriate laughter in a meeting your attorney or fly of the handle in a fit of rage because a form asked for you to indicate your marital status.
And this uncertainty combined with a feeling that you no longer have control over your inner world, leads to a great deal of anxiety.
Future Happiness
“Will I ever be happy again?” you wonder. And your anxious brain is ready with a reply – “No.”
You worry that the best years have already happened and that it’s all downhill from here. You wonder if this divorce will always be your defining moment. And you stress as you contemplate the thought that maybe you’re broken and that you cannot be repaired.
The Views of Others
You feel like those around you are judging you, labeling you as a “quitter” or quietly assuming that you failed as a person in order to have a failed marriage. Their voices – real or imagined – join your own, doubts and criticisms circling around your head like tubes in a lazy river.
This anxiety may extend to your general social standing and connections. Maybe you are now losing the family that you’ve grown to love and cherish. Perhaps you worry that you no longer fit into the “couples only club” that is your primary friend group. Or, in your cultural or religious group, divorce may be viewed as a sin and you’re shunned for your circumstances.
New Relationships and Finding Love Again
You worry that your ex was your soulmate and that you somehow screwed up your only chance for love. The thought of dating again is downright terrifying and you wonder if anybody will love the older, more jaded, and less tolerant version of you. And that’s of course assuming that there are even people out there that you’d be interested in.
Finding love is only the starting place for your anxiety. Then comes the question of keeping it. After all, you don’t have such a great track record right now. You worry that you’re going to end up in this same place again.
How the Anxiety Manifests
A Feeling of Being “Driven”
Anxiety has energy. It is an accelerant. A propellant. The focus of this drive can vary, turning towards everything from your performance at work to finding out every detail possible about the person your ex cheated on you with. Sometimes anxiety feels like you’re being driven by a motor but you’re spinning your wheels.
Obsessive Thoughts
You may be obsessively wondering how your ex could have acted the way they did. Or maybe you’re fixated on something you did that contributed to the collapse of the marriage. Anxiety often causes our thoughts to become trapped like the water above a blocked drain, as we desperately sift through them looking for a way to control the outcome.
Avoidance and Distractions
Anxiety is not a comfortable feeling. So when something causes undo stress, we often avoid it in order to eliminate that discomfort. This can manifest by intentionally or subconsciously avoiding locations or situations that you know will trigger an emotional reaction. Others may turn to distractions (everything from dating to work) in an attempt to give a wide berth to anything that may cause anxiety to spike.
A Sense of Futility
Anxiety is the world’s greatest pessimist. It will always tell you that not only is the glass empty, but the glass is cracked and will never hold anything of substance again. If you’re feeling defeated and assuming that it’s a permanent state, that may be your anxiety talking.
Restlessness
Are you feeling a need to redecorate your entire home? Or maybe move to a new home – or country – altogether? Do you have trouble staying still and you seem to always find something to keep you busy? Anxiety has its own fear – a fear of stillness and quiet. So when you’re anxious, you’re often restless.
How to Handle Your Anxiety
Call in the Professionals
Get help if you need it! There is no shame in asking for help. In fact, admitting a need for and accepting help are great signs of strength.
How do you know if you need help with your anxiety? Here are some signs that it’s time:
- Your anxiety is interfering with your ability to carry out the basic functions of daily life
- The divorce is history, yet your anxiety still remains
- Symptoms of depression are present along with the anxiety
- You’re turning to substances to help you manage your anxiety
- Your children are being impacted by your anxiety
- You want to improve your anxiety but you don’t know how
Incorporate Exercise
Exercise won’t cure anxiety, but if you exhaust the body, it has a tendency to tire out the mind as well. And when it comes to worrying, a tired mind is a happier mind.
Play around with different types of exercise. Perhaps you do best with yoga and its emphasis on breathing through discomfort. Or maybe running helps you process your thoughts and gives you a sense of progress. You may find that you’re drawn to martial arts, where your anxiety can be funneled into strikes and you gain a sense of power and strength.
The what doesn’t matter here. The regularity and commitment does. Figure out what works for you and practice it frequently.
Learn to Recognize Anxiety
Be aware of how anxiety manifests in your mind and body. Does your chest get tight? Your stomach upset? Your brain on overdrive?
Just being aware of these signs can 1) give you a sense of control over your anxiety and 2) provide you with an opportunity to do something about it. You’ve heard about love languages. This is the time to become fluent in your own fear language.
Face Your Fears
When we avoid situations that cause us discomfort, we allow them to grow in size and power. Think about all of the times you’ve been afraid to do something, from jumping into a pool as a child or having a difficult conversation as an adult. How many times did you discover that the anticipation was worse than the reality? Quite a bit, I expect.
And also think about your mindset before and after you faced that fear. Before, you were fixated on the situation, playing out all of the possible outcomes and worrying about every one. After? Well, it no longer seemed so important and all of that mental energy no longer had to be allocated its direction.
It’s pretty simple, really. Not easy, but simple.
Avoidance makes your anxieties grow. Facing your fears diminishes their power.
Chart Your Progress
When it comes to healing from divorce, progress is so slow that it’s often imperceptible from your viewpoint. So document your journey. Bring awareness to your progress.
Journaling is one way to accomplish this. You can go back at any time and read your earlier entries to get a feeling of how far you’ve come. This serves to both help you recognize your strength and also gives you hope that things will continue to improve.
Question Your Conclusions
Anxiety lies. Just think about it – when you’re sifting through all of the possible outcomes, how many of them or positive or even neutral? Not very many, I expect. Yet, the reality is that many outcomes fall into these categories. But anxiety always assumes the worst.
So learn to question your conclusions. Where is this assumption coming from – facts or fears? If it’s the latter, you have permission to ignore the advice.
Implement a Gratitude Practice
When you’re grateful, you’re in the moment. When you’re anxious, you’re living in the future. Take some time every day to focus on those things that bring you joy and appreciation. Write them down in a place where you can return time and time again to literally count your blessings.
Listen to Others
We don’t do well when we live only within the echo chamber of our own minds. So allow other voices in. Hear their perceptive and their wisdom.
From others, we gain insight into ourselves and inspiration to keep trying.
Accept Anxiety as a Natural Response
We have evolved to experience anxiety as nature’s way of keeping us safe. We are primed to feel fear and uncertainty around novel situations to help guide our decisions in a safe direction.
Anxiety is natural. However, modern life doesn’t present us with the simple dilemmas our ancient ancestors faced. The question about whether the meat gained from hunting the large game is worth the risk has been replaced with the constant worry about your child’s ability to navigate the emotional fallout from divorce.
So it’s important to both accept your anxiety as a natural response to a potentially threatening and new situation and also expend effort to lessen your anxiety since the potential triggers are ongoing.
And always remember – you may feel anxious at any given moment, but YOU are not your anxiety.
Why Do We Believe Their Lies?
In hindsight, it’s all so clear.
Unfortunately, we can’t preorder hindsight.
Looking back now, some of my ex’s false stories are absurd. One of my favorite has to do the phone line. Apparently, we were beginning to receive calls from creditors since he had decided that funding a second life was more important than paying the bills. And it wouldn’t do to have me inadvertently pick up one of these calls and learn the truth about our finances.
So he cut the phone line.
But it didn’t end there. Because of course, he couldn’t admit that he disconnected the service (which by the way, also meant the alarm system didn’t work while I was home alone when he was traveling), so he feigned surprise that the phone no longer worked. We went to radio Shack, where he bought a device that is used to diagnose issues in phone lines ($25) and pretended to try to find the problem for the remainder of that afternoon. Now that’s commitment.
My gut said something was off about the entire situation. After all, I had never had a phone line just suddenly stop working. And my ex never followed through with contacting the phone company, which seemed like a logical next step. His reaction was a combination of an initial flurry of action and then…well, nothing.
But I didn’t listen to my gut. I listened to him.
So why do we believe their lies?
The Truth is Too Scary to Face
If I saw the truth about the phone line, it would mean that I would have to face the reality that everything I thought I knew was a lie. It would mean that my husband was not my protector, that instead he had become my tormentor. That every ounce of security that I thought I had (financial, emotional, etc.) had evaporated and nothing could be trusted.
It was like a domino effect; if I saw through one lie, they all would tumble and reveal the hellish truth behind their facade. And I wasn’t ready to see that.
We believe the lies because we so desperately need them to be true. Because reality is too scary to comprehend.
We Don’t Want to Admit We Were Wrong About Them
I thought my ex husband was a good man. A generous man. An honest man. And to admit otherwise meant that I would also have to cop to my own shortcomings in selecting him and then for keeping him on a pedestal.
We believe the lies because we want to think that we made a good choice. Sometimes it’s hard to admit a mistake.
It’s Hard to Admit That We’ve Been Fooled
By the time my spidey-sense was trying to get my attention to tell me something was wrong, he had been lying undetected for years. So to see one lie in the present meant that I had to admit to not seeing all of those in the past. It was easier to simply stay in the dark and pretend that everything was okay.
We believe the lies because it’s embarrassing, shameful even, to reveal that we have been fooled. We want to think that we’re smarter than that.
We Want to Believe the Best About Them
In many of my ex’s stories, he painted himself as the victim of some unfortunate circumstance. He was the underdog, just trying to do the right thing in a world that seemed to be stacked against him. And since I loved him, I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe IN him.
We believe the lies because we take the side of the one we love and it’s easier to see them as the victim than the perpetrator.
We’ve Learned to Doubt Ourselves
Like many cheaters and addicts, my ex used gaslighting to keep me confused. He would outright deny something that I remembered happening and he would create documents that conflicted with the real ones that I had already seen. All of this uncertainty meant that I always questioned my own perceptions, often even more than I did his excuses.
We believe the lies because we have been conditioned to no longer believe ourselves.
And that’s exactly where healing begins – in learning to trust our own perceptions and instincts again and in believing that we ARE strong enough to handle the truth no matter what it holds.
Finding Understanding In the Lies Cheaters Tell
The Cornerstone of Divorce Recovery
“But how did you do it?” I was recently asked in regards to my divorce recovery.
“I had no real choice in the matter,” I replied, “I absolutely refused to give him any more. He had taken enough.”
But that reply, of which I’ve given some version of probably hundreds of times over the past decade, didn’t really answer the question.
I could list the strategies that I implemented, as I have done numerous times before. But even those wouldn’t address the heart of the question.
Because what this person was really asking was how did I get myself up out of bed every morning when the sheets were still wet from the tears that flowed throughout the night? They wanted to know how I kept my hopes up for the future when all I could see was darkness. In witnessing the dichotomy between my now happy and smiling face and the brutality of the story I told, they were struggling to understand how happiness could survive such despair.
Faith played a big role – belief in the possibility of recovery, confidence in the strength of the human spirit and trust in the inherent kindness of most people.
But even faith isn’t enough to force you out of bed on those mornings when the weight of the world feels as though it will crush you before noon.
That requires something else entirely.
Discipline.
Discipline is one those traits that we explicitly try to build in our children. We train them with chore charts, sign them up for martial arts and require that they eat their vegetables before their sweets.
Yet the role of discipline doesn’t fade as we age. In fact, the stakes become larger. Because without discipline, we can have all of the faith and hope and desire in the world, and we still won’t make any progress.
(Related: 6 Reasons You’re Not Seeing the Results You Expected)
At its core, discipline is about doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s about enduring discomfort, working towards a goal and, at least some of the time, putting the “have to’s” in front of the “want to’s.”
And most of us are pretty good at this. We pay our mortgage before we buy the ticket to Paris. When the alarm sounds on Monday morning, we manage to make it into work on time even though we’d rather sleep in and have UberEats bring us pancakes.
But something often shifts when it comes to divorce. Whether from the sheer enormity of the emotional turmoil, a case of the “why me’s?” stopping your momentum or the utter exhaustion of a major transition, discipline often flags after divorce.
Which is a shame because the swift kick in the butt provided by discipline is exactly what we need to get us back up on our feet again.
Without discipline, I would probably still be Googling my ex and his other wife. Discipline is what allowed me to get my finances back in order after my ex confused me for a line of credit. And discipline is what led me to face those triggering events that, on my own, I would have preferred to avoid.
The good news? There are strategies that you can use to get yourself moving while your discipline is still lagging behind:
Rely on External Supports
When you’re feeling weak, it’s perfectly acceptable to use external supports to buttress you from the outside. This can take the form of a therapist or coach that provides you with accountability. Alternately, you may benefit from a structured program (divorce related or even something completely different) that guides you with instructions on what to do and when to it. If you gravitate this direction, make sure that you select a group that both pushes you and offers a hand of encouragement. Or maybe you simply need a living space that is devoid of your favored form of distraction.
I knew that I would have a tendency to withdraw into myself during divorce. So to combat that, I lived with a generous friend and her family for a year. I let my teammates at work fuss over me and encourage me to eat. And I reached out to doctors to help manage my physical and mental ailments that arose from the situation at hand.
So often we refrain from asking for help out of a fear of looking inadequate. Yet admitting weakness is a great sign of strength.
Set Tangible Goals
Discipline operates best when the goals are clearly laid out and achievable. It’s easier to motivate yourself to do those not-always-pleasant things when you understand why you’re doing them.
Divorce is a time of immense change and overwhelming, and often impossible-seeming, goals. So break it down. What is one small way you want your life to look different next month? What steps can you start taking right now that will get you there?
Next, record those necessary steps on your phone’s calendar and/or set reminders to get them done. Finally, when that reminder pops up, do the thing.
I posted a list of 12 goals that I wanted to reach that first year. It was in a highly visible place and I made notes on it as I made progress towards my intentions. There were days that those 12 bullet points kept me going.
Try Gamification
Thanks to the neurotransmitter dopamine, our brains thrive on intermittent rewards. The concept of gamification capitalizes on this fact, tying game theory into everything from learning a new language to meditation.
Many lifestyle and wellness apps now apply this theory with opportunities to “level up” or unlock new content. Alternately, you can set challenges for yourself or commit to a streak of a certain behavior or action (or non-action in the case of trying to stop social media stalking your ex).
I used gamification during divorce when it came to paying off the debt he incurred. Every time I paid off another $1,000, I would grant myself a small guilt-free activity or purchase. It was my way of leveling up.
Practice Habit-Building
Discipline is not infinite. Several studies have demonstrated that decision fatigue is a real thing (interestingly, this is most true for the people that believe that their willpower will fade). There are a couple ways to combat this lack of willpower. The first is to force yourself to begin. Because once you have taken your first step, the resistance to the subsequent ones is lower.
The other is to cultivate habit. Within the last 6 months, my mom changed her entire way of eating. At first, food choices required an extreme amount of conscious awareness for her. It was new and nothing was automatic. That is the most difficult period, as the brain wants to go back to the easy comfort of the known pathways. But over several weeks, the new foods simply became, “The way I eat,” and no longer required so much mental energy and discipline. (An aside, I am super proud of her for making – and maintaining – these changes! Go mom!)
The more you can move into habit, the less discipline you’ll need.
Start Small and Gradually Expand
You don’t have to do it all at once. Hell, you can’t do it all at once.
But you have to start somewhere.
And you have to start sometime.
Why not here and why not now?
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 