7 Critical Secrets To Get Through Your Divorce In One Piece
You will survive this.
Kate Gundareva | Canva When you’re going through a divorce, it feels like you’re running a marathon or two every single day. You’re spent. You’re running on fumes. And there’s no finish line in sight. At times you wonder if you’ll survive because the grueling pace of making sense of your new life (not to mention all the legal aspects you’re dealing with) is killing you. But, you can catch your breath. The pace seems relentless and it is — mostly because everything is new. Yet, just like the athletes who train to run marathons, there are things you can do to help you get through and survive divorce in one piece.
Here are 7 critical secrets for getting through your divorce in one piece:
1. Read fiction
Reading fiction is a great escape from your current confusing and frustrating reality, but it has other amazing benefits. It will help you improve your ability to focus on everything you’re juggling right now. It amplifies your creativity which is critical to solving all the problems you’re facing. And it can help you to both find and calm yourself. (Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for zoning out in front of the television.)
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2. Talk with people who have successfully made it through a divorce
Doing this will tap into your belief in yourself. After all, if they can make it through divorce, then you can too.
3. Don’t blindly trust the experts
Divorce is tough. You’re faced with a legal system you know very little about. So you hire an attorney and maybe a financial expert and maybe a therapist or divorce coach to help Sherpa your butt through this whole thing. It’s really easy to just let them handle it. But you can’t do that because nobody cares about you and what happens to you more than you do. You’ve got to become familiar with the basics and remember that these people all work for you.
4. Journal and/or blog
Catharsis. That’s what getting all the thoughts and emotions out of your head feels like. You’ll come away from putting pen to paper or pixels to screen feeling so much lighter and more focused than when you started.
5. Identify both your end goal and your daily priorities for getting there
This isn’t a suggestion that you have to know what the next 10 years of your life will be like, so don’t worry. It’s just that it’s time to start figuring out what you want. Heck, your daily priority for the next month (or more) may just be to spend 10 minutes thinking about what you want.
6. Restore yourself physically
This means getting enough sleep (or figuring out how you can get more), drinking enough water every day, eating healthful meals (and if all you can manage right now is to just eat something, then that’s enough), and exercising to feel refreshed and clear your mind.
7. Keep calm
This may seem impossible, but you can find pockets of time where you can focus on finding calm. And you know, if you can find even little bitty pockets of time for calm every day you’ll be amazed at what a difference that can make in how you get through your divorce. These 7 tips are just the jumping-off point. They are meant to get you started with shifting your attention — just a tiny bit — to yourself and what you need to recuperate from the chaos swirling around you. If you can take the time to support yourself every day, you’ll be well on your way to making it through the grueling grind of divorce in one piece.
Dr. Karen Finn is a divorce and life coach. Her writing on marriage, divorce, and co-parenting has appeared on MSN, Yahoo, Psych Central, Huffington Post, Prevention, and The Good Men Project, among others.