Monday, August 18, 2008

Thinking the Unthinkable

Recently, a fellow blogger friend of mine and I had an exchange that sparked a conversation.

In his blog, he spoke of some of the things that he had experienced in his divorce. Things that seem outlandish to anyone who has never actually experienced them for themselves. We talked about the many times that he had been blind-sided by the antics that his wife engaged in, all in the name of "divorce war".

And, as you know, it's my passion to help people avoid such wars.

And, as most people realize, one way to avoid war, or even one skirmish in it, is to see it coming, so you can prepare for it. Yet, as I remarked to my friend, it's often frustrating in my line of work to warn someone who is smack-dab in the midst of the skirmish of an impending attack... and hear them respond "Oh, my spouse would never do that!" It happened often enough, that when my friend made mention of it as we commented about his blog, I realized it was time to think this through some more. If I could not learn a way to help my clients understand and get past their blindness, I would be doing them a disservice.

So, I thought about what causes a person who is going through divorce to get taken by ambush by the shenanigans of their spouse. And I am talking about the stuff that happens often enough (sadly) that it's easy for those of us who are familiar with the course of divorce to predict with pretty fair accuracy when then next stunt is going to get pulled. When you know what to look for, you can see it coming for miles.

I realized that a big part of the problem is that there is cognitive dissonance for a divorcing person, between the married life that they once knew, the marriage partner that they once knew, and the life they are transitioning into presently. I wrote about this in a guest blog on my friend's site (see www.thepsychoexwife.com).

But mere understanding is not a remedy in and of itself. So, I also tried something new with one of my clients today, and asked her for permission to share how it worked with my readers.

As she and I spoke, I heard the classic sounds of "oh, my spouse would never do that!" In her case, the words were not exact, but the overall gist was the same. So I said "will you take a short walk with me?" She looked puzzled, but agreed.

We walked down the hall of my building and out onto the sidewalk. Across the street a man had just parked his car and was hurrying into a nearby building, carrying a briefcase. I asked my client "do you recognize that man?" She replied that she did not.

I asked her "what do you know about him?"

"Only that he looked middle-aged, seemed to be in a hurry, and was carrying a bag."

I thanked her for trusting me, and said "Let's go back inside." After we returned to the office, I explained: "Someday in the future, you will see your husband somewhere, a random glimpse, and it will occur to you that you know longer know him. He will seem like a stranger to you. You will hardly know more about him than what you know right now about that man on the street. It will probably even feel strange and quite distant to recall anything about him. That's the destination of this part of the journey for your brain. Can you imagine that happening?"

She struggled for a moment, but finally mentally merged the image of the stranger on the street with an image of her husband. I prodded her: "Imagine that all you know of your husband is that he is middle-aged, seems to be in a hurry, and is carrying a bag. Keep that picture in your mind until it seems real to you and not merely imagination."

I was really glad she was able to trust me! Finally, she nodded.

And I said to her: "That man you are picturing right now, that total stranger who merely looks like your husband... that is the person you are divorcing. You know no more about him - his intentions, his cares, his drives, his plans - than you did about the man on the street. From this point forward, you simply have no way to predict what he will do."

Now, I may have overstated the magnitude of the situation, to make an impact. But finally, it got through. My client needed to understand that the man she was divorcing was not the man who had bought her flowers, rubbed her feet, or gotten up early to make the coffee.

One need not transform their soon-to-be-ex into some demon, nor resort to paranoia, to avoid the surprise attack that can take place in divorce war. As I mentioned in the other blog post, we must always hope for the best behavior, of both ourselves and our divorcing spouse. But, to avoid a prolonged, painful, scorch-the-earth war, we must also prepare for the worst. And step one in that preparation, is to trust your coach when he or she tells you "oh yes, your soon-to-be-ex spouse would do that."

Peace.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Random, and Completely Unrelated...

In my life prior to becoming a divorce coach, I was involved in the aerospace industry. It was a great, rewarding, and joyous career, and I am thankful for it. Today's blog has nothing to do with divorce. It's just a little blurb I wrote a while back, after I had learned to fly. Read on:

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Recently, I was given the opportunity to finally learn to fly a real airplane. After years of collaborating with pilot review teams to develop cockpits, I was finally going to learn firsthand what it was like to truly use my product. Up until this point, I had spent countless hours “flying” our test cockpits in the simulators. But the many pilots on my test teams insisted over and over that I could not know what it was truly like, until I had truly flown.

They were right. And so, after finally learning to fly for real, I realized that there were some important life lessons that went along with the flying lessons. At least, this is what the experience taught me:

  1. You can control a simulator with millions of lines of code and control laws and rules and logic statements. You don't control real flight: you surrender to the laws of nature (gravity, Bernoulli's principle, physics) and the airplane flies itself. If you hit turbulence, have a cross-wind, get out of trim, or slightly "off-course" you inspect, adapt, and correct. If you over-correct, you inspect, adapt, and correct back in the other direction. You are never "perfectly" on... except for a teeny instant when you are going past 'perfect' on your way out to the other side of the pendulum. And that's okay.
  2. When you sit in a simulator, you feel NOTHING. This is because there is nothing at stake. If you crash, the dome goes black and the technicians will tease and harass you a bit. But you have never left safe, secure, terra firma, and somewhere, your brain knows that. When you sit in a real plane, you feel the wind, the surge of forces against the controls, the pressure of the stick and the rudders; you feel the force of gravity as you lift off... you feel twice the force of gravity as you make a steep 60-degree angle turn and it pins you back into your seat. You feel a thrill of watching the altimeter zip past 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 and you look down at tiny little roads and trucks and houses and lakes. You feel a twinge of excitement and panic as you realize you are high up in the air. You feel your "oh s***" moments when you realize you didn't pull your nose up correctly and you just lost 200 feet of altitude. You FEEL it ALL. You are taking a risk to live a reality, and somewhere, your brain knows that.
  3. You cannot make an airplane take off. You just put all of the elements into place and it will take off when it's ready. You point it into the wind if you can... you give it all the speed you can... you pull back and give it all the lift vector that you can... and then you surrender and let the natural laws do what they will do. You cannot make a simulator take off. No matter what you do, you will just be sitting there, in a dome, strapped into a seat that a lot of people spent a lot of time and a lot of money to make *look* just like you are flying. But no matter what, you will always just be sitting there.
  4. Flying an airplane is ALL IN. From the second you strap into the seat... you push all your chips to the middle and play hard with all you've got. If you're not prepared to do that, you don't get in at all. There is no halfway. There is no control-P to pause it. There is no withholding a portion; keeping one leg on the ground; or being wishy-washy about your commitment. There is certainly no "pretending to fly" or "wearing a mask" of flight. It is undeniably, unshakably R.E.A.L.
  5. Off the ground is off the ground. If you're going to fly, you may as well soar all the way to the stratosphere (well, allowing for equipment limits, but you know what I mean). It is no scarier or riskier to fly at 5,000 feet than at 1,000... so why needlessly limit yourself? Fly higher!!!
  6. Most of the joy of flight is paying attention to what is going on outside the airplane... not what's going on inside. So... break away from the control panel as often as you can, learn to *feel* your way so you don't have to constantly monitor your instruments and gages -- and look out the window and enjoy the amazing view!

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That's it. Sometimes, especially when you are smack-dab in the thick of the most difficult thing you've ever done, such as divorce, it's good to take some time out and soar. I hope you did today.

Peace.

Monday, August 4, 2008

The Way It Looks To Them

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I received from one of my clients (used with permission):

"We continue to struggle with my stepson's relationship with his mother." [the court had awarded primary custody of the 15-year-old boy to the father, two years ago; the mother agreed to shift custody because she recognized that the boy needed to be with his father more once he entered his teen years; this e-mail is from the boy's stepmother]. "We try to explain our values to her, but she still thinks she can make up for abandoning her son by buying him off. Now she has promised him a car for his 16th birthday, after we told her not to. We are still recovering from the cell phone fiasco she started when she bought him his own cell phone. It's impossible to enforce the court order restricting her phone calls when he has access to his own phone. We try very hard to teach our son to resist all these materialistic bribes, but he's only 15. He's really confused because he seems to think that love equals stuff. How do we help him see that phones and cars are not love?"

Sounds quite innocent, right? Someone in a parental role, hoping to rear their child with solid, respectable values.

Here is what that 15-year old boy hears:

"Your mother doesn't love you."
"Your mother has abandoned you."
"Your mother doesn't want you to interfere with her selfish, materialistic life."
"Your mother is a bad person, and if you accept these gifts, that makes you a bad person, too."
"You should not want to contact your mother."
"You cannot have a relationship with your mother, and also have a good relationship with your father at the same time."
"You are bad person if you want a cell phone or a car."

When I informed my client of the messages she was sending to her step-son, she vehemently denied it. "Oh no," she said, "I never ever say these things around him."

When I explained to her that these were the messages he was receiving, whether or not they were what she intended to send, then she returned to her original position: that the mother had abandoned her position as parent. My client then wanted to know how she could convey "the truth" to her step-son in a way that "wouldn't damage him."

What I said to her, I say to all parents, step-parents, grandparents, and any other quasi-parental role: it is not your job to make sure your child knows "the truth" about their other parent. There is simply no way you can do this without damage. Even if there were a way to do it without damage, it is still not your job.

Even if the child seems "confused." Not your job.

What is your job? To let that kiddo know that YOU love them, support them, will be there for them, no matter what. That's it. You can tell them YOUR feelings ("I love you"), YOUR intentions ("I will always have your back"), and YOUR commitment ("I will never abandon you"), but you cannot tell them someone else's. Don't even try.

The interesting thing is, if the parents, step-parents, grandparents, and other quasi-parents will just do this one thing - their own part - the kiddos grow up healthier. They own their own "truth", and they can handle it... in large part because of the gift of emotional health given to them by grown-ups who were secure enough themselves to do their own job.

Peace.