What To Do With All The Pain

Divorce, put simply, is a coordinated (and uncoordinated at times) logistics and emotions endeavor.

For a period of months and often years, the logistics of your divorce will include conversations around attorneys, parenting time, real estate, retirement, income, and expenses. It will revolve around who owes who what and for how long. Decisions around these logistics - many of which will have an impact on your life for decades after - are made during a time when you are most emotionally spent.

This is where the emotional part starts to take center stage. Often the emotional part of this two-part divorce endeavor will cost you more than the logistics in lost sleep, frustration, anger, fear, and the overwhelming need to pursue justice. If left unchecked, your emotions will sabotage everything you're trying to gain on your logistics side.

So what are we to do with these dark emotions?

In my new book, The Best Worst Time of Your Life: Four Practices to Get You Through the Pain of Divorce, I lay out exactly what it takes to manage the wild territory that is the emotional divorce. It is an art to both fully experience your emotions in divorce and not let them derail the actions of your better self. Below is an excerpt:

It goes to say that one of the biggest emotions you will encounter is emotional pain.

Pain. So much pain. So much mental and emotional stress. So much suffering.

During the first part of your divorce experience, you rarely go a day without it. You hate it. You resist it. You wish it would go away. And in typical fashion, you believe that relief from your pain comes from what your soon-to-be-former partner should do or should stop or what you could do, say, or be to make them different.

In divorce, you have the opportunity to learn the true meaning of the phrase, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” You will undoubtedly have pain. Your heart will break in a million pieces for yourself, for your kids, for your future, and for everything you ever understood of your past. Pain is not a bad thing, although it can feel like it. It’s the suffering that gets us. You will have suffering if you need everything to change but you. You will have suffering if you think you will never get to a point of freedom in your divorced relationship. You will have suffering if you keep using your former partner as an excuse for why it’s so hard.

Let’s let the pain flow. Pain, at its core, is simply an invitation. It’s not a coveted invitation, but it is an invitation, nonetheless. Pain says, “Hey can we spend some time over here? Something is not right here, and I’m concerned.” Pain raises its hand. It stands on tiptoe to get your attention. It notices when something is off. It raises a finger to suggest that there’s more work here. The work is not necessarily to make the pain go away, but it is to let the pain occupy the space without the suffering.

Our poodle dog, Winston, is the official noticer of things that are off at our home. One night, I found him barking at our back door as though a team of burglars were ready to break in. As I let him out to go explore what he sensed, I watched him walk straight out to the pool. The wind had blown an inflatable flamingo pool toy into our pool, and Winston was not going to have it. He barked like management needed to attend to this deviation right away.

This is what pain does for us: it notices changes and it demands our attention. It picks up on subtle ways that things moved. It feels the ache of a weekend home that is empty, it frets about holiday plans with two addresses, and it hurts when a kiddo just wants her dad and he’s not there. It’s painful. Divorce is painful. But we can learn to allow the pain to be our guide, not our alarm and not introduce further suffering.

The specifics of how you go about living with and not against the pain in your own life is the practice part of my book. It is not enough to simply know these truths. To live them, you must become proficient with self-examination, journaling, conversing with listening ears, and seeking out the relief you most want inside yourself. If you are attentive to what the pain is willing to teach you, you too may someday believe that your divorce was the best worst time of your life.