dudesndivorce.com

Having been divorced two times now I’m becoming unfortunately familiar with the overall process; before, during and after. Kind of like being an expert on self-flagellation – it’s a dubious honor.  But I HAVE learned some things – especially this last time around – which is part of the reason why I’m doing this site w/ Russ.  Looking back, I notice that after my first divorce I was so wrapped up in DEALING with the changes it brought about that I never took the time to focus or guide or use them much.  To be honest it never occurred to me that I had the option to use these changes in a positive, on-going way.  I did make use of the greater freedom and ability for self-determination that the divorce provided by going to college.  But that was almost a by-product of the whole process – not something I did as part of a program of self renewal.

 On Thursday we talked about how fear is probably the greatest hindrance to making needed changes and that the time immediately after a divorce constitutes a unique window of opportunity to reinvent yourself in many different areas of your life. So what do you do if you’ve moved well past that initial post-divorce phase and find yourself in need for some reinvention?

 First of all I think it’s good to approach this whole process as a project – something that can be broken up into concrete action steps aimed at achieving clearly defined goals.  This has the advantage of breaking the effort up into achievable steps instead of being faced with an overwhelming and monumental task.  Small victories and achievements tend to motivate you to continue working rather than giving up because the big, end goals seem so far away.

Second – before you start you’ll need to spend some time in good honest self-assessment.  What needs to change in your life? Work at getting a good overall picture in your mind of where you’d like to be eventually.  Make this achievable over all ok?  I mean I’d love to be worth a couple million, drive a Benz and vacation in the Virgin Islands . . . but I’d be happy if I could loose some weight, pay off my house and find the time to learn Greek.  Use the “Magic Wand” trick – ask yourself “If I had a magic wand what basic changes would I make in my life.”  The answers might give you some ideas about things to add to the list.  As you are working on this try to be aware of topics that you are avoiding or shying away from.  Is a fear of change possibly influencing you?  Fixing a relationship or starting a new career is tough stuff but remember that in such areas the decision to avoid change now can lead to the NEED to change later.  As I mentioned in the last post – the greatest motivation for change is pain – that can serve as a warning to the wise.

Third – organize the list from your self-assessment according to priority.  You might want to consider putting learning how to dance lower on the list than strengthening your relationship with your children . . . just a thought.

 Fourth – so you have your list of what you want to change and it’s in order of priority.  Next step is to create concrete goals – for example “within six months I’m going to be eating healthier and will have lost 20 pounds.”  Or “within six months my son and I will be having fewer arguments and will be making progress on our communication”.  You’ll notice that I kept the relationship stuff process oriented rather than setting an absolute goal; relationships involve two people and are very much a work in progress therefore it’s best to reflect that in your goal.  Second you’ll see that I set a specific time limit on the goal.  It doesn’t have to be six months of course – it’s up to you and what you feel is reasonable.  But a time element acts to help you measure your progress and as each one is reached set a new goal to keep you moving in the right direction.

 Fifth – decide what steps you are going to take to meet your goals.  “I will reduce the number of times I go out to eat per week by half”  or “I’ll stop eating snacks after 7 each night” or “I’ll read a book on father/son relationships”  These are specific tasks that can be completed and will set you on the path to achieving your goal.  Each time you complete one – add another so that you maintain your progress.

 Sixth – reward yourself for even small achievements.  When you loose that 20 pounds do something fun as a celebration!  Also make the whole process fun . . . no one can stay invested in pulling teeth for long.  Set little challenges or goals, make a bet against yourself or someone else, find ways to enjoy not just the achievement but the process as well.  Also – if you are a chart person don’t forget to chart your positives!  If you keep track of your failures you will focus on those and where you focus your attention there you are.  So focus on your successes – if you keep track of every time you DIDN’T eat out you become impressed with how many times you had the will power to resist temptation.

 Finally – while most of the steps above are pretty standard self improvement stuff remember that the big picture ties back to renewing yourself, recovering from the damage done by the past and reinventing who you are.  It’s not a static one-time-only event to fix some especially serious problem but instead is a process within a process – the larger process of building a habit of continual self renewal.  Remember the analogy of the puzzle or the Formula of Self? (last Saturday’s post)  The idea that a bad “piece” taints the puzzle or a negative “variable” taints the formula applies in reverse as well . . . a particularly good piece or variable can improve the overall end product. 

 Hope this was helpful; I’m going to try to have a review of a good self-help book regarding these same issues up soon as a further help to each of you who would like to take this process forward in your own life.

 Until then – Be Well!!

 Bill

First of all I want to start with a brief apology – My internet service has been down at home and so I’ve been unable to make my posts on time; hopefully that problem will be resolved soon.  Okay now on to the post. . . ..

As we discussed in Saturday’s post; just like many pieces make up a whole jigsaw puzzle, so we are each comprised of many different pieces that make up our whole person. A divorce is essentially the removal of one of those pieces from your life which is never an easy thing.  We also talked about how an unhealthy marriage relationship can basically taint many of the other pieces of our life such as our relationships with our children and that after the divorce it is necessary to take steps to renew those other pieces and rid them of the negative effects of that unhealthy marriage.

I think we all agree that recovery and renewal are good things, even necessary things . . . but why then is it that we’re so often hesitant to take steps in that direction?  I’d say probably the biggest cause is a fear of change.  There are plenty of reasons why we distrust and avoid change but probably one of the biggest has to do with a sense of safety.

We tend to feel more secure dealing with a known quality than stepping out into new territory.  Let’s look at relationships for example; imagine you are in a relationship with someone in which there is a pattern or a custom so to speak of always avoiding direct confrontation.  Whenever there is a problem the two of you dance around it, ignore it and avoid resolving it.  Obviously that’s a relationship in need of some healthy change; yet you’ll find that most people in that situation will avoid making the needed changes for years and years until things get so bad that it becomes a crisis.  As a very wise man told me years ago – “the greatest motivation for change is pain.” (now THAT’S a T-SHIRT!!) Why is that?  Why all the hesitation and avoidance to resolve what is probably not an insurmountable problem?  Well – we know the rules!  We know how to act, what to expect, what to do in that relationship when there is conflict – it may not work great but it is comfortable.  If we take steps to make a change . . . well ANYTHING could happen!!  We don’t know what the new rules will be, how the other person will react, what to expect . . . and that isn’t very comfortable now is it?

The relationship above is just one example of how we dislike the threat of change to our safety and security (and comfort) and therefore try to avoid it until things get so bad that we can’t do otherwise.  As a result we also loose out on the opportunity to renew our lives and our relationships into something much healthier.  When you are coming out of a divorce you are in a unique time of opportunity in your life.  You’ve faced your fear of change and already made a big adjustment that has had a trickle down effect on many, many other areas of your life.  You’ve essentially reinvented yourself almost by default!  The opportunity then is right there in front of you to continue to conquer that fear of change, to keep up that inertia of reinvention.  Take the time to examine closely each facet of your life, each piece of your self-puzzle and identify what needs a dose of healthy change.  Are there some old patterns in your relationships with your kids that need changing?  Are you happy in your career?  Want to go back to school?  Learn a new skill?  Take up a new hobby?  NOW is the time to reinvent and renew yourself! 

What if it’s been several years since your divorce and you never really made those changes at that time . . .maybe you find yourself back in a comfortable if not entirely healthy and satisfying rut?  Well – good question!  Let’s discuss that on Saturday in my next post.  As always – until that time if you’ve any thoughts, contributions to the discussion at hand or questions . . . please feel more than free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail at divorced-dudes@dudesndivorce.com  Would love to hear some feedback from everyone!!

Until then – Be Well!!

Bill

Hello dudesndivorce.com fans!

This morning I was recalling one of my favorite football stories and realize it had great implications to our blog!

In my opinion Johnny Unitas was one of the, if not THE greatest, quarterbacks to play the game of professional football. His best years were with the then Baltimore Colts of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s. 

If your familiar with the American version of football you may understand it is probably one of the most team oriented games in the world. Thus Johnny’s success depended heavily on his teammates, particularly the offensive line that blocked for him and allowed him to do all the amazing feats he accomplished.

During one particular game Johnny called a pass play, he dropped back to pass the ball, and his offensive line fell apart, allowing the defensive players to tackle Johnny with the ball. It was a series of vicious hits by multiple players and Johnny went down hard! When the tacklers got up off of him, he just laid there in pain for several moments. His offensive line looking on, feeling terrible, they had utterly failed to protect him. Slowly, painfully Johnny got up. The Head Coach, fearing his star quarterback was seriously injured sent in the backup. When the backup arrived in the huddle, Johnny merely looked at him and said,”Get off my field!”

At this point blood was streaming from Johnny’s nose due to the ferocious tackle he had suffered. It had rained earlier, so the field was slightly muddy. Johnny reached down and scraped up some mud in his fingers and jammed it in his nose to stop the bleeding. He looked at his offensive lineman with a look of stern and fierce determination and said, “We’re going to run that play again but this time YOUR going to do YOUR job and block!” So he did, he called the exact same play.

Afterwards the offensive lineman, to a man, said there was absolutely no way they were going to let Johnny down two times in a row! So they lined up and ran the play. The result? A perfectly executed pass play that resulted in a touchdown score for the Colts!

What can we learn from this seemingly unrelated story? As those of us that have played team sports realize, each member of the team has roles to perform. The better each member performs those roles, the more efficient and successful that the team is. This applies to businesses and, yes, to relationships as well. So what was Johnny doing here? He simply and firmly held the offensive lineman accountable for their inability to fulfill their role or expectations. Thus preventing Johnny from fulfilling his. 

Occasionally in a relationship a party will let their responsibilties lapse. This causes the other member to then “pick up the slack” and carry an additional burden. Now there may be some instances where we can understand this, for example an illness, but these are typically temporary in nature. It is when it becomes a habit of one person to frequently allow the other person to shoulder their responsibilities or even shirk their own responsibilities that causes problems.  

Commonly a good response is to address the matter with them directly, calmy, but firmly. Use “I” statements rather than accusations or attacks to communicate your thoughts and feelings on the issue. For example, “I get very frustrated when I have to do all the grocery shopping.” Rather than, “Your so lazy, you won’t even pick up the groceries!” I hope you can see the that these two statements will usually illicit very different responses from your interlocuter! 

Well, I’ve rambled on enough for today,

See ya later,

Russ

Hello dudesndivorce.com readers!

Saturday I had a situation at work come to a head. I don’t need to go into the specifics here but I do need to tell you it has been an ongoing issue for sometime and, yes, I have addressed the matter several times through the appropriate channels. Despite this it came down to a clash between my boss and myself that became quite heated verbally. I’ll be honest, I lost my cool somewhat and lost my tongue for a hot moment. And, yes, I did apologize afterwards. 

Well, after all was said and done and cooler heads prevailed I began to review the situation and not only my actions but my feelings too (a lot of anger and frustration towards the managers I work with). Not just during this night but during this whole time in which it built up and culminated in this “verbal showdown”. I had to ask myself why did I let this get me so very angry? The answer was easy, the clues were in my own words each time I complained about this situation to others. I would say things like; “When I was a supervisor at my other jobs I was always expected to dot every “i” and cross every “t”, I was given no slack, why can’t these guys do their job?” What was I doing? I had been harboring bitterness and anger and frustration towards my PREVIOUS supervisors regarding how they treated me (or my perception of how they treated me) and was carrying it forward and somehow expecting my CURRENT supervisors to make it right!

The more I thought about the more I realized how insane that was! My current supervisors had nothing to do with any of my previous employers and how I was treated there. They do not have any way of knowing how I was treated there, unless I tell them! Regardless of the fact, they are in no way responsible for that previous situation, therefore they are in no way responsible for “fixing” it for me! Once I realized this I could see how crazy I was acting. I could see I needed to let that past go. I don’t even know where any of those people are any more! It’s all gone. I just need to forgive and let it go. So I can deal with my current supervisors and my current situation based on their merits and not the mistakes of others from years ago in my past.

Then I remembered a post I had written (came back to smack my in the face!), “Carrying a Load” from October 16, 2008. That post touched on those of us that may do something similar and carry hurts and pains from one relationship into another expecting that new person to “right’ our perceived “wrongs”. Since this event from work was fresh in my mind, it caused me to consider if I had been guilty of this very thing during my previous marriage (because I sure don’t want to do it again if I had!).

I had to consider this as a real possibility.

If I may be so honest, I grew up in what Bill has called an “emotionally sterile environment”. I’m not making excuses for myself, that just they way my parents were. So I began to wonder, to question myself;

Did I lay an emotional burden at my ex-wife’s feet and expect her to meet it? Without her even being aware of it? (Heck, I wasn’t even aware of it until just recently!) Did I expect her to meet a need for love that had not been ever been met? On top of the love she may have had for me?

If so, and I think it is a very real possibility, this was a burden she nor anyone else could have carried.

Does this mean I am absolving her of all her contribution to the demise of our marriage? No, I am not.

But I am now more acutely aware of this tendency in myself. Am I the same person I was when I first married her? Again, no. I think I have grown quite a bit.

Do I think this issue is completely resolved? Probably not completely. I am always cautious to use words like “always” and “never”. (Keeps me on my toes.)

Well, guys, I just wanted to share this process with you. I hope it was as good an example to you as it was for me.

See ya later,

Russ

 Ya know pepperoni pizza and beige carpet don’t go together? Who’da thunk it?

 Russ, the klutz!

I’m probably going to wax a bit philosophical in this post but my purpose isn’t to try to sound highbrow; but rather to set the ground work for a discussion about why renewal is important to a divorced man and how it can be achieved.

People are like jigsaw puzzles – they are each comprised of many separate pieces that only really make sense when you look at them all together.  Conversely you really can’t fully understand the whole person unless you’ve looked at each of the pieces that comprise them.  So what are these “pieces”?  Well some examples would be the “piece” of you that relates to your boss, the “piece” that relates to your best friend, the “piece” involved in fishing; the “piece” that is concerned with your health . . . in short every relationship, every activity, every involvement you have comprises a “piece” of your whole person.  I know that the Bill who is a father to my youngest son is different that the Bill who is a father to my oldest son and both of those are different that how I am a father to my daughter.  That doesn’t mean that I suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder . . . it’s just that because they are different people and because I have a different history with each of them so they have a different “piece” of me. 

When you are in an unhealthy situation it can become so toxic that it over flows into every other area of your life – in essence it discolors the other pieces of your “self” puzzle and the whole picture of who you are begins to get blurred and loose definition and perspective.  It is in such situations that drastic measures are sometimes called for.  If you have a job that is this toxic you eventually reach the point where you start looking to get rid of it and find another, healthier, job for you.  If you have a habit, such as eating, that begins to overwhelm and negatively impact other parts of your life you start looking at how you can overcome that habit or replace it with healthier ones.  And if the toxic area is your marriage then you likewise may eventually have to face the need to remove that piece of your life from your whole person.  No matter if it is a job or a habit or a marriage it is always a difficult thing to remove a piece of your life – they are all strongly interconnected and after all it is a piece of yourself that you are doing away with!  Probably no piece is harder or more painful to remove than the relationship with your spouse; even though it may be toxic. 

If we think about things in this way – as your life being a composite of many, many pieces all interconnected into a whole – then we can first of all see how what happens in one area impacts everything else and secondly we can get a sense for how important it is to repair that puzzle once a piece has been removed.

Here is where things get very interesting!  The concept I have in my mind is a very complex, multidimensional picture of how the synergy between all of the pieces of your life interact to form an end product of “YOU” or “SELF”.  At this point maybe it is easier to lay aside the puzzle analogy and pick up the idea of a complex algebraic formula.  One of those with half the alphabet in them and all sorts of parentheses and odd symbols and such.  If you think of each one of those variables as a “piece” of your life then you can see that changing the value assigned to one changes everything in one way or another and impacts the end result – the answer.  The answer in this case is “YOU” is “SELF”, is the whole person.  When you are in an unhealthy relationship many of your variables are changed in such a way that the You Answer becomes a negative.  And although you may remove the marriage variable from your equation of self – there are still effects that have been felt and experienced – changes in your formula that still have an effect on who you are; and so the need for renewal.

Renewal is the process – often life-long  - of looking at each piece of your life, each variable in your Formula of Self and determining how it was impacted by the unhealthy relationship; how does it fit with who you want to be or need to be and then beginning the work of changing it accordingly.  Perhaps in your family the unhealthy marriage relationship led to some unhealthy patterns in how you relate to your children.  Renewal is the process of identifying how the toxins in the marriage piece leaked into the parent/child pieces and begin working at healing them of that effect.  Sometimes the damage is so extensive that you almost have to completely reinvent the whole piece!  Take it down to the absolute basics, humble yourself and begin the process of reinvention and restoration.  Sometimes the marriage piece changed the color of your self perceptions (another piece of who you are; another variable in your Formula of Self).  Those effects are sometimes very difficult to identify but doing so is incredibly worth the time and effort; as is the time and effort required to renew and reinvent how you perceive yourself.  Indeed I would maintain that until you’ve at least started that task you really won’t make much progress on any of the other areas.

This is getting pretty long and I’ve thrown several concepts out there all at once – so why don’t I pause here and pick this up again in the next post.  If anyone has questions or comments or thoughts to share on this please feel free to leave a comment or drop Russ and I an e-mail at divorced-dudes@dudesndivorce.com  we’ll keep those confidential.

Hope this was of some help or at least provoked some thought – until next time . . . Be Well!

Bill

Hopefully, whether your a longtime reader of dudesndivorce.com or have just recently stumbled upon us, you have realized that renewal and rebuilding post divorce is a large part of our focus here. Naturally, we hope that a marriage would never come to divorce in the first place, but having both of us been veterans of the process we understand that it does nevertheless happen has much as you wish it would not. 

Bill and I understand we would probably get more readers if we chose to appeal to those that merely want to vent their anger and hate over and over towards their ex-spouse (or future ex-spouse) and certainly there are a multitiude of web sites and blogs that cater to that. However, while we do understand that there is often anger and resentment and a whole host of negative emotions associated with a divorce, our message is that it should not dominate the rest of your life. Yes, it is probably wrong to deny that you have those feelings. But there are methods to process those emotions that allow you to move along your life in a positive manner rather than get stuck in that “divorce swamp” (Bill’s post April 11, 2009). 

And that’s the message we would like to build on. Do everything you can to build a good healthy relationship in your marriage, but if you can not and divorce is the only option, realize that it is NOT the end of your life, but merely the beginning of another chapter.

See ya later,

Russ