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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