33. Navigating Life and Finding Strength Post-Divorce

We're going to dive right in to a topic that , gosh , I wish it was less needed , right ? I wish that we didn't have to talk about divorce the way that we really do need to in today's context for relational health , but it is all too common , that's true and , gosh , unfortunately .

Fortunately , jason has some firsthand experience in this department and we get a lot of questions about life after divorce , not just in the dating realm which we've actually done an episode on dating after divorce , which I would recommend for anybody in that camp but just actually living a whole healthy , thriving life after walking through a pretty catastrophic heartbreak .

You know , divorce is heartbreaking regardless of circumstance . There's heartbreak involved and there's a tearing apart of lives involved , and so , to live well and thrive after that kind of devastation , I think that people in that boat can take all of the help they could get .

It's a tough road , so we're going to dive in today and talk a little bit about life after divorce . And I'm going to it's going to be a little bit more interview style I'm going to interview my husband here , because he really is the one who is is walking that road in our dynamic . So , babe , what say you ?

And so , for starters , I just want to start out by saying , like man , if you're in the middle of a divorce or having gone through that , like your life can actually and should actually get better and you can start to rebuild a new life , and so actually talking through what that looks like is that's our heart today .

There's a lot of hardship involved and it may or may not have been your choice to actually walk that road of divorce , but regardless , there is a rebuilding process .

You know , we believe that the Lord is God , he's a redeeming God , and so that we are offered the chance to , in partnership with him , learn how to thrive and walk in wholeness after a devastation is absolutely what is our portion Like . That is what we are able to do in partnership with God , and so .

But there's a lot of practicals involved right In , like how , how do I actually thrive and what are some of the common mistakes that people make that lead to a life of real hardship after divorce . So I would say those are the two categories we'll go after , kind of what how do I thrive , and then how do I avoid some common mistakes ?

Some people like fantasize about oh man , it'd be so much easier just to not be married right now , you know . And then when they get , if they get divorced , and you start to realize like oh my gosh , this is so challenging .

What am I going to do ? To work through the pain , whether you're the one that caused the divorce or whether you're the one that was on the receiving end or maybe it was mutual . I don't know , there's just so many different scenarios . But if you don't have a plan for dealing with the pain , then the real problem is is you perpetuate the pain ?

And we do all kinds of really dumb things when we're in a lot of pain , and so we have a whole entire podcast that talks about processing pain . But that's the first step . In order to really process through the pain , you're going to have to leave behind this justice piece that basically says you know , what was done to me wasn't fair .

Or , and when I say leave behind , I guess I'm saying you're going to have to be willing to get justice a different way than getting back at the person that you're with . And like one of the first things that happened to me in my divorce is , I remember , like I don't know if it was the first or second day , but it was really really .

And when I say divorce , I guess when my wife left , when you were separated .

Because I was telling him like I wish I could do all kinds of bad things , like to her and other other people involved . Right , and and I remember it's clear as day , like it caught me off guard God saying there's no justice in a broken life . And wow , I asked him like well , what does that mean ?

He's like well , if you go and you ruin her life , all that's going to do is hurt your kids , because that's still their mom . And not only that , but like how did that solve anything in her life ? Like how did that bring any life to her life ? All it did was satisfy this thing inside of me that says you wrong me .

I want you to feel what I'm feeling .

You spend the next year or two years or three years of your life trying to get real payback and you end up using the kids to do that .

It sounds so Christian cliche , but it made the biggest difference for me . It like so set me up for success . It didn't make me feel good about what happened . I didn't feel loving and warm towards her . It just gave me a target to aim at . Okay , this has to be it . So from there I literally just started to go Okay , how do I ?

How do I work through pain ? What are the steps to working through pain ? And that's what I did . Is I literally just started through learning how to process , learning how to dive deep , learning how to not shove stuff down when I had . That's all I had known forever and I never worked through something this hard .

But when you give somebody a real clear process for dealing with pain , all of a sudden they go from powerless to powerful . So that's the key right Is a divorce . You get thrown into this world that you feel so powerless in .

You have to do something yourself , and I think that's where people often try to be their own . You know their own justice in the situation and and like you've said , start . You know using , using the kids against the other person or actually intentionally punishing the other person , trying to make their life miserable , blaming .

You know all the things that we do when we're not trusting God for justice .

My how .

You've ruined my life , right , and we've talked about it in the past , with boundaries and all different kinds of stuff , but that codependent life puts you in a place where now you're not in control of your life and by starting to learn how to work through pain , starting to change the way that you see justice , starting to go , you know what this is going to

hurt , but this is going to ruin me . This , honestly , that was like a massive point for me . I had so much anxiety when , when my marriage was ending , I was trying hard I was , I was trying all that I knew how to do to save it , and I remember at one point , the Lord literally met me and took away all of my anxiety .

Okay , so I didn't have any anxiety . A lot of the reason why I didn't have any anxiety was because I didn't believe that my life was going to be ruined .

Right , I just had a ton of pain , yeah , and so , man , if I can get people to get back their power , get back their control , which is in this belief system that your life is not somebody else's , your life is . You are directly connected to God , like God is your main source .

And so if you can get God back in the God spot and start to go like , okay , my life's not over , I'm just in a really painful spot that I need some tools to work on and to work through , then you get your power back and you're able to like okay , how do I build a life that's healthy and powerful ? I think it's worth saying too .

When you start in the name of being powerful or in the name of , you know , taking back the control that you should have over your life , if you start using that as a way to punish or , you know , instigate trouble with your ex , what that's showing you is that you're actually still powerless to the pain .

So when we say to be powerful or to be in control , we mean over your own self , over your own self and over how you're managing your mind , your will and your emotions . And there's a it's largely to do with emotional health and regulation tools that you're gonna need to use in order to actually start rebuilding your own sense of self .

And I just also wanna mention , I think , in the process of divorce , it wouldn't be uncommon for someone going through a divorce to discover , wow , I had a lot more dependency or co-dependency on my spouse than I realized . So when we say , you know , jason says I need to realize this is going to hurt , but it's not going to ruin me .

I think a really normal , a normal experience at the beginning stages of a divorce would be to feel that sense of my life is over my you know , the fear is I'm never gonna be okay again or I'm never gonna be able to have a happy life again . And I'm saying this as someone who is in a happy , healthy marriage .

I feel like I discover my co-dependency on Jason all the time . I'm shocked all the time at how easy it is for me to put my dependency on him , even as opposed to God . It's easy to put your spouse in the God spot .

It's easy to get into a spot where I kind of joke a lot that I often will trust Jay more than I trust myself in a situation and , gosh , if I'm going through something tough , I wanna tell him about it and I want him to pull me out and rescue me , and it's easier to do that almost than go to God to find my source of peace .

So all the reason the only reason I'm saying that is it would be normal to recognize a measure of co-dependency in a spousal relationship and when that person's gone , you realize all that you depended on that person for , whether it was healthy or in an unhealthy way .

So to even just start there and go , okay , I'm gonna untangle that with God and I'm going to embrace the reality that this is going to hurt , like Jay said , but it isn't going to ruin me .

Okay . So another thing figuring out how to thrive . I remember very well when we were dating and you said to me one day that it was important to you that I knew the part you played in the breakdown of your marriage , and I think that's it's really important to mention this .

You have to be able to assess what actually went wrong in your marriage , and a marriage is two people .

So even if you didn't want the divorce , even if you didn't initiate the divorce , whatever breakdown happened in your marriage had to do with you and your spouse , and when you're willing and able to actually take a look at what part you played , that is a step towards being able to work through pain and recover and actually build a thriving life .

You can't do that if you can't accurately assess what went wrong .

And if I'm gonna be in another relationship , then I better be able to explain what my process was in my past marriage , how you know why it failed and what I've done to actually heal and grow from that experience , because that's all that the next person's gonna care about and , honestly , it's all I really care about is what did I do wrong ?

So I had realized like , oh man , I had not done a great job expressing needs and doing confrontation in my past relationship , and that's something that I was working on . Some Wasn't like I was just a doormat , but not to the level that I needed to .

I'm such a high pleaser it's part of my personality traits and it's part of my strength when it comes to counseling . But it didn't work great in my marriage and so that caused some disconnection in the marriage .

Coming out of that , I worked pretty hard , pretty intentional , on shoring up that area of my life I think the other piece too when we had started to date , I could tell you what my exact process was for working through the pain , like I could literally walk you through step by step .

Yeah , and that's a big deal , because when you came in , you had a lot of questions and me feeling confident in answering your questions brought you tons of confidence .

You it actually and I know I'm talking for you , but we've just shared this conversation so many times that my divorce didn't make you scared of what our future could possibly be together , because I could explain what happened and what my part was and how I worked through the pain and how I had rebuilt my life . It actually brought you a lot of confidence .

I think it's easy to walk through divorce and feel like , wow , my marriage just failed , like how much confidence is somebody gonna have in my ability to do this well another time ?

And I think that what is important for you to hear if you're in that boat is , you know , for me , as the person who had not been married before and was taking the bigger risk , so to speak , on marrying someone who had been through a divorce , he's right , like his .

The divorce in and of itself , that he had walked through a failed marriage did not actually make me scared of his ability to navigate healthily inside of our marriage , and it had everything to do with his ability to explain to me his process for working through the pain , explain to me the process of having built stronger muscles in those weak areas where he had

contributed to the failed marriage . Because , gosh , I mean , if you're not great at sharing your needs or actually vocalizing , you know boundaries or whatever it's he was somewhat emotionally disconnected inside of marriage , which doesn't work . It doesn't work at all so he was able to lead me in a dating relationship . He was able to .

You know , he'd grown so much in that area of his life .

He was leading me in that , so there was no fear that that was going to creep into our future together and he did such a good job of helping me understand , like the proof of growth , the proof of even just who he had in his life that trusted him in these areas , because of how he navigated his healing journey .

So , you know , I I kind of jokingly say this a lot , but there's things about having dated and married a guy that had been married before that have honestly been incredible benefits to me . It's not , you know , dating or marrying someone who's been divorced doesn't have to actually just be .

Uh , you know , oh , bummer , there's some extra baggage in our relationship . No , there have been some incredible benefits . There's a whole lifetime of experience that he had under his belt and things he had matured through and worked through that have only benefited our marriage . So I'm thankful all the time .

I always say , like I got the better half of by the way , I got the better half .

kids . But aside from dating after divorce , just purely simply going through divorce with kids yeah , we haven't talked much about that , and mostly I was .

We've talked about this in the past but I just wanted to brush over it because I know people will email us and go what about if we have kids ? Getting a child play therapist is is part of what really helped our kids because they were so young .

So that's a lot of what we did for the kids help them build a life that they felt powerful and that they felt excited about . And we can even dive into that more later , but I did want to talk a little bit about it . To me , the next step is establishing some new normals , because your whole life is uprooted . Everything feels a bit weird .

You don't have the same rhythm of life that you used to have , and for me , right away , it was like , oh , I became a single dad and now the kids are going back and forth some weeks and back and forth not not every week , because our schedule was really weird and you know , I did the bulk of the , the parenting , at first with the kids , and so I think

what I started to do is create really healthy normals . So I worked out six days a week . That was part of my like . I didn't work out before my divorce .

As soon as my divorce happened , I was like , oh , I need an outlet and I'm at home with the kids all day long and I'm at work when I'm not at home and I need something that I can do just for me , and so working out became this like massive helpful thing that I could do to manage my stress , to manage my mood , to release endorphins into me , to feel

like I'm building my body , and a way that I could start to have a healthy rhythm of my life . Hanging out with friends was another one . So I just started to , because when you're divorced , your friend group literally splits in half and they don't all go one way or the other , sometimes they're just gone .

So I had to reestablish new friendships even and start to be really proactive about creating healthy guy friendships that you know could just I could do life with , and so those are the areas where I would do some sports stuff with guys or I had a bunch of roommates that really helped to in school and ministry stuff .

But I'm created a room for that in my life on a regular basis and I can't stress how important it is for people who are going through , you know , the end of a relationship to don't just wallow in . Man , I used to have all these great friends . Now they're . We don't really hang out that much . That's normal , it's just part of it .

You don't have as much in common anymore and they don't know who to protect and who not to protect .

You're rebuilding a life that you can feel proud of that you can thrive in that you love , and those goals can start by being really small and you can grow them . But you know that's part of how you're going to feel . Like you're back on track with life is okay .

I'm establishing new normals , I'm hanging out with some friends , I'm working through some pain on a regular basis , I've got some hope in my life , and one of my first goals was to get out of debt .

I had acquired a bunch of debt from divorce , because divorce is not cheap , and so I just started working towards getting out of debt and doing whatever I could do to put extra money aside towards that . And you know it was .

It was part of I want to be ready for marriage , and when we were married , I think I still had some debt , but I had been working on it and I had paid a bunch of it down . And so again , my life's not stagnant , I'm working to reach these goals . Yeah , I had talked a little bit about , you know , building the friend group and doing all that .

One last piece before I get onto common mistakes is part of recognizing what went wrong is helpful , because now I know what I need to work on too . So marriage gives you relationships , give you a whole bunch of information on your strengths and your weaknesses .

A lot of people don't fix their weakness inside of marriage , like in these scenarios , and then they get back into a relationship and they end up repeating the same thing because oh shoot , I didn't fix it when I knew about it .

In that season , when I didn't have another relationship , I went to counseling with Danny like I really focused on strengthening that area of my life , which again brought a ton of confidence . Because here's what I really wanna stress is , if you work through the pain and you rebuild that skillset now , you're not afraid to get into a relationship again .

If you don't do that , then the next time you get into a relationship you're constantly gonna be afraid that the relationships can end in failure and all this stuff . And it's like if you want confidence going into your next relationship , work hard on fixing the things that came up in the last one .

I fought off the urge to even think about what my next life would be . And then , after that year was up , I still like I had relationships with girls in my life that I was like , oh , maybe I would date her and maybe I would date her , and I just kind of kept waiting .

And I look back now and I'm like gosh , I'm so glad I didn't date any of those girls that I was hanging out with and looking at , because it just wouldn't have been a great fit . I was so tempted to do that because I still needed a lot of comfort .

I was trying to , I was still tempted to meet the needs that I was still working through that loss in my life . And you've got a big old , fat , gaping hole in your life .

When you go through divorce you need to completely fill that hole as much as possible , at least get rid of the pain and fill that hole with other things that are life-giving , before you put anybody else in it . You need to be happy with your life .

You need to feel like my life is going great , I'm doing well , I don't need somebody else in order to be okay , like that's what you want to be before you put anybody else into your life . So to me , the last one that I'll just talk about for one second is most people think that they're better than they really are .

It's such an embarrassing story for me to tell . And they're like yeah , they're like there's like 2008 by this time and my dad just said Jay , listen , I love you and I want you to have you know , nice stuff and things that you want . Mom and I are gonna , whatever , help you get a car and all that stuff .

But so I knew you got three kids and like a friend group , like you couldn't put your three friends , your three kids and any of their friends , in your car . That's a really bad plan .

That is the dumbest thing I could possibly want in that season and it's because you just have head trauma . You're not thinking straight . It's very hard . You think that you're thinking straight , you think you're making good decisions , you think that you're on track , but you're not .

And if you trust you , you're gonna make some really dumb mistakes , like getting into dumb relationships and dumb purchases and dumb money decisions , and it's like just you just have to trust the people around you way more than you

trust you .

But I really do believe that , as people walk through heartbreak and pain and the devastation of a broken marriage , I think that God , as he is a redeemer , is more than willing to meet us in that process and help us rebuild .

And if I could say one thing to people that are listening , I think it's important that people actually believe that they can have a full , whole , beautiful life after devastation , but that it's gonna take an incredible amount of work and a lot of ownership and a lot of intentionality .