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Picking a divorce coach is easier when you feel like you get where they’re coming from.
Love heals pain.
Many people struggle to understand that. People think love hurts. But it’s not love that hurts and it’s not somebody else’s love that’s going to heal my pain per se.
It’s not winning back someone’s affections or finding my new person that’s going to make the pain finally go away.
It’s me understanding that
And love isn’t what hurts us.
What hurts us is taking the things people say personally and having an emotional response instead of remembering our worthiness.
When we’re more attached to someone else than we are to ourselves… If I care about what you think of me more than I care about what I think of me, then what you say is going to hurt me.
Judgement hurts. Attachment hurts. Criticism hurts. Rejection hurts.
Love doesn’t hurt. Love heals pain.
As a divorce coach, I feel confident and proud of how I moved through my own experience with divorce.
I actually had a dream recently about my ex-husband. And for the first time, the dream included a peaceful exchange and there was zero angst. So even today, years later, I’m still progressing with letting go.
But I unlocked the recipe for healing, and I don’t just mean the practical act of getting past a divorce and getting back to your new normal.
This discovery did not come easy for me. I made more relationship blunders afterward. In fact, it almost got worse before it got better!
But I have really come to understand that through the experiences embedded in my divorce process and relationship restarts came the unlocking and awakening of truth.
There are still a lot of segments of society that deem divorce as wrong or bad. As a therapist, I work really hard to debunk the myth of good and bad, right or wrong, and this is just another one of those places.
If it’s happening to over 50 percent of the population, let’s quit being a$hles to each other about it.
I remember feeling so ashamed — and I know that’s a result of how I was raised; that it was wrong to divorce. I worried what my friends and family would think. I felt like it was the biggest mistake of my life up to that point. Like, I’d really effed up.
And I simply don’t believe that anymore. And I want other people to not have to believe that.
I’m remarried now.
My husband has loved me since I was 16. I was the one who wouldn’t commit to him.
He came to my first wedding and that day my dad said to him, “It should have been you, I’m really sorry.” (Can you imagine?!)
Remember when I said it got worse before it got better? The guy I began dating over a year after my finalized divorce was extra cruel. I got really scared and called Dad. My dad knew Brian (my current husband) lived nearby and reached out to him. He gave Brian strict instructions to watch over me until I felt safe again.
Brian and I had always stayed in touch and were always good friends. By this time, I realized he was the most solid and loving partner I could ever want.
From there, our true love story began. Now, don’t get me wrong. I still had hang-ups and personal work to do! I judged him and pushed him away at times. My therapist told me that I was unkind and that my agnostic husband was Godlier than I was, because I was judgmental, and he was unconditionally loving and accepting. My mom pointed out my hang-ups about money.
I was getting all this feedback from people that I was still stuck in judgment, and it was blocking me from the thing I said I wanted.
I finally listened, and something flipped in my heart. And my marriage was born.
At some point during our courtship, we went to a friend’s daughter’s birthday party. These types of events were typically painful for me as I had gone through fertility treatments in my previous marriage and was diagnosed infertile.
As we were driving back from this party, I said, “You really want to be with me for the rest of your life even if I could never have children?” And he said, “Yes.”
Eight days later, I learned I was pregnant with our daughter. He had bought an engagement ring months before the party but I didn’t know that. He proposed; we quickly got married. So it happened all out of order. And that’s why our daughter’s name is Grace!
We all get a second chance. This was Brian’s first marriage but it was my second marriage and I had reservations. I was terrified. I didn’t want a wedding, and I was frantic at the thought of him moving in. I thought, “I am not equipped for this.”
And then getting pregnant felt like God was telling me: “Stop. Let go.”
Often, people think of divorce therapy as only dealing with the mind or thinking that medicine is just dealing with the body.
But we know from science that the mind and body are intrinsically linked. There’s this interplay between
down to a cellular level.
In my experience as a therapist and divorce coach, I’ve seen that so many physical ailments are related to our thoughts and attitudes and our well-being and vice versa.
In that vein, I’m a huge proponent of yoga as a healing tool. During my personal healing journey, I was introduced to a particular style called Raja yoga. It was a 90-minute heated class, but it was not power yoga; it was about disengagement rather than engagement. It was about melting the body and learning how to let go. It beckoned me to become really flexible and open.
Ninety minutes of that. It invited you to slow waaaay down, holding poses for 5 minutes at a time. So we would get in some wild poses, but they were all disengaged. It was a lot of laying on the floor.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was taking a brilliant approach to yoga because I was learning how to let go before I learned how to dig in.
I was going through a really hard emotional time and noticed that it greatly impacted my mood. Raja yoga specifically gets into the myofascial sections of the joints, so it helps release down to where the tendons or the joints connect, and it was a very special experience that I’ve only had in that particular studio. The instructor was fluid in Sanskrit and also was supremely well-versed in Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism, and he would teach what a posture would do for the mind, the body, and the soul.
He was so brilliant and it almost felt like yoga was my church at the time.
I tend to be awe struck whenever I’m outside and take notice of the sky or any body of water. When I lived on the beach in Boca Raton, I would sit and meditate on the shore. There was nothing there to cloud my intention about comparison. Meaning I wasn’t looking at my kitchen saying I wish my cabinets were better, I wasn’t looking at the cars driving around and saying my car is such a piece of crap, I wasn’t looking at the clothes in my closet and saying I have nothing to wear. It was just me and Mother Earth. (And I could go on and on for hours about the physical and mental benefits of earthing, or grounding, and absorbing the Earth’s natural healing energy into your body by touching your bare hands or feet to it.)
There’s so much acceptance and perfection and abundance in nature. And we think about how the flowers work with the bees and the scorpions work with the mulch and the sandpipers work with the crabs and it all just works. It’s a deeply rooted reminder for me that everything is OK if you let it be and so much of what we deal with in our minds is bullshit and made up and because we are getting in our own way. When I go outside and take a moment to breathe, I feel almost instantly connected to what’s real.
If these words sound familiar –
If they make you feel something –
Then I invite you.
The This Pleases Me More community is filled with women after divorce with stories like mine (and like yours, too).
Join us in a safe inner circle with high-level divorce coaching and nurturing as well as tools to emerge into your bright, beautiful future.
You’ll find new levels of confidence, month after month.
And you’ll experience first-hand how much having a divorce coach supports your healing process.