Handling The Hard Stuff

Tag: Divorce

  • Fighting Right

    Navigating conflict is one of the biggest challenges in a relationship. You each come with your own baggage and your own interpretations of other people’s statements and perspectives. And you each come with your own personality and sensitivity. That makes turning mole-hills into mountains a really easy thing. I struggle with this in my personal…

  • Neutral

    There are a lot of things we deal with that we consider bad or good, that really aren’t inherently anything. They’re neutral until we give them meaning or a response. For instance, Change is neutral. Some people love change and some people cringe away from it. But change in itself isn’t good or bad. It…

  • Stop Beating Yourself Up

    In the past few days especially I have had a number of friends and potential clients berate themselves for “putting up with so much” or something along those lines. They’ll talk about a million different ways their partners failed them and feel such shame for not kicking that person to the curb sooner. They look…

  • Give Them an Out

    Have you ever been in an argument with someone and you’re both so dug in to your positions that neither of you can move even a little bit without “giving in”? I have. I am stubborn as all hell. And I always have been. My parents talk about how conflicts with me were a negotiation…

  • The Best Revenge is None

    They say the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is indifference. The truest test of your progress or closure about the end of a relationship is whether you can truly just nothing them. The ends of relationships can be so emotionally hurtful. When you’ve been together for awhile, you know what…

  • Stop Breaking Your Own Heart

    Only you can choose who you let into your life. There are so many studies that talk about how you are influenced most by the six or so people you spend the most time with. Whether this is your family, your co-workers, your running buddies, friends, or neighbors, this shapes who and how you are.…

  • Stop. Collaborate and Listen

    Have you heard of something called collaborative law? It’s the coolest thing in the divorce world since…I don’t know, there’s not a lot of cool stuff in divorce world. Collaborative law is essentially the idea that you are going to behave like reasonable adults and co-parents from the beginning of your divorce case. In a…

  • Guilt

    I have so many people come in my office ready to file a divorce but feeling SOO guilty about being the one to end it. The reality is their partner ended it long ago. They stopped being a partner. We see this a lot in long-term marriages where the responsibilities devolve and fall heavily onto…

  • (Re)Building Confidence

    Sometimes things happen in life that shake us to our core. Other times it’s not any particular incident, but the erosion over time when daily challenges get in the way of our self-care. We find ourselves older and less confident or capable than we’ve ever felt. Often during or after a divorce my clients are…

  • Ending a Fight

    I was just talking with someone about their divorce and they told me how they really just didn’t want to fight and wanted it to be over. But in the very next sentence they mentioned that they had gone to court to dispute a vehicle ownership and value and that they were disagreeing about whether…