108: Mindset Mini: How to Navigate the 3 Phases of Your Divorce

Feb 19

[Unedited transcript, please excuse errors.]
[00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. You are listening to Welcome to the Other Side, and I am your host, Meg Gluckman. This podcast is all about supporting parents who are navigating divorce and co parenting. and life after divorce. Today I'm bringing you another mindset mini-sode where I share a mindset concept or strategy that I want you to be able to grasp pretty quickly and apply to your life, hoping that it'll bring you some new perspectives, new ideas, new approaches to what you might be and hopefully reduce fear, anxiety, worry or frustration that you might be feeling around your divorce or co parenting.
[00:00:52] Today's concept I'm going to bring to you comes from a book that I love which is called Life Is In the Transitions and it's by author Bruce Feiler and Bruce went All across the country and interviewed a hundred people about major life upheavals that they experienced huge bursts of change in their life that really caused them to reflect and question and their identity, what they were doing with their life what their purpose was, and the transition that came after these major upheavals.
[00:01:36] Clearly, divorce can be one of these major burst of change, it can really shake us up. Now, it doesn't do that for everyone. So, if you have a friend, a neighbor, a cousin, who went through divorce and seemed to really do pretty good going through it, that's because divorce in itself is not necessarily a thing that does shake everybody up.
[00:02:03] It doesn't necessarily have everybody questioning their identity or wondering what they're doing with their life, but it sure does for a lot of people. So, if you're in the camp where it feels like your ground is unstable, That there's so many unknowns that you're questioning who you are and what you believe, then this is a good podcast episode for you.
[00:02:31] I I want to share one concept that Bruce talks about in his book, which is how people transition after this major upheaval. The process that people go through . He, breaks it into three different stages. The first he calls the long goodbye.
[00:02:53] The second he calls the messy middle, and the third he calls new beginnings. And what I love about this, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, it really matters how we tell the story of our divorce. It matters how we tell the story about our relationship, and it matters how we tell the story about our future.
[00:03:17] And if we're in a place where the story that we're telling is that this shouldn't be happening. Someone's to blame. I'm to blame. It's my fault. Something went wrong. We did something wrong or I did something wrong. That story affects how we show up in our life. It affects our ability to plan for the future and make decisions and to create more of what we want.
[00:03:45] I love how Bruce divides the transition into these 3 phases. So we can tell a story about which phase we're in primarily because I'll just give you a side note that oftentimes we're kind of one foot in one, one foot in the other, but generally we're primarily in one of these phases and we can tell a story that then It makes sense and helps us talk about it in a way that's accepting and loving and compassionate to ourselves and to the other folks that are also being affected by it.
[00:04:23] So the first stage, the long goodbye. I like to think of this as really our grieving period We're grieving perhaps the end of the relationship, we're grieving what we thought our future was going to look like, and we're probably grieving some of our identities. Maybe it was as a spouse, or maybe it was being in an intimate partnership. There can be a lot of little identities that we don't even necessarily consciously think about, but they were an automatic part of our life. Maybe we were always the one who was who took the kids to soccer practice. And now we're not going to always be the one who takes the kids to soccer practice.
[00:05:08] Or we might have been the one who never had to do taxes, and now we are going to have to do taxes. So there's these little parts of our identity that are shifting as well, and there can be grief that comes up around all of that. And remember, grief is not just like one Emotion. It's really a family of emotions that kind of coexist together.
[00:05:31] There can be sadness, and anger, and blame, and guilt, and shame, and frustration, and regret. There can be so much that kind of churn and come up under the umbrella of grief. And that long goodbye for some people starts while they're still in their relationship. And for others, it starts after it's been decided.
[00:05:56] That divorce is going to happen. There's no one size fits all. After the long goodbye comes the messy middle. And this is where we might feel very unmoored. We don't really know exactly what the future is going to look like. We have so many questions. We feel like we have more questions than we have answers.
[00:06:15] We're trying to figure out a little bit of, like, what is going to come with me from the past and what is going to be brand new from the future. Oftentimes we'll still have one foot in the long goodbye and one foot in the messy middle as we navigate this time. A lot of folks can feel like it's wrong, like something is going wrong, that you don't have all the answers and that you, you don't know How long this messy middle part is going to take.
[00:06:47] Oftentimes that has to do too with like how long the divorce process takes. Some folks have a sense of how long it should take and the reality might be very different from how long they think it should take. Slowly though, we're going to start getting some footings. We're going to start making some decisions.
[00:07:04] We're going to start getting some clarity on questions that we have and we're going to start stepping into the third phase which is. The new beginnings phase and bit by bit with new beginnings, we're creating what our new identity is. And again, we might have one foot that goes back into the messy middle.
[00:07:25] And at times we might even go all the way back to the long goodbye. There might be something that Even though we think we're done grieving the past relationship or the divorce, that something triggers it in us and we're reminded of something. Maybe it's a smell, maybe it's seeing something familiar.
[00:07:46] Maybe it's just the words that somebody says that brings us back and we realize, oh, there's a little bit more grieving I still have to do, and that's totally okay. It's normal, it's human not to be done grieving after just some certain amount of time, that there might be little things for the rest of our life actually that, that trigger it and bring it up and we can give ourself a moment to grieve.
[00:08:11] We're in the new beginnings, we get to choose a lot about what we want to think about ourselves, who we want to be.
[00:08:22] There can be choices around work. There can be choices around friends. Perhaps there's some friends that don't come with you through this process. Perhaps there's new friends that you make. Different kinds of communities that you join. Different priorities. Something that was not really a priority before might become a real priority now.
[00:08:46] I'll give you an example from my own life. When I was in my marriage, it was fun to read to the kids, but it wasn't a huge priority to me. And as we transitioned, into the divorce and then after the divorce to just our, our co parenting schedule and so forth, it became a huge touchstone for me and the kids that every night I would read to them.
[00:09:13] And it became this thing that We always did together. That was one of my new beginnings. That was foundational to our connection and to our relationship. What's really amazing about the human brain though is that we can go back and forth between these phases. As we need to. It is not a linear process, and the more that we can accept that it's not a linear process, the more grace and compassion we can give ourselves.
[00:09:46] So I want you to think about where are you in your process right now? Today are you experiencing the phase of the long goodbye? Are you in the messy middle or do you feel like you're in the phase of the new beginnings? And if we talk about it in that way, does it help to bring more acceptance to the exact phase that you're in right now?
[00:10:16] I would love to hear your thoughts about this way of thinking about your transition process. You can come see me over on Instagram. I'm @ Meg Gluckman and drop me a note there. Or you're welcome to drop me a note on my website, which is MegGluckman.com, where you can also learn more about my coaching and see if you want to sign up for a free coaching consult so that I can provide you some support and some information about the divorce process, about co parenting, so that it can be more easeful and less stressful for you going forward.
[00:10:54] All right, y'all, that's what I have for you this week, and I will see you next week. Have a good one. Bye now.

📚 Any good story has a beginning, middle & end.

Your divorce story is no different.

In this week's podcast episode, I'm sharing a concept from a favorite book of mine: Bruce Feiler's book Life Is In the Transitions. Bruce traveled across the country interviewing over 100 people who had gone through major, identity-shifting life changes and found many common themes with how folks navigated the transition.

One theme was the phases that we go through as we shift from our old lives to our new ones. He named these the Long Goodbye, the Messy Middle, and New Beginnings.

Using this naming during and after our divorce can help us cope with uncertainty, bring us more peace, and give us a sense of what's coming.

Tune in for actionable advice on navigating divorce with resilience and grace, inspired by Feiler's wisdom.

Happy listening!