Divorce for anyone is a time of upheaval and change. How much change varies from person to person. My divorce happened at the same time I was going through a career change – I can’t say that one was caused by the other but the two were definitely connected. I was approaching 50 and on a quest to find happiness.
The Divorce Encouragist was 27 when she got divorced. She started relishing life after divorce from her husband of 20 months (they’d been together for five years). She also started her blog – The Divorce Encouragist. DE’s parents were divorced and she says her experience of divorce as a child and then her own divorce left her noticing the injustice that happens with divorce. She’s on a mission to change that …
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When I was 13-years-old, I overheard my parents talking about their separation. I heard my dad say,
“I know you’re the woman and I know you’re automatically going to get everything, so I’m not going to bother fighting you and going to court. You can just have the house and the kids. I’ll go away and take them every other weekend.”
At that point I thought, that really sucks. It shouldn’t be like that.
For a long time I toyed with the idea of becoming a divorce attorney. Then I got a bit closer to divorce attorneys through my process and through my boyfriend’s divorce and I decided I didn’t want to be one anymore. Then I started looking into being a mediator or a family therapist or a divorce coach.
This passion has been in me for a long time. A couple of years ago I started collecting books on the topic. When I realized I was happy about getting divorced, I went looking for books about divorce being a good thing. I loved The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart by Constance Ahrons. She has a really good outlook on the whole process and talks about how different couples handled things and the difference outcomes.
I read her follow-up book, We’re Still Family: What Grown Children Have to Say about Divorce and her subjects said they were still a family years later, that their parents were divorced but they still came to weddings and birthday parties for the kids and that they still felt they had a family.
Well, that’s how I feel too. So then I started looking at bad divorces and parental alienation syndrome and co-parents fighting and bad things happen to kids in those situations.
A friend of mine was going to court one day and invited me to join him because he knew how passionate I was and he knew I would value the experience of being there. It was very educational.
Then I started listening to motivational CDs in my car and I was listening to Better Than Good: Creating a Life You Can’t Wait to Live by Zig Ziglar. He said, if you’re really passionate about something, you should move towards it and immerse yourself in it. That’s why I started the blog.
I’m enjoying it. A lot of doors have opened up and I’ve met a lot of people. It’s been a great experience. I didn’t really have any expectations for the blog and I’m still learning. But I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback from people and that means a lot to me. People have enjoyed what I’m writing. People have found it helpful and that makes me feel so good.
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The Divorce Encouragist is now working on becoming a divorce coach and in my last post in this series, she’ll tell us what a divorce coach does.
I love the passion DE has for working to make divorce a better experience. While all the women I’ve interviewed have said they’ve come away from divorce with some valuable lessons about themselves and life, no one says it’s easy. Divorce is always painful but it isn’t the end of the world and if we can make the process less traumatic, then I’m certain that will make the years that follow better.
BTW … if you’ve had the news on the last few days you will have heard about Amazon summarily firing all it’s affiliates in Colorado because of a change in Colorado’s sales tax law. Not that I was making any money from Amazon, but I was an affiliate and as of now I won’t be linking to them an more. The links above go directly to the author’s site and that’s what I’ll be doing from now on. I probably won’t be buying from Amazon anymore either. I’d love to remove all the old links but that’s some housekeeping to do unless someone has a nifty little plugin to do that.
