Many people going through divorce ask, “How do I feel from divorce?” They started to realize they’ve lost touch with who they truly are and feel lost.
My current guest, Bill was married for twenty-three years and has three daughters. When his marriage was falling apart he started to realize that he and his wife were really at cross-purposes. Their personalities were fundamentally different and what made each of them happy was also fundamentally different. Understanding this and getting to know himself helped Bill recover from his divorce. Here’s Bill:
I was in therapy. It helped me tremendously to have another woman telling me, “You’re a really good person and you went to the nth degree to try to make this work and it didn’t and you don’t have to feel bad about that.” I guess in a sense, it’s very easy to see it in hindsight, but at the time it was tremendously painful.
I think the therapist helped me understand that my role isn’t to be the white knight and shining armor, to be the person the feels pain so that others can feel good. I think that was very, very helpful. I think that it was extremely important.
I tell this to other men who are going through difficult times. They come to me, gravitate to me, because they know I went through so much. I tell them, I said, “Listen, the most important thing that you can possibly do for yourself and your family is to get to know yourself and to like yourself.”
It’s really important, because when you know yourself, then you can stop worrying about yourself and you can worry about your kids and others. But it’s really, really difficult when you’re caught in this cycle of trying to help others and feeling resentment and not helping yourself and not feeling good about yourself.
It’s not so much that I didn’t know myself. It’s that I had lost the intensity of what made me happy and who I was in trying to—and I described it even in the last couple of years of the marriage when I was trying to dig outside of the financial hole that she had dug. I really felt like I was deep in this hole and I was just digging and digging and digging, trying to fill the hole to get out of the hole to use a better analogy. And she was just digging around me. We were working at cross purposes.
Getting to know yourself is to really be grounded in understanding, not only what makes you happy but how you can make others happy and be happy at the same time and I think that’s what I lost complete sight of.
I found that I like to have fun in an adventurous sense, whereas my ex-wife was a bit of a loner. She was a very withdrawn person. She almost has a social anxiety disorder in a sense that she was abused as a child and she really does not like going out into big gatherings with lots of people. I felt I did a lot of things by myself, such as the social circuit that I have to do as a professional. It’s hard to describe. I always felt like I was going to be happy being in the marriage doing those things but I never realized that I was with somebody that didn’t want to do those things.
Then, when my family started to get into the horses in a really significant way, my daughter and her, I was pretty unhappy. They used to make fun of me that I would show up at their horse events dressed in my golf attire, because I’d usually come off a golf course on weekends. I was this real fish out of water, that all the people at the barn—it sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time it was hurtful, because you’re trying to be supportive and you’ve got all these people that are looking at you like you’re some sort of yuppie idiot. As it became more and more evident that that’s what she wanted for the rest of her life, I think I had to realize that that’s not what I wanted.
I was there being supportive and I wanted them to be like, “Thank you for coming,” but I ended up being the butt of everybody’s jokes. It would be just the opposite. It would be like if they came in their riding gear to watch me play golf, I wouldn’t laugh at them. You know what I mean?
That’s what started the spiral of me realizing and recognizing that I didn’t really want to do what they wanted to do. They would go to weekend horse shows and they would spend the whole day cleaning the stalls and talking to people and training and practicing and doing those things. And I think they wanted me to want to do that and I was like, “No, I don’t want to do this. I’m happy to come and watch and be supportive but I don’t want to the sleep in the stall next to the horses and I don’t want to clean the stalls and I don’t want to carry water.”
It’s just not who I am. It look awhile for that to sink in, that we were really going to be oil and water in the long run.
And horses—it’s a lifestyle, it’s a mentality. You can’t say, “Okay, I’m going to do the horses in my few hours of off time.” They immerse themselves in it.
Well, they had 30 horses when they had their own barn and all the clients. Christmas morning is cleaning stalls. It’s not enjoying opening presents. But then the young girls, they loved that. So, what was I going to do? Deny them that?
The Divorce Coach Says:
Getting to know yourself is a vital, fundamental part to healing from divorce. It’s the key to finding your path and true happiness. Wanting to be happy isn’t selfish or frivolous.
As long as you are looking to other people, your work or material possessions to bring you happiness it is likely to be transient – all of those things could go away and you’d have no control over that and then what?
When you know who you are at the core and accept that person, like that person, you can start to make choices that are consistent with that and that will bring you deeper satisfaction with your life and a sense of purpose.
This is a process that many people go through at the time of their divorce. That’s because divorce will shake the ground you walk on and it’s impossible to keep pretending. Then, in the quest to understand what has happened we realize that we’ve strayed from the person we once were and it’s time to start over.
How do you start? Download my 14 Ways To Get To Know Yourself for free.
And btw … there’s no need to wait until you are divorced to do this. many people find this helpful when they’re trying to evaluate whether their marriage can be saved.
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