After Divorce: From Finances to Kids, Take These Steps to Thrive

There’s no doubt that divorce causes dramatic changes in one’s life. It’s an emotionally trying and exhausting experience.

After divorce, some of the biggest challenges stem from changes in financial status, the need to go back to work, living on one income, and taking care of children. It’s easy to feel lost and confused when faced with these types of repercussions.

But you don’t have to throw up your hands and surrender.

From Finances to Kids – Learn to Thrive After Divorce

It’s not pleasant to handle the changes divorce brings, but it’s also not impossible. You have to have the desire and willingness to take control of your situation and work diligently to stabilize your life.

Step 1: Handling Changes in Financial Status – Plan for the Future

It’s important not to think of child support or alimony as income. Child support eventually ends, and if you remarry, alimony payments end too. Plus, even if you were rewarded “permanent maintenance,” it doesn’t guarantee anything. Your ex-spouse may retire or be unable to work.

Consider your financial future carefully. Openly communicate and cooperate with your ex-spouse and enlist the help of legal and financial advisors. Avoid using your credit card to buy things you think will soothe your emotional stress after divorce. Getting into more debt will only hurt you in the long run.

Step 2: Living on One Income – Create a Budget

After  a divorce, you may not be able to do all the things you used to do. Trying to maintain the lifestyle you had before your divorce will just cause you stress. Instead, develop a clear picture of your budget, demonstrate self-control, and stick with it.

First, make a list of all your sources of income. Then, make a list of all your monthly spending. Next, think about which expenses you could cut, especially luxury items and regular payments. While you may not want to disrupt your children’s lives, you may need to consider whether moving to a less expensive home or renting might be a viable and more affordable option. Lastly, call all your creditors and ask them to lower your payments.

Step 3: Going Back to Work – Learn New Skills

It may not be easy to go back to work after divorce, especially if you haven’t worked for a while. Consider taking classes to brush up on job-related skills, working from home, finding ways to make good use of your talents, or seeking out companies that would hire and train you at their expense. Also, don’t just think about jobs that you’ve done before. Working in a different field may give you more free time or flexible hours and could be better for you and your children. Make sure you put some time into researching opportunities.

Tell family, friends, associates, and former co-workers that you’re looking for work. Then, update your resume and include all your skills and volunteer work. Practice for interviews, dress for success. Speak calmly and professionally. It may seem daunting, but a job with sufficient income will boost your finances, self-confidence, and happiness.

Step 4: Caring for Children – Consider Their Needs

After a divorce, children can be emotional and unsure of what life will be like now that their parents aren't together any longer. More than ever before, your children need your time and love to ensure them that you still care for them. They also need structure, boundaries, and consistent discipline to keep their lives stable. Depending on their ages, they could also learn more responsibility by keeping rooms picked up, taking out the trash, doing laundry and dishes, or preparing a meal. And, finally, they need you to be an example in showing respect to their other parent. Therefore, don’t put them in the middle or speak poorly about your ex-spouse.

Whatever the challenges after divorce, remember that setting priorities, having a plan, and consistently sticking to it can help you thrive despite any difficulties you may have after divorce.

4 Important Topics to Discuss Before You Say "I Do!"

The time before marriage is filled with planning and preparation for your big day. You may be planning a large wedding event, or something much smaller and intimate. Either way, it’s a time of anticipation and excitement for you and your beloved.

Whether you have been together for years, or your relationship is taking the fast-track to the altar, there are important things to discuss with your partner before you say “I Do.”

You may be thinking you and your partner will simply deal with issues as they arise and work through them then. You may also believe that because you have known each other for a long time, you already know everything you need to know about how you and your partner feel about these important issues. That is a mindset that many soon-to-be-married couples have, and unfortunately, it can lead to misunderstandings, hurt feelings, frustrations, and heightened conflict down the road.

Before you head to the alter, and before you say “I Do,” take some time to get to know how you and your partner feel about the following subjects. Discuss the questions under each topic and if you find you have different points of view, ask questions to better understand your partners position.

This is far from an exhaustive list of things to discuss before marriage, but it’s a start. As you explore these questions, you will likely find that you think of other discussion topics.

1. Romance & Intimacy

   Do you think dating or courting your partner ends after the wedding?

   In what ways do you plan to keep the romance alive throughout your married life?

   What do you need and want from your partner to keep the romance alive?

   Is physical intimacy or emotional intimacy equally important or is one more important than the other?

   How do you each define “emotional intimacy?”

2. Money & Finances

   How will you manage your money after marriage?

   Will you have joint financial accounts and bank cards?

   Do you want to have a separate account of your own?

   How do each of you feel about having debt?

   If you want to have children, how do you want to plan financially for growing your family?

   What are you goals for saving?

   Is retirement planning important to you now?

   Are you a spender or a saver, and how will you handle any conflicts if you differ on what to spend your money on?

   How would you handle tough financial times as a couple?

3. Family & Social Life

   How was conflict handled in your families of origin?

   How was money handled in your families of origin?

   Do you agree or disagree with the way your families of origin handled conflict and finances?

   Are you OK with your partner having separate friends and interests?

   Do you and your partner plan to share household duties? Do either of you expect your partner to assume defined roles in your marriage?

   Do you want to have children? How many? Do you think one parent should stay home after children are born?

   Do you prefer large social gatherings or smaller gatherings of a few close friends? How about your partner?

   If you are blending families, what roles will you have in the lives of your partner’s children?

4. Work & Career

   What do you expect from each other regarding success in your respective careers?

   How would you feel if one career took off, and the other was slower to grow?

   Are you equally ambitious in your careers?

   What does a balanced work and family life look like to each of you? Do you think it’s important to your relationship? How do you and your partner plan to achieve this balance if it is important to you?

   What if your partner wanted to make a career change or return to school? Is that something you would support?

If you find that you and your partner disagree on any of these questions, you may want to have a professional counselor facilitate discussion for you in premarital counseling sessions. Think of premarital counseling as an investment in your marriage and your future together. You won’t regret it!

New Parents: Coping with Sleepless Nights and Fatigue

Newborns like to sleep. Newborns need sleep. New parents might be surprised how much their baby sleeps.

If babies sleep so much in the early weeks, why do new parents feel so sleep-deprived and exhausted after bringing their baby home?

Newborns typically sleep between 16-18 hours a day. That’s a lot of sleep! Babies, however, have different sleep patterns from their parents. A newborn baby sleeps for two to four hours at a time, and then wants to be fed, changed, and comforted. That’s quite a change in an adult’s sleep cycle of a consecutive six to eight hours of sleep each night. No wonder new parents are so tired!

New parents of babies also need sleep to be able to function throughout the day and to care for their little one.

Sleep deprivation and extreme fatigue are tough, and can even be dangerous to your health. Symptoms of sleep deprivation include headaches, hot flashes (caused by stress, emotions, and anxiety), cognitive impairment, irritability, and in extreme cases, even hallucinations. Sleep deprivation slows down your metabolism, can make you feel depressed, and make you feel like you’re on the verge of getting sick, like you’re coming down with a cold or flu.

So what can you do to cope with the sleepless nights and extreme fatigue during the early weeks of being new parents? Here are some tips:

Understand that sleep deprivation is normal for new parents 

Sleep deprivation is to be expected. You are not doing anything wrong. Your baby is not doing anything wrong. Needless worrying leads to even more sleep deprivation. Try to relax and be kind to yourself as much as you can.

Focus on teamwork as new parents

Now is the time for you and your partner to shine as a parenting team.

Discuss your teamwork strategies BEFORE the birth – ask more experienced friends and relatives for advice if this is your first child. Find a class or workshop for new parents, such as the Bringing Baby Home Workshop, to help prepare you and your relationship for welcoming your baby to your family.

Partners can help in many ways:

• Create a comfortable and relaxing environment for mother and baby
• Look after the mother’s physical and emotional needs
• Take turn feeding your baby, when you can. Even when mom is breast feeding, breast milk can be expressed and your partner can feed baby from a bottle when needed.
• Bond with your baby by ‘wearing’ the newborn in a close body sling
• Take care of the baby’s non-feeding activities, such as diapering, changing clothes, bath time, and play time.
• Be supportive and have a positive attitude!

Be compassionate toward each other when either of you get irritated or upset. If you are sleep-deprived, you will lose some of your ability to self-regulate emotions.

You are both only human – and so is your baby. A sense of humor always helps. You will make it through this sleep-deprived phase of parenting your newborn.

Exercise

Yes, that’s right. Although it may be the last thing you feel like doing, exercise (with your doctor’s approval) can boost your metabolism and circulation, speed up digestion and elimination of toxins in the body, counteract depression, and make your sleep more efficient, once you get the time.

Remember, you don’t have to go to the gym to get exercise. Even a short walk in your neighborhood, with your baby in a stroller or carried close to you in a baby sling, will help. If you can’t get out of the house, do some gentle stretching or yoga on a matt in your living room.  

Sleep when the baby sleeps

There is so much to do when you have a newborn. When you bring your baby home you might feel that you need to accomplish household tasks while your baby sleeps during the day.

Take care of yourself while your baby sleeps. Use the time to catch up on your sleep. It’s not selfish. It’s self-care. Your baby needs you to be as rested as possible when he or she is awake.

Try to avoid the mindset that you need to keep the house clean, cook wonderful meals, and be “super mom.” Parenting a newborn is hard work and it’s exhausting. Take the time to sleep when your baby sleeps. It’s important for you and your family.

Rest

One of the problems with getting enough sleep while caring for a newborn is that adults don’t slip in and out of sleep as easily and quickly as babies do. Studies have shown that rest is the next best thing to sleep – so, just lie down when you get the chance, close your eyes, elevate your feet slightly, and let your mind rest as well as your body.

Drink enough water

If you don’t get enough sleep, it is even more important to stay hydrated. Some of the symptoms of dehydration overlap with those of exhaustion. Avoid excessive caffeine consumption and sugar-laden drinks.

Don’t skip meals

Keep your metabolism going, and don’t let hunger make you even more irritable. Good nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep healthy, quick meal options on hand. Keep healthy snacks on hand, as well, for the times you need a little something more between regular meals. Meal planning before your baby arrives can help you maintain a healthy diet in the early weeks of being new parents.

Stay connected with your network of support

You may think you don’t have the time, but visits, phone calls, and video calls with supportive friends and family can refresh your spirit. You may have gotten to know other new parents in preparation for your baby’s arrival. Reach out to them and support each other on your parenting journey. A whole new world of connections opens up to you once you have children. Embrace it!

It’s only temporary

You will not be sleep-deprived forever.

Babies vary enormously in their sleep patterns during the first few months of their lives. They do become toddlers eventually, and then school children, and then teenagers. (Then you will be struggling to wake them up in the morning!)

Having a baby and creating your family is one of the most exciting and joyous adventures you will have in your life. Enjoy every moment you can!

Couples in Happy Marriages Focus on the Small Things

“Many people think that the secret to reconnecting with their partner is a vacation by the sea. But a romantic outing only turns up the heat if the couple has kept the pilot light burning by staying in touch in the little ways.” – John Gottman

Relationship expert Dr. John Gottman has developed a research based, reality tested system for happy marriages. And one of the most important ways to keep your marriage healthy is this: “focus on the small things.”

As in the quote above, romance will only flourish in your marriage if you keep the fire burning throughout all the many days, weeks, months, and years of your relationship. Spectacular holidays and vacations, romantic dinners in candlelit settings, and expensive gifts fall flat and don’t mean much if the small things are not present in your relationship every day.

Every positive, small, daily interaction with your beloved is an opportunity for you to connect in loving and caring ways. The small positive things in marriage need to be done often. They need to become your communication style as couple.

Words and actions matter

“Thank you,” “I appreciate you,” a quick shoulder and neck massage at the end of a stressful day, a hug or a kiss given “just because,” are all deposits to the emotional bank accounts of happy marriages. Make deposits to your relationship’s emotional bank account each and every day…. several times a day. It may be small, but it’s an investment in your happy marriage.

Look at me and share my joy

“I broke my running record,” “I finished my presentation,” “I got that special bottle of wine we liked so much on vacation last year,” “I picked up your dry cleaning.”

These are bids your partner makes to connect with you. If you love, admire, and appreciate your partner, this is the time to show it – in small ways. Actually, small ways are bigger than you might think.  

“I’m so proud of you,” “You put in a lot of time and effort on that presentation. I know you will do a great job,” “I love that wine. Thank you,” “You’re so sweet to think of the dry cleaning pick up. That helped me have one less thing to do today.” A hug and a kiss added to your verbal expressions of gratitude, when possible, will also go a long way to keeping the flame burning in your relationship.

It may be a small moment, but it’s a building block for happy marriages. You and your partner should look for these moments to give to each other in small ways – start to look forward to these moments! 

Pay attention to my troubles

“I’m feeling a bit exhausted,” “My co-worker is really getting on my nerves,” “I didn’t sleep very well.”

Life is tough at times. Little stresses and emotional injuries mount up. Your partner needs your compassion and empathy.

Your partner is your first and foremost support system in a sometimes very exhausting and painful world. If your spouse turns away from you in these moments, when you are already feeling down, it will hurt a lot.

Look for opportunities to attune to your partner. Offer physical and emotional support. Be fully present and in-the-moment with your partner. Ask your partner to tell you about the exhaustion, the irritation, or the poor night’s sleep, and what you can do to help in that moment. An exhausted partner would probably welcome time to sit and relax with a beverage you serve, an irritated partner just wants someone to listen (not problem solve or fix the situation), and a sleepy partner may simply want the luxury of going to bed early one night while you take care of evening household duties.

Come play with me

Holding your hand, sneaking a kiss, snuggling on the sofa while watching a movie, dressing up for a special occasion or for no reason at all – these are all ways your partner shows affection and seeks affection in return. Again, in happy marriages, small ways of showing affection matter. When they are noticed, acknowledged, not taken for granted, and, when possible, returned, you are showing your partner how much he or she means to you. When you turn toward your partner in these small moments, you are making sure the flame doesn’t go out.

Can we talk?

Small things are the fabric of connection between couples.

Paying attention to the small things often also helps you notice as early as possible when a conflict may be brewing, and also when and where you disagree.

If you catch that conflict early, you can talk about it and sort it out while it is still manageable and without all the extra baggage that long neglected relationship conflicts tend to acquire.

Happy marriages thrive on small, precise discussions. Voicing a difference of opinion, a concern, or hurt feelings doesn’t mean rejecting your partner or your partner’s bid for attention, compassion, or affection. On the contrary, it means that you take each other seriously and that you try to understand even if you don’t agree.

Talking and paying attention also applies to the romantic side of marriage. Keep the romantic connection going by initiating and responding to small acts of affection and to your own and your partner’s desires as often as you can and want.

A Happy Marriages Mantra

So by all means, go on that special vacation. Take time for date nights and special evenings together.

Play! Have fun together!

But don’t forget that doing small things for your partner on a consistent, daily basis will contribute to a stable foundation for your happy marriage.

Make this your marriage mantra: “Small Things Often = Happy Marriages."

Self-Soothe: When and How to Take a Break During Conflict With Your Partner

Conflict happens in all relationships.

However, sometimes a conflict becomes ‘too much’ for us and we can no longer contain our feelings and sustain dialogue.

If you and your partner find yourself in a disagreement that is escalating and one or both of you feel your emotions and reactivity are getting out-of-control, take a break.  Learning to take breaks and self-soothe when psychological flooding is taking over, is a skill all couples can and should learn.

Flooding

Psychological flooding occurs when you become overwhelmed by the emotions aroused through the conflict with your partner – a condition that experts call diffuse physiological arousal or DPA. DPA causes a sudden elevated stress response, with all the usual physiological symptoms like shallow breathing, fast heart rate, sweating, trembling, and even heart palpitations and dizziness.

During DPA, our cognitive abilities decline, you can’t focus on words and abstract concepts, and your memory may even be affected. All you can feel is an overwhelming emotion, usually some form of fear, ‘flooding’ your entire system. It is like an otherwise well-regulated river breaching its banks and flooding the entire city.

This is not a good state of mind to engage in any complex argument, nor is it the ideal way to engage with your partner and the conflict at hand.

Self-soothing techniques

The first step of self-soothing is to notice and acknowledge that you are overwhelmed (‘flooded’). Check in with yourself and ask how stressed you feel on a scale of 1 to 10. Or, take your pulse rate. If your pulse is higher than 100 beats per minute (or 80 bpm, if you are an athlete), you are in a state of DPA and it's time to calm yourself.

If you find yourself in a state of DPA, take some time away from the conflict. Just a few minutes in a different room by yourself can make a huge difference. Your fight or flight response will decrease, and you will slowly regain all of your cognitive abilities.

According to experts, it takes around 20 to 30 minutes for our minds and bodies to calm.

During your break from the conflict, use breathing techniques, such as the 5-5-7 system. Breathe in for 5 counts, hold your breath for 5 counts, and exhale for 7 counts to slow down your breathing and begin to bring yourself to a calmer emotional place.

Another technique to bring yourself to a less stressed state, is to imagine a place in your mind where you feel safe, relaxed, and nurtured. Perhaps it's a memory of a pleasant experience, or a place you want to visit. Whatever the image, imagine a place far away from the present situation. Focus on the details of the imagery of the safe place - the colors, the sounds, the smells - any sensory images that you can recall or imagine.

Movement and exercise also help self-soothe and reduce your stress levels. If you can, go for a brief walk, put on music and dance your troubles away, engage in a short yoga session which also includes breathing exercises, cuddle and pet your dog, or grab an adult coloring book (or a sketch pad) and colored pencils that you might have on hand.

Actively try to disengage from the stressful conflict. Use this break to be intentional about thinking of something other than the conflict you have been having with your partner. You can resolve the issues later. Be there for yourself. Treat yourself like a caring friend or a loving parent. This is time for you to calm down and bring your emotions and your logic and reason back into balance.

Communicating flooding to your partner

If the conflict escalates to high stress levels, both partners can experience flooding and may need a time out to self-soothe.

However, if you feel flooded, don’t wait for your partner to reach the same level or become aware of their own stress before saying you need a break.

Have an agreement with your partner on the best way to communicate that you feel flooded BEFORE a conflict.  Briefly state your feelings and explain that you will need a short break away to self-soothe. Agree to a time that you will come back together to continue your discussion. The agreement to take a break must be honored by both of you for the break to effective.

When flooding happens, remind your partner of the agreement and retreat to another room or step outside immediately. Use self-soothing methods before you and your partner resume your conversation.

Taking a break is not the end of it

Here is an important piece that must happen for self-soothing breaks and improved conflict discussions to work. Taking a break to self-soothe does not mean that it's OK to abandon the conflict and your partner altogether. You can't leave the discussion and not return to it.

Self-soothing breaks or time-outs are essential responses to psychological flooding. Take time to get yourself into a frame of mind where you can continue to process the conflict. Relationship conflicts still have to be worked through.

If you find that you have become so flooded that you can no longer tolerate any kind of conflict, it’s time to seek the help of a professional counselor who can help you and your partner productively manage conflict and communication in your relationship.

Causes of flooding

Flooding may be triggered by your own issues or by your partner’s behavior, but the underlying causes of your response often lies in your individual past. It's important for each partner to have individual self-awareness around what causes emotional and reactive responses during conflict.

Distancer/pursuer roles in relationships

Flooding occurs differently in different people and one partner may be more easily overwhelmed by negative emotions. It may take this partner longer to "come down" after heightened DPA. Perhaps they are less familiar with self-soothing methods, and may even feel that they should ‘tough it out" and continue interacting with their partner.

The other partner may be so flooded that they withdraw entirely from the discussion.

These patterns can feed into ‘distancer’ and ‘pursuer’ roles in relationships. One partner continuously avoids contact and the other partner constantly seeks it out. In this pattern, the distancer uses time-outs to deny the partner any conflict resolution, while the pursuer cannot accept that the distancer needs a break.

If this is more than a temporary situation and the roles have become fixed in your relationship, you urgently need to do something about it. Fixed distance/pursuer roles create a toxic relationship.

Understand yourself

The basis for a good relationship, and even more so, a good way of processing inevitable conflicts, is to first understand yourself. Do whatever you need to self-soothe so that you can engage in healthy dialogue and grow together with your partner.

Childhood Trauma: What To Do When Bad Memories Intrude

Surviving childhood trauma is an incredible achievement for women. You may not even be aware that you’ve done it until, one fine day, you realize that you are finally free of the traumatic, toxic environment.

Then, sometimes, bad memories intrude.

Childhood trauma, particularly family violence (experienced as well as witnessed) and childhood sexual trauma, rank among the top causes for developing PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

One of the symptoms of PTSD is intrusive memory — images, feelings, and traumatic scenes from your past that pop up in your mind without invitation or a conscious decision to remember. Many survivors of childhood trauma feel haunted by those memories and don’t know how to stop them from turning up. Once they have appeared, those unwanted and often very disturbing memories can hang around for a long time, and they can prevent you from engaging with your life as it is right now. Some survivors say the memories feel as if it all happened yesterday. Some even feel compelled to replay those painful scenes over and over again.

Research suggests that the reason traumatic memories are so vivid and bring up so many painful emotions is because these memories are stored in the brain where they can be activated quickly if any situation in the present looks similar – these are the notorious “triggers.” The evolutionary reason for this may have been to alert our stress response system to sources of mortal danger that we survived in the past, and to enable us to fight or flee without having to reflect. However, for survivors of childhood trauma, intrusive memories become obstacles to healing.

Traumatic memories contain important information and many survivors report that the memories fade into the past when this information is processed through counseling and psychotherapy.

What should you do when bad memories intrude?

• Don’t tell yourself to just forget it. You can’t. All you do is add another layer of bad feelings when you can't make them stop. The memories come uninvited and they won’t just go away because you tell them to.

• Don’t blame yourself. Neither the memories of childhood trauma nor the events that created those memories are your fault. They are not a sign of weakness.

• Stop and acknowledge. Yes this is happening. If you try to ignore the memories, they will just intrude more.

• Reality check. Although your bad memories can be very vivid, the fact is, they are just memories. Images and stories from the past. You don’t live in the past. You live now. You survived. You are free.

• Connect with the present. Thoughts may not be enough to convince the part of your brain that flashes up your trauma memories. Try to use simple mindfulness techniques to connect with your current environment. Listen to the sounds around you, whatever they are, birdsong or cars in the street, breathe in deeply and take in the smells, again, whatever they happen to be, coffee, flowers, heavy machinery. Smell is a very powerful sense that will anchor you in reality and can even override memories, at least briefly.

• Call in support. If it gets really bad and the memories establish themselves in spite of your best efforts, or if they even spark other bad memories, don’t hesitate to contact your support network. It helps if you have friends who have agreed to be “designated listeners” in advance.

• Long term healing. Psychotherapy has been treating survivors of childhood trauma for many decades with great success. Psychotherapy provides a way to process your childhood trauma consciously so that it can be transformed into a more ordinary memory that doesn’t get triggered so easily. Sometimes people ask why they should have to look at the painful past in order to get better. The answer is: because the unresolved pain is already there. In your memories, in your dreams, in your life history.

Childhood trauma needs to be processed so that it has less power over you now. Bad memories can be worked through until they no longer dominate your present thoughts.

The past will always be your past. Let it stay there.

Allow yourself to progress from “surviving” to “thriving.”

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Janie McMahan, MA, LMFT is a therapist in Austin, Texas. As a trained trauma therapist, she works with women to help them heal from traumatic events of childhood and adulthood. Call her at 512-739-2494 for more information and scheduling.

Dating After Divorce for Women: Ways to Know You're Ready

Wondering about dating after divorce?

What is dating after divorce for women really like?

And… are you ready for it?

Other people will have a lot of advice. (When you’re divorced, there’s always plenty of advice on how to meet someone.)

“Come on, get back into dating right now,” your friends might say. Some popular psychology books, however, will tell you that have to wait “at least two years.”

Like all other advice, it is based on the life experience and belief systems of the advice-giver. But, your experience might be different. Rigid timetables and over-impulsive decisions both don’t work very well.

How do you know when you are ready for dating after divorce? Here are three things to consider:

1. How do you feel about your previous relationships/your ex?

Hint: If your previous relationship still occupies a lot of space in your head, if you find yourself thinking of your ex (in good ways and bad) several times a day, it might be too soon to think about a new relationship.

Be sure you have processed your feelings about the loss of your marriage before dating again. Trusted friends who listen to you, support you, and don't judge you can help you process the loss. Seeing a qualified therapist to help you work through your feelings and what you want next for your life, can provide sound and objective assistance as you navigate this new time in your life.

Getting divorced is a grieving process, even if you were the one who wanted to end the marriage. You grieve the loss of the hope you had for your relationship, the loss of your partner, the loss of the marriage, and the end of an important phase of your life.

The grieving process takes as long as it takes, and it is different for each person. You can’t hurry it up. There are no shortcuts. You also don’t need to trap yourself in someone else’s somewhat artificial time frame for grief. Some women start their grieving process before separating from their spouse, others before the divorce is finalized. Some stay in a state of shock for a long time and only begin to grieve much later.

Be kind to yourself and pay attention to your real feelings. Don’t feel pressured to fulfill the expectations of others. You get to make your own decisions. Trust and believe in yourself and what is right for you.

2. How do you feel about yourself?

So, you are single now.

What’s that like? Maybe it's been a long time since you have had a chance to focus on your relationship with yourself.

Who are you now? What is your identity? Is there any fall-out from your breakup in terms of self-image and self-worth? Do you need to heal and become confident again?

This can be a good time to reassess who you are right now, what you like about yourself, what you might like to improve and strengthen in yourself, and who you want to become in the future.

Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship in your life. Being single, and being happy being single, is a strong foundation from which you can live your life to the fullest. When you know yourself well, you know what you want from life, including what you want from a possible new relationship when you are ready.

3. How do you feel about change?

Are you looking forward to falling in love again?

Are you looking forward to sharing your life with someone different?

Are you ready to share emotional and physical intimacy at some point, and begin a new partnership?

First, test your readiness for change in the following smaller, more personal ways:

Are you forming new friendships?

Are you exploring new hobbies? Are you exploring interests that may have been side-lined before?

Do you sometimes look at a man and feel a little bit of attraction?

Are you ready for the actual dating process?

There are many options for dating after divorce for women.

Online dating is very popular now, but if you were married for a long time, meeting someone new via a dating site may be uncomfortable for you. Meeting someone new “the old-fashioned way” through common friends and activities can be great fun, but maybe you need to create new social networks first.

Finally, are you ready for setbacks?

Dating after divorce for women can be exciting and enjoyable, but it can also be challenging. Dating means people are looking for that “good match” and testing each other out. It would be nice if the ideal new partner suddenly appeared when you are ready but, in reality, you will do what everyone else does – do it all step-by-step and by trial-and-error.

If you feel too fragile, if a few small rejections make you question your self-worth, then maybe you are not ready to date. That's fine. Give yourself as much time as you need to feel stronger and confident.

Dating after divorce can be complicated.

But really, there is no obligation to date if you don’t want to.

You can stay single for as long as you like.

You can dip in and out of the dating scene.

You can try different ways of dating and explore what you really want from a relationship.

Remember this: It's YOUR life. The most important thing to remember after divorce is to be kind to yourself. Have compassion for yourself. When you are ready to jump back into the dating game, you will be in a position to know what you want and you will have the confidence to make decisions that are right for you.

Childhood Abuse: Why You Think the Abuse was Your Fault

Childhood abuse can come in many forms - physical, sexual, emotional, psychological.

What they all have in common is that the survivors often think the abuse was their fault.

Before we go further into this painful and confusing subject, it is important to be very clear: abuse is never your fault. Children neither participate in, instigate, or perpetrate their own abuse. The abusers are the adults.

So what is going on here?

1. Construction of the child’s self with parents/adults as guides

Children construct a world for themselves where their parents (and to a lesser extent, other significant adults such as teachers, youth leaders, older relatives) are the holders of authority, reliability, and safety. What these adults say and do is right. They are an important reference point in an often confusing and sometimes overwhelming world.

Even if these adults violate them, children desperately try to uphold the foundations of their world-construction. Often the only way to do this is to believe that somehow, the adults are still right; they must still be right, or the child's world collapses. And that means that the abuse must have been the child’s fault.

2. Conflict of loyalty

Children experience a conflict of loyalty – the abusing parent is still the parent. The abusive teacher is still the trusted teacher. The child feels that she owes this adult loyalty and love. If pressured, the child is afraid to betray the love and loyalty she assumes the parent/teacher/uncle must feel for them. This is one of the reasons why children often lie to defend the abuser. This is also one of the reasons why adult survivors often cannot acknowledge the truth.

3. Scapegoating

Many abusers tell the children directly that the abuse is their own fault. They say that the child ‘made them do it,’ and/or that the abuse happened ‘for their own good.’ This puts the child in an impossible bind. It is normal for children to have to suspend their own immature judgment and rely on norms set by adults instead. How can they differentiate between benign and abusive motives?

4. Loss of parental love

Accepting that you are a survivor of childhood abuse means accepting an immense loss. Your childhood was not the safe place to grow and develop that it should have been, your trust was violated, and, worst of all, your parents did not treat you with love. This is one of the biggest and most lasting taboos in modern society. If you had a strong reaction to reading this, perhaps even a kind of automatic disbelief, imagine what it must feel to have overwhelming evidence. Almost anything else is better. Believing that your parents somehow were forced to abuse you because you were to blame can feel like a better alternative than accepting that they did not love you and did not care for you.

5. Shame

Shame is everywhere in childhood abuse. In cases of sexual abuse, the act itself is often framed as a secret that the victim must keep hidden from everyone else. Children also can feel sexually aroused, often for the first time in their lives, through sexual abuse. This is particularly shameful to them and also confuses the situation. “If I felt sexual arousal then maybe I wanted it.” “Maybe I really manipulated the adult into abusing me without realizing it.”  “I don’t understand what is right and wrong – so I must be wrong.”

6. Stigma

Unfortunately, some media portrayals of childhood abuse survivors often shame the survivors as damaged, dysfunctional, and socially inferior. Private shame turns into stigma.

The truth is, anyone can be a survivor of childhood abuse. Survivors are often very brave, sensitive, and empathetic.

Understanding why survivors feel that the abuse was their own fault is absolutely vital to recovery from childhood trauma and eventual healing. This is not ‘faulty thinking’ that must be corrected, once more, from the outside. Survivors have every right to progress at their own pace. Deeply internalized childhood patterns take a long time to unravel.

But the truth still is: abuse is never the fault of the victim. The abuse has very little to do with who the victim is; it is all about the psychological issues of the abuser.

Alice Miller, psychiatrist, survivor of childhood abuse, and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, writes this about childhood abuse, “The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him.”

A Look at the Many Faces of Marital Infidelity

Statistics about marital infidelity are notoriously difficult to verify, with estimates ranging from five-percent to 50-percent of marriages. A reputable, long-term study by Blow & Hartnett (2005) puts the likelihood of infidelity in a marriage, in any given year, at around six-percent, rising to 25-percent over the lifetime of the relationship.

Reasons for marital infidelity are diverse and complex. There is no one reason why someone is unfaithful to their partner. The reason given for a marital infidelity may be isolated to a single, identifiable reason. However, more often than not, infidelity occurs for a number of reasons, and it’s important for couples to be honest with each other about the infidelity, and investigate together why their relationship took this turn.

What is marital infidelity?

When one thinks of someone being unfaithful to their partner, or “cheating,” the common assumption is that someone has had a secretive, sexual relationship with someone other than their partner. The secret relationship could be long-term or even a one-night-stand.

There is much more than sex to marital infidelity and sometimes the infidelity doesn’t even involve a sexual relationship, in the strictest sense. Even sexual infidelity can be defined differently than before with individuals having the ability to email and text message sexual photographs and have video conversations without even being in the same room together. In fact, these actions are probably better classified as sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity in today’s world of communication.

“Non-sexual,” emotional marital infidelities have also become much more common with email, cell phones, phone texting, and social media, and they can be every bit as damaging to a relationship as a sexual affair.

Let’s look at a broader definition of marital infidelity, a definition that includes crossing emotional as well as physical boundaries.

In her book, Not “Just Friends,” Dr. Shirley Glass asks the following questions to investigate if a friendship with someone other than your partner has crossed the boundary to an emotional affair:

1. Do you confide more to your friend than to your partner about how your day went?

2. Do you discuss negative feelings or intimate details about your marriage with your friend but not with your partner?

3. Are you open with your partner about the extent of your involvement with your friend?

4. Would you feel comfortable if your partner heard your conversations with your friend?

5. Would you feel comfortable if your partner saw a videotape of your meeting with a friend?

6. Are you aware of sexual tensions in this friendship?

7. Do you and your friend touch differently when you’re alone than in front of others?

8. Are you in love with your friend?

Give yourself one point each for yes to questions 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8 above, and one point each for no to 3, 4, 5.  If you scored near 0, this is just a friendship. If you scored 3 or more, you may not be “just friends.” If you scored 7-8, you are definitely involved in an emotional affair, according to Glass. Elevated scores on this brief quiz indicate that you may be on a slippery slope to further emotional involvement with someone outside your marriage, which puts you at risk for possible sexual involvement, too.

The commonality in emotional affairs and sexual affairs is that they are secretive and withheld from your partner, and your attention, emotional attunement and connection are being directed to someone other than your marital partner. If you are not attending to your connection with your partner, your marital relationship suffers. When you ‘cheat,’ you deceive your partner and violate your mutual trust.

What are some of the faces of marital infidelity?

Social media has created the ability to reconnect with family and friends in a way not previously possible.  An online friendship (think Facebook and other social media sites) that your spouse is unaware of can be a warning sign. Maybe your online friendship is with someone you’ve never met before, or maybe it’s a high school or college sweetheart that you haven’t heard from in years. Your new or renewed connection may be harmless and truly nothing more than friendship. But, if you are sending private messages to this person without your partner’s knowledge, or you withhold from your partner all or selective parts of conversations you have with your friend, or if you justify not sharing details of the friendship with your spouse because you think he or she “won’t understand,” you might want to evaluate what is happening in your relationship with your friend, and in your relationship with your spouse.

A relationship with a co-worker or business associate that falls outside the realm of work is also a red flag. Glass calls the workplace “a fertile breeding ground for affairs.” Think about it. Men and women often work side-by-side to complete projects, work cooperatively to meet company benchmarks, and may even travel together for their work responsibilities. This kind of “togetherness,” and working to meet common goals, can easily cross the line to having more intimate conversations, having contact with each other by phone, text, and social media, and spending more time together than is required of the work relationship. 

Marital infidelities can be present in relationships in other ways, too. Infidelity is not limited to sexual and emotional affairs. Financial infidelities can be another problem in marriages. If you and your partner have an understanding that your finances are joint, is there some part of your financial world that you are keeping a secret from your partner? Do you have a credit card or credit card debt your partner doesn’t know about? A separate checking account your spouse is unaware of? Are you spending money and trying to hide the expenditures? Financial infidelity can also be devastating to couples. Again, the secretive and hidden nature of activities are what classify an infidelity, and lead to a fractured trust between you and your partner.

How to protect yourself and your relationship from marital infidelity.

First, understand that attraction to another person is normal. Just because you are married and committed to your partner doesn’t mean that you’re dead! But feeling attraction to someone else, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to act on it. Being attracted to another person also doesn’t mean that you are married to the wrong person. Commitment to your spouse means that you do not allow yourself to be distracted from your marital relationship.

Dr. Glass also suggests that if you find yourself attracted to someone other than your partner, don’t allow yourself to fantasize about someone else. She states that “affairs begin in the mind.” Don’t flirt either, because you are signaling that you are available and interested in someone else. Avoid risky situations. Late nights at the office with a co-worker you’re attracted to, coffee alone with “a friend” who feels like more than “just a friend” are situations that heighten risk for infidelity if you are attracted to the person.

Healing Your Relationship After Marital Infidelity

Marital infidelity does not mean your relationship has to end. Couples who work with a qualified marriage counselor after the discovery of marital infidelity can come through the challenge and sometimes have an even stronger relationship than before. There is no doubt about the anguish that is felt when a marital infidelity comes to light. Contacting a qualified marriage counselor and working together as a couple is the first step toward healing your relationship.  Exploring the reasons the marital infidelity happened and how to prevent it in the future can help get your relationship back on track and headed in the right direction.

Baby Emotions: What Is Your Newborn Telling You?

Babies are born with the full range of human feelings. Baby emotions range from joy to fear to anger to sadness, and babies express these emotions through body language, a seemingly universal language of short and clearly distinguished sounds, various forms of crying, and attempts to make eye and body contact.

Yes, your newborn is telling you precisely how she feels and what he wants. All you need to do is learn how to understand.

Body language

Newborns kick and wave their arms and legs, turn their heads, start to look around, and make a whole range of facial expressions.

Babies who are only a few hours old already prefer adults who make eye contact and they recognize voices familiar from before birth. Watch their movements and identify what interests them, what they like and what they don’t like. Your baby is at the beginning of a lifelong learning journey and all he wants is to get through to you.

Don’t be afraid of trial and error–your baby will let you know if your response meets his needs.

Baby sounds

Every sound a baby makes, gurgling, whimpering, cooing, crying, and smaller, more specific sounds, expresses emotions and conveys needs. Nothing is random.

The “Dunstan Baby Language,” a concept created by Australian mother Priscilla Dunstan, is an innovative attempt to categorize certain sounds that newborns and babies up to three months make when they try to communicate specific needs.

Recent research has suggested that these seemingly universal sounds are probably more like stand-alone signals of baby emotions than a complex, combinable language, but listening closely to the sounds your baby makes and noticing her attempts to tell you what concerns her is the best way to establish communication.

Try to respond to the needs your baby expresses as soon as you can, so that the need doesn’t grow into distress. If you respond–and respond correctly–your baby will trust you and feel less need to cry.

Crying

Crying is one of the main ways to communicate baby emotions. Crying is a stronger, more intense language and evokes an emotional response from you. Experts have distinguished different kinds of crying for different needs. “I am hungry,” “I am tired,” and “I am in pain” all have their own specific cries, intended to elicit a specific reaction from you. Again, close observation and immediate, positive response will both help you to understand your baby’s language and bond with him. Babies cry because they need you to respond, not because they want to annoy you!

Body contact and eye contact

Hugging and cuddling your baby is another way to communicate directly through the sense of touch. Your newborn has spent the previous nine months in a world of constant skin contact. Touch is also a very sensitive way of picking up emotions and connecting in non-visual ways. Your baby absorbs whatever you feel. She can feel your heartbeat and will tune in to your breathing patterns which have a profound effect on her baby emotions.

Eye contact is important to babies even while their eye sight is still developing, but after a few weeks babies also feel a need to break eye contact and turn their heads away when the connection becomes too intense for them. This is the beginning of the complex dance of closeness and privacy boundaries in human relationships.

Babies Can Be Overstimulated, Too

Your baby may get overstimulated sometimes and need a little break from all the interaction. Dr. John Gottman offers the following tips for recognizing an overstimulated baby in his book And Baby Makes Three: Is your baby looking away? Shielding her face? Pushing away? Wrinkling his brow? Arching his back? Fussing? Crying? If so, your baby may be overstimulated, rather than asking to have a need met. In this situation, your baby may be trying to self-soothe by looking away. Well-meaning parents may make efforts to play more and engage in eye contact with their baby in an effort to make him "happy," further stimulating the baby and increasing the fussiness and crying.

Notice if your baby gets fussier, not calmer or quieter, when you do any of the following: move your face in front of his face, move your baby's body to keep her looking at you, increase the pace of play when she is upset, switch back and forth between activities in an effort to keep your baby happy, repeatedly pat his back or leg or repeatedly wipe her face or move her hair out of her eyes, compete with your partner for your baby's attention.

Just like mom and dad, baby sometimes needs a very short break from all the activity, too. Your attunement to baby emotions will help you to determine if your baby needs you to do something for him, or if he just needs a little rest from play, sights, and sounds.

Communication

Whatever your baby is trying to tell you via body language, touch, and sounds, he needs your response to it. Communication is a two-way street, right from the start. Quick and flexible response makes this communication effective and your baby will be less distressed. But sometimes babies are sad and angry for their own personal reasons, just like adults. Try to find out what is going on.

Your baby also starts to mimic tones of voice, hand movements, and moods right from birth. Even newborns start to cry when they hear other babies crying. Studies have found evidence for babies’ basic empathy with the feelings of others.

Baby emotions and baby bonding

Bonding between parents and baby is the foundation of a good relationship that facilitates child development and will last a lifetime.

Classes and workshops for expectant and new parents, like the Gottman Bringing Baby Home Program, can make the whole process of transitioning into parenthood more enjoyable and effective for parents. In addition to keeping your marital and parent-child relationships strong,  you might even bond with other parents and care-givers while you are learning how to communicate with your baby.

Every minute you spend trying to understand and respond to baby emotions will deepen your bond and create a rich and fulfilling family life.

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Janie McMahan is a therapist in Austin, Texas. She works with expectant and new parents as they transition into their new roles as mom and dad. She is a Gottman Bringing Baby Home Educator and offers BBH workshops, small groups, and individual sessions for couples. For more information and scheduling, call Janie at 512-739-2494.

Depersonalization: A Common Self-Protection Method

What is depersonalization and what does it have to do with trauma?

When someone experiences a traumatic situation or a series of repetitive traumas, areas of the nervous system goes into stress response. This is a survival strategy activated by the oldest and most primitive parts of our brain. The typical result is the fight or flight response, but if neither of these are possible, the person can go into the freeze response, the method of last resort. In animals, this freeze response looks like “pretending to be dead.” In humans, the freeze response can take an instinctive form of self-protection called acute depersonalization, an aspect of dissociation (i.e. disconnection from the self and/or from the situation).

Depersonalization is the disconnection from the self, a sense of not being at home in your own body, disconnected from your emotions, and disconnected from your physical sensations. Trauma survivors report that they were able to “detach” from physical pain during abuse, accidents or illness, or even torture; from fear during natural disasters, war, and abuse; and from shame and humiliation during episodes of bullying as well as psychological and sexual abuse.

Sometimes they describe depersonalization as “this is not happening to me” or as an involuntary out-of-body experience.

How does depersonalization protect during trauma?

Traumatic experiences can be so overwhelming that the cohesion of the self is threatened. Physical pain can be intolerable, and psychological attacks can undermine the normal sense of self. Repetitive trauma can trigger depersonalization, after several episodes, at a relatively low level – a negative “learning experience” for the brain.

This is particularly true for traumatic situations that offer no other way out, such as being imprisoned, physically incapacitated, trapped in a war zone, or facing an attack that you cannot fight off. It is also, sadly, true for the trauma of childhood abuse.

Temporarily disconnecting from your identity, the sense of who you are, can protect the cohesion of your self, a self that you are either still constructing when you are a child or that you have spent many years building up as an adult, by allowing you not to feel the attacks to the same extent. If you can temporarily escape into a sense of “that is not happening to me” or even “that is not me,” you can protect your inner core.

Many trauma survivors describe exactly that.

Some make a conscious decision to leave their body behind, but many report that they “escaped” by disconnecting from their sense of being themselves without realizing that this was what they were doing – the freeze response kicking in.

A survival strategy that can come at a high cost.

While depersonalization can help a person survive the current traumatic situation, it can also come at a high cost. Depersonalization disorder, a diagnosable mental health condition, can result from episodes of temporary (or acute) depersonalization during trauma, and lead to many years, or even a lifetime, of disconnection from a sense of self. It can also affect memory and the person’s general state of awareness.

The survival strategy is no longer offering protection. It has become an inappropriate response that now impacts daily functioning and optimal survival.

Because it is often invisible to others, and because the sufferer often doesn’t know how to identify the disorder, depersonalization disorder is often left untreated. However, a mental health professional will be able to make a diagnosis with the help of clinical tests and exploring your history. Treatment often involves addressing the original trauma that caused the first episodes of depersonalization.

Depersonalization and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Depersonalization can be difficult, but not impossible, to treat, particularly in cases of extreme or early trauma. However, PTSD treatments have evolved considerably over the last decade and some treatments, such as EMDR Therapy, can help in healing from the impact of traumatic events. It is also possible to live and function with a mild form of depersonalization and to manage the symptoms with the help of a mental health professional who is trained in treating trauma and dissociative disorders. There are forums, advice columns, and books available that can help to better understand what you are going through, but the best option is to find a qualified counselor who has specific training in treating trauma and dissociative disorders.

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Janie McMahan is a therapist in Austin, Texas. She is trained in EMDR Therapy and has received additional clinical training in treating complex trauma, PTSD, and dissociative disorders. If you have experienced difficult life events that are preventing you from living a life of happiness and fulfillment, call Janie today at 512-739-2494 for more information and scheduling.

Why It's Important to Have a Strong Friendship in Marriage

Marriage is all about romantic love – or that’s what the Hollywood movies would like us to believe.

Of course, love is at the core of marriage, including intimacy and romantic attraction, and love is what makes marriage different from all our other relationships.

But the marriages that overcome the many stress tests and the many conflicts, big and small, that inevitably crop up over a lifetime, the marriages that last, also have something else at their core: a strong friendship.

Seeing your partner as a friend and not as the fulfillment of a personal or cultural fantasy (in which case he or she can never be enough) is the most realistic foundation of a long-term relationship.

Characteristics of friendship

Friendships, it has been said, are the freest of all relationships. Friends are freely chosen, without pressure or obligation, and friendships express who we are. Friendship is also the most equal of all relationships. Friends have mutual respect, mutual curiosity about each other’s lives, and support each other unconditionally because they have each other’s best interests at heart – more so than their own selfish agenda.

A strong friendship is the best foundation for being a lifelong team.

How to maintain a strong friendship

The big stuff

Support your spouse in living a full life. If your partner wants to branch out professionally, travel more (or less), if he or she is faced with a major life decision, or wants something that you don’t want, stay curious, ask questions, and try to support your spouse in making the best choices for his or her own life. Not yours. A strong friendship rests on the fact that each of you is an individual. Undue pressure, coercion, emotional blackmail, and a sense of entitlement have no place in a strong friendship.

Of course, marriage is also a partnership in practical matters. But friends who respect and trust each other will also treat that partnership with trust and respect.

The small stuff

Life, however, consists largely of the small stuff. Most days don’t bring the big decisions, but every day is an opportunity to rediscover and reinforce your strong friendship with each other.

Show your spouse that you are paying attention – through small gifts, thoughtful remarks, and encouraging questions.

Suggest little things that lighten up your partner’s life – a short trip, a favorite food, participation in a favorite activity.

Be reliable when you execute the little tasks and helpful acts that your partner asks for, be honest when you make promises, and keep those that you make.

Stay engaged in conversation.

Create projects together and follow up regularly. Building things as a team strengthens the dynamics of your friendship by using them.

How to stay friends in tough times

Best friends can disagree without losing each other’s positive regard and support. Friends can even dare to be more honest with each other than everyone else, and during tough times in your marriage that might be necessary.

If you can trust and respect each other, even the biggest conflicts and challenges benefit from that honesty. If you are best friends, you can also approach your mutual mistakes more openly and with compassion.

The “friendship” frame of mind can help you to try to see the other person’s point of view. It can also help you stay realistic and remind you that your partner is an individual, a person who has chosen to be with you, and not the fairy tale prince or princess created in your own psyche. (That fairy tale prince or princess is actually a part of you that you project into someone else, expecting that someone else to rescue you and solve all your unresolved internal issues.)

The most important aspect of a strong friendship is, after all, mutuality – respect, trust, and freedom work both ways.

No matter how your relationship started out, it is never too late to focus on and expand a strong friendship in your marriage. A friendship that will last a lifetime, whatever happens.

When Holidays Trigger Traumatic Memories From Childhood

The holiday season brings up memories from childhood in all of us.

Songs, smells of familiar food, and traditional holiday decorations everywhere activate the long term memories stored in our brains. And inextricably bound to those memories are emotions.

If those memories are pleasant, if they give us a sense of belonging and being rooted in a world that welcomes us, then the holiday season is a very enjoyable time.

But what if you are dealing with painful or even traumatic memories from your childhood, triggered by those same songs, smells and images?

What happens when traumatic memories are triggered in the brain?

Our brains are constant recording instruments. And there are at least two reasons why traumatic memories from childhood are so strong.

First, our earliest memories are actually the building blocks of the brain. They structure our later experiences and how we interpret them.

And second, memories with strong emotions, particularly of fear and pain, are a priority imprint on our brains. This is actually part of the learning function. Fearful situations are remembered so that we can survive similar ones in the future. Unfortunately, we can also get stuck inside those memories and the feelings they evoke.

If this happens to you a lot and if you experience other symptoms like panic attacks and prolonged periods of low mood, it would be a good idea to seek professional help. Some traumatic memories can lead to PTSD which can and needs to be treated.

Coping strategies for random holiday triggers

• Acknowledge that you have been triggered. Note the trigger and try to understand what the connection is. The act of reflection will make you feel a little more ‘in charge.’

• Practice your calming skills like deep breathing, sensory mindfulness, and living in the present moment.

• Connect with non-toxic people in your life right now.

• Remember that your emotional well-being is important. You deserve compassion and respect for your feelings, including from yourself!

Coping strategies for family holiday events (revisiting the traumatic environment)

• Plan a time limit for the visit and create a safe exit strategy.

• If you can, don’t stay overnight and don’t depend on transport from people who are likely to trigger your traumatic memories.

• If you can, don’t go it alone. Ask someone to come with you who understands and can help protect you. If that is not possible, you could arrange to have a phone connection and agree on a kind of ‘personal emergency’ code.

• Listen to your feelings and honor your experience.

What can make it worse?

Group pressure to ‘forget’ and pretend

Families (or other groups) can exert a strong pressure on someone who has been the target of traumatization from within their own ranks to ‘forget’ and ‘forgive’ what has been done to them. This is often presented as proof of ‘maturity’ – with the implied criticism that the person who has suffered trauma inflicted by members of this same group is at fault if they don’t comply. Again.

In reality, the pressure to pretend that all is okay is solely for the benefit of those who hurt you and those who didn’t do anything about it.

Alcohol and ‘unsafe’ surroundings

For many survivors, holiday festivities feel deeply unsafe, and efforts to ‘relax’ through alcohol actually make things worse. Try to stay sober so that you are in control.

Presence of someone connected with the original trauma

This is probably the worst case scenario and the one most feared by survivors of childhood trauma. If you know that someone like that will very likely be present, you might consider not attending.

Yes, that is considered an extreme measure and will probably increase the group pressure to disregard yourself. But it might be the best solution for everyone. You can always meet the ‘non-trigger’ members of your family at other times.

If you feel you can cope, try to put in place very strong boundaries. If you have any allies in the group, try to connect to them but don’t let yourself be drawn into any fights.

You have a right to protect yourself, even during the holidays – or perhaps even more so, since traumatic memories are more likely to be triggered.

One good idea is to write down your coping strategies so that you can look at them — why not store them on your phone so that you can have a quick reminder when you get stressed?

Talking through your fears and possible solutions with a good friend is also very helpful. Maybe you can make a mutual assistance plan.

And maybe now is also a good time to consider counseling or re-visit counseling for a few extra sessions.

Life After Divorce for Women: Your First Holiday Season

Divorce is an emotionally complex experience. While for many women there is some relief at ending an impossible or even abusive relationship, the dominant experience is a sense of loss.

Loss of the partner, loss of the family unit, and — when it comes to the holidays — loss and need for readjustment in life after divorce for women really comes home to you.

Holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah, and Thanksgiving are supposed to celebrate family time and there is no way you can avoid the fact that your family is different now.

But the first holiday season is also an opportunity to start a new life after divorce for women. Here are a few useful survival tips from those who have walked this path before you.

No forced cheer

Don’t be surprised if you feel sad or angry at times — you are still going through the grieving process. And like everyone who is grieving, you need to acknowledge your real feelings. You have every right not to let others push or manipulate you into ‘forced cheerfulness.’ This, of all times, is the time to listen to yourself.

A positive new holiday experience for and with your children

If you have children, the best survival method for you and them is to take the new and perhaps painful challenges of holiday time suddenly shared (or split up) between two parental homes and the negotiations with your ex-partner and transform them into new and positive traditions.

Take the stress out of sharing

As long as the sharing arrangements are fair and in accordance with the terms of your divorce, don’t make the negotiations about the details an additional source of stress. Don’t make your children feel that they are in any way part of your problems. Instead, make exciting new plans.

If, for example, your partner ‘has’ the children for December 25, don’t insist on breaking up the celebrations and instead create your own main event on one of the other 12 days of Christmas. Why not? The children will enjoy it.

And while it is important not to avoid your own feelings, it is also important not to over-involve your children in what may be perfectly understandable jealousy and resentment towards your Ex and perhaps his new partner. Use this opportunity to create good boundaries that help to protect your children.

Alone on the big days

But whether you have children or not, being alone on one of the big days of the family holidays is a real challenge in life after divorce for women.

Turkey for one? Listening to holiday music and crying? It can feel as if the whole world is celebrating together and you are the only one who is excluded.

Here are a few suggestions how to survive these days and celebrate them in a new way:

1. You may be alone today but you are probably not literally ‘out in the cold.’ So why not spend this day helping others who are? Many charities have big events on the main holidays where you will be very welcome to volunteer. You may have that shared dinner after all, but with a whole new family who really needs you.
2. Accept an invitation. Not everyone flies home for the holidays. Sometimes, circles of friends celebrate together, either at home or in a restaurant. But make sure they are positive people.
3. Do something special for yourself alone. If your city is even moderately multi-cultural, there will be opportunities to have a spa day or go on a mini holiday with creative or sports activities – preferably in a group of singles or with female friends.
4. If you have more time to yourself, why not go on vacation to a different country, join a working holiday as a foreign volunteer, or sign up to learn a new skill.

What all these suggestions have in common is that life after divorce for women is not just a struggle for survival, you are laying the foundations for a whole new chapter of your life story.

One day you will look back on this first year and remember how many of your new traditions, skills, and friendships originated right here, right now.

New Baby? Don't Sit on the Sidelines, Dad. Baby Needs You, Too!

Who else comes to your mind when you hear the words ‘new baby’?

Obviously, the mother of that new baby.

Traditionally, and for a long time, fathers didn’t really enter the picture, and when they did they were peripheral figures sitting on the sidelines. Babies were firmly inside the world of women–and really, what could a man do besides providing external security and financial resources?

Your grandfather was probably such a man. Even your father might have been.

But times have changed, and so have dads: fathers, your new baby needs you, too.

Your baby needs an intrepid adventurer.

“But I don’t know anything about babies!”

True. Maybe your wife doesn't either.

You can learn, starting with attending prenatal and parenting classes together, and supporting your wife through labor and childbirth.

And then you can go on learning it together. Together, as a couple and together, with the baby. Your baby will probably make its needs known in the ways babies do. The fun is in figuring out what your baby is trying to tell you.

Yes, fun. Your baby is not a burden. Parenting is a completely new adventure for you and your partner to explore. As with any journey of discovery, your life will be transformed.

Access resources and information–your new baby needs a geek!

There will be plenty of people who have experience with new babies and can guide you. Don’t forget to ask other men what it was like for them. If you have a good relationship with your own father, it’s a great opportunity for another bond.

And there are also many sources of information (offline and online) where you can do your geeky best. Don’t forget to share it all with your partner and ask her opinion. This is team work and your baby needs both of you working together.

Bonding with your baby–your baby needs you close.

Holding your baby is not just a practical way to get her to places. (Since she can’t walk yet!) Physical contact, close embraces, and contact skin-to-skin are essential to the mental and physical health of newborns. Just imagine you grew for nine months inside another human body where you could hear your mother’s heartbeat. And now you’ve lost your womb! Close holding reassures your new baby, and skin contact conveys a lot of information that the baby’s new brain can process.

Caregiving–your baby needs a strong, soft man.

There is nothing to prevent a man from being a good caregiver. Your natural abilities weren’t eliminated by the Y chromosome.

Basic caregiving duties like changing diapers, cleaning, bathing and dressing the baby, and creating a calming atmosphere can be performed by most adults adequately, even if some people are a little squeamish at first. And providing emotional support–well, by this stage you’re probably an expert!

“But I can’t breastfeed…”

No, you can’t. You can’t do everything. But you can do everything else.

24/7 management–your new baby needs you on the night shift.

New babies have no idea how we like to structure our day. They follow their own rhythm and even that changes all the time as they develop.

Think of the night shift as a test of your strength. For a long time, industrial night shift work was reserved for men since women’s constitutions were thought to be too delicate for it. Your baby will reward you by trusting dad when the darkness falls, and falling asleep on your chest when you are both calm. (And think about the many many episodes of your favorite TV series you can catch up on while there is nobody there to criticize your taste…)

Traditional roles still matter–your baby needs a protector.

New babies can’t do anything for themselves.

They need a house, food, warmth, clothing, and 24/7 care.

All that costs money and maybe the mother of your baby is taking a little time out from work. So, yes, it may well be up to you to provide the foundations of your lives, at least for a while.

Support your wife–your baby needs a happy mother.

Help your partner without being asked to (failure to do so is the main complaint from new mothers), support her emotionally and show your own emotions, and don’t stop talking to her as an adult.

From couple to family–your baby needs a dad who can grow.

Take an active and positive part in reshaping the dynamics at home.

After your baby is born, your relationship will never be the same.

That’s very true.

It will grow in size and in love, if you let it.

You and your partner now have a common project of the most urgent and most fulfilling kind. A helpless small human who depends on both of you for his or her survival, development, and shaping himself or herself into a full person.

Don’t experience your own life and family from the sidelines. Go right in there and embrace the love.

Yours and Mine Equals Ours: How Couples Can Blend Holiday Traditions

Holidays can bring out hidden dynamics within a couple.

It’s one of those times when your individual pasts meet and you get the chance to blend them into a new tradition together.

If you are celebrating a holiday that is part of  both of your family traditions, such as Christmas or Hanukkah, you each may have particular traditions you want to bring into your relationship as a couple. Twenty-two percent of American couples come from divergent religious backgrounds with very different holidays and many more regional variations of them.

Even an all-American holiday like Thanksgiving can be unfamiliar if your spouse comes from a country or culture where this kind of holiday doesn’t exist!

Be curious and respectful

Holiday traditions go very deep for most people. They accompany us from our early childhood and are part of our sense of identity. Be curious and respectful of each other’s traditions. You never know what complex associations an inexpensive-looking Santa hat (for example) may have for your partner.

Don’t make assumptions

If you are part of an interfaith or mixed cultural relationship, you may try to find out a lot of things about your partner’s traditions on your own. Your partner, however, may have had a different, or non-typical, holiday experience from the one you have been reading about. Don’t make assumptions, ask!

Create your own individual blend

Like coffees or teas, your traditions may have many countries of origin, but it is up to you to create your own specific ‘house blend.’ As a couple, creating completely new holiday traditions is a great way to bond and make your partnership real. Find a special way to exchange gifts, and create a special time just for you to share a newly created holiday activity. Try to bring one element that you really enjoy into this new blend. It will have a unique flavor that will grow on you every year.

Be real about the holidays — together

Holiday traditions can also be a trap. If there are things you really didn’t enjoy about your original holiday traditions, now is the time to stop or transform them. Not all traditions deserve to be continued.

For many people, the holidays can also be a very stressful time when they feel that all they do is try to satisfy other people’s expectations at the expense of their own. If that is the case, your relationship with your partner can allow you to set new boundaries. When you start celebrating together, you are no longer just children at your respective parents’ holiday events. And while it is important to honor heritage traditions, it is equally important that the holidays are a time for restoring your energy and inner peace, and a time to bond for the future.

The best of the past holiday traditions

Ask your partner, and yourself, which of the holiday traditions you grew up with were the ones that mattered to you most, and why. Then think of a way to re-create some or all of these traditions just for the two of you. You may end up with very similar activities, perhaps lighting the candles on the Christmas tree and on the Menorah all together (or the lights for Diwali), or you could just do one celebration on one day and then next one on the other if they fall together in a year. Many holidays offer more than one date for celebration.

A new relationship with your families

When you feel ready, perhaps when you have established your new, blended holidays for a few years, it may be time to invite your families of origin to join you and join in your new holiday traditions. This is also an opportunity to introduce the entire family to a different cultural background or to learn more about another religion.

Blended families with children

A particular challenge can come up if one or both of you already have children from a previous relationship. Try to respect the children’s attachments to their own holiday traditions, even if they were created before you joined their family.

Just like you, these traditions are a part of a child’s identity, even if the child is still quite young. Don’t take away, build on what you find.

And add your own way of telling them, through a present or a special moment together, that you love them and want to celebrate with them.

Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate

Whether it is a series of festivals from different religions — either a month or two apart or sometimes right after one another — or a big round of non-religious holiday parties and visits, you’re connecting two families and circles of friends that used to be separate before. If you blend your holiday traditions, you will have many occasions to celebrate.

Of course not all holiday traditions are of the ‘cozy snow’ kind. Not all of them involve conventional rituals or ceremonies.

Some couples opt to create a completely new tradition by heading off to another country, perhaps to a sunny climate, where they celebrate the holidays — by going on holiday.

Don't Forget to Plan Your Marriage While Planning Your Wedding

Getting married is a big deal.

And we’re not just talking about the dress, the guest list, the wedding cake…

All of those things can take up a lot of your time and attention, and of course you want to have a wonderful wedding day.

But your wedding day, as important as it is, is meant to celebrate the real thing: your marriage, your partnership as you’ll live it every day together. It’s just as important to plan your marriage as it is to plan your wedding.

“But we love each other, isn’t that enough?”

Love is the foundation of your marriage, but when it comes to conflicts, large or small, love is not enough, as the famous saying goes.

Love will help you to get through all the issues of your marriage with respect, compassion, and caring for each other, but you will also need a lot of other skills.

What if…

Yes, to plan your marriage you’ll have to think and talk about a whole list of scary ‘what ifs.’ And it is much better to talk about them before they happen than after.

Here are some of the things you should think about:

Communication patterns

This is quite possibly the most important aspect of any relationship since communication is involved in everything. Communication patterns can make or break a marriage.

Goals and expectations

It might sound like a silly question, but what do you actually expect from your marriage? ‘Happily ever after’ doesn’t count. Your answers to this question contain the real ‘values’ that you are going to base your marriage on.

• Work/life balance: How do both of you see the importance of career and home life? How much time do you want to spend together every day, every week? How can you support each other in that?

• Children: Do you both want children? How many? Another thing to consider is, you’ve both got your own childhood experiences – some good, some bad, maybe some horrible. These experiences will influence each of your parenting styles. Can you discuss your childhood experiences and work together to overcome any problems or differences of opinion about child rearing?

• Money: More marriages break up because of money problems than for any other reason. Think about it, before marriage you both have your own financial life in terms of earnings, saving habits, and spending patterns. Merging your finances is a big deal. You need to develop trust and practical skills to share that responsibility.

• Conflicts: All marriages go through conflicts. Avoidance doesn’t work. The best way to deal with conflict is to acknowledge it is there and learn strategies to find out what each partner really wants. It’s all about learning how to argue with respect and openness, and how to stay with the present conflict instead of descending into resentment.

The issues that come up in a marriage are the same issues that each partner already has, magnified by an intimate partnership. To better understand how you each feel about these issues, help is available.

Pre-marital counseling and couples counseling

Couples usually come to marriage counseling when there are already serious issues in the marriage. Sometimes very late in the process.

Pre-marital counseling is a form of prevention – a little bit like adopting a healthy life style and getting a checkup instead of waiting until a serious health problem occurs.

And prevention is usually less costly and less dangerous.

Who can provide pre-marital counseling?

Look for an experienced, licensed couples or family counselor who will approach your relationship with an open mind. He or she will ask you personalized questions and observe the dialogue between you and your partner.

Your counselor will be able to help you identify the areas you need to work on before you get married.

Think about it like this: you’re willing to employ a wedding planner for one event. Your counselor will help you plan a marriage that lasts a life time!

Couples Conflict Management: Why Defensiveness Doesn't Work

A relationship conflict can start anywhere, any time — and there’s no telling where it will stop. One of the most common couples conflict accelerators” (communication mistakes that make the situation worse very fast) is defensiveness.

Imagine you say to your partner: “You’ve been home late every night this week.”

What would a defensive response to this look like?

“I have not been late every night!” (Denial) “I don’t know what you expect. I have a stressful job and you know that.” (Rebuttal)

“What about me? What about my job and career? I don’t have a choice about staying late. I have to come home and take care of things around here. Someone has to be responsible.” (Counterattack)

Hence, the main strategies of defensiveness:

1. Denial: “I didn’t do it/say it.”

2. Rebuttal: “You are in the wrong.”

3. Counterattack: “You do this to me, too.”

4. Escalation: Fight or flight, then shutdown

If a couple conducts its conflicts in this way, one defensive statement will lead to another, and soon accusations and hurtful attacks turn the conflict into an all-out fight.

Depending on your personalities, and your position in the power dynamics of the relationship, you will tend to prefer fighting or running away, but quite probably you will end up doing both at different times.

The final stage is communication shutdown. Bad feelings, resentment and sometimes hopelessness as to how to resolve the issue, are the result.

If you want to learn how not to act/react defensively, you need to first explore and understand why this is happening.

Goals of defensiveness

The main goal of a defensive response is not to have to engage with the issue. The larger goal is not to have to engage with the person who is trying to talk to you. It’s a verbal “keep out” sign.

And while defensiveness can be part of an abusive power play (a way of never letting the less dominant partner voice their side and be heard) most of the time, defensiveness is caused by fear.

What are defensive communicators afraid of?

• Not being safe

“If I open myself up to this, I will get hurt.”

• Not being heard

“No matter what I say, my partner won’t listen so it’s better to cut it off a.s.a.p.”

• Not being understood

“If I try to explain myself, my partner will not get it and accuse me even more.”

• Not being forgiven for mistakes (even small ones)

“If I admit to this small mistake, my partner will feel entitled to punish me.”

In fact, defensive partners feel the exact emotions that their behavior induces in others.

How to respond constructively to defensiveness

Responding to defensiveness with rebuttals, counterattacks and withdrawal will turn your living room into an episode from a courtroom drama. There is a reason why the American court system is called “adversarial”: The opposite party is your enemy whom you must vanquish at all cost.

It can happen very easily. It takes patience, courage and love not to fall into the same pattern.

The most important thing to remember: Conflict between couples is not about winning or losing, but about exploring, understanding and if possible, resolving the issues.

Even more, it is about understanding each other:

• Why is my partner so upset right now?

• What prevents me from hearing his words as a question, instead of as a criticism?

• What is she afraid of that prevents her from openly engaging with me?

• How can I help to make our relationship a safe space where we can voice our concerns, stay curious about each other’s feelings, and start to see conflict as an opportunity to get to know each other even better?

This is the way to start managing your couples conflict constructively.

Parenting With Mindfulness

A few days ago I read an article by a blogger confessing to being one of “those” parents. She was admitting to the world, or at least to the readers of The Huffington Post, that she was guilty of being a less-than-perfect parent. You know the scenario: parent is tired, overwhelmed, emotionally triggered in some way and doesn’t respond to the child in a way that would win an award for Parent of the Year. Sound familiar? It certainly did to me! As the mother of three now-adult sons (the oldest biological and the two younger ones adopted from Russia), I have certainly had my moments of not exactly stellar parenting. Being a parent is a tough job, and as Daniel Hughes wrote in his book, Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment, "Although the process of becoming a parent may seem like a ‘no brainer,’ the process of parenting taps all the brain power we can muster.”

What I have learned through the years, from my sons as well as in my role as counseling professional, is that consciously tapping into our mental processes, and working at mindful parenting, can go a long way towards helping to allay the reactivity we all have with our children from time to time. In fact, it has been argued that the practice of mindfulness could be the single most effective way to improve your parenting skills.

What is mindful parenting? I’ve seen a number of definitions, and what they have in common is an emphasis on the practice of moment-to-moment awareness from a non-judgmental stance.  My favorite description of mindful parenting is this one offered by Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book, Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting:
         
Mindful Parenting involves keeping in mind what is truly important as we go about the activities of daily living with our children. Much of the time, we may find we need to remind ourselves of what that is, or even admit that we may have no idea at the moment, for the thread of meaning and direction in our lives is easily lost. But even in our most trying, sometimes horrible moments as parents, we can deliberately step back and begin afresh, asking ourselves as if for the first time, and with fresh eyes, “What is truly important here?"

How do we become more mindful parents? First, it is important to accept our own imperfection as parents. None of us will ever be perfect in our role as Mom or Dad. As the Huffington Post blogger pointed out, it’s impossible to remain attuned and empathic with our children at every moment. We do our best, but we are human. After acknowledging and accepting our imperfection as parents, it is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment endeavor to practice mindful parenting. It begins with each of us as individuals.

The benefits to the parent of parenting in a mindful way include a decrease in parental stress as well as increased pleasure in parenting. It also brings profound benefits to your child.  There are a number of ways to practice mindfulness, from simple breathing exercises to formal religious practices. If all of this mindfulness talk is new to you, here are a couple of simple things you might try to help you become more mindful in your role as a parent and in every aspect of your life:

• Breathing exercise. Find a quiet place and sit comfortably in a chair, or on the floor, if you prefer. Close your eyes and notice your breath as you inhale and exhale. Focus on your breath as you inhale and exhale. If you find your focus and thoughts have wandered away, simply go back to noticing your breath as you inhale and exhale. That’s it!
• Listening exercise. Find a place to sit or relax comfortably, where you will have few distractions, and notice any sounds you might hear. You might be surprised at what you notice when you focus your attention in the moment and listen. A barking dog outside in the distance, the silent whir of the refrigerator motor as it clicks on at the opposite end of the house. It’s amazing what we can hear when we listen with mindfulness. Again, if you find your thoughts have wandered, simply return to focused listening.

Pick one of these and try it out once a day for five minutes. Expect that from time to time you will have to bring your attention and focus back to the moment during the exercises. That’s all. Even five minutes each day of one of the exercises described above can pay off in significant ways for you, your children, and your entire family. My guess is that after a while, you may want to increase your mindfulness exercise time to ten or twenty minutes once each day. It’s a small investment of time with the potential for big rewards.

The Benefits of Journaling

Journaling is a practice I recommend for many of my clients. When I make this suggestion, I sometimes get a wide-eyed “oh, no!” look in return. I quickly try to take the fear out of journaling and explain the benefits of a regular practice of keeping a journal.

First of all, journaling does not require you to be a great writer. The personal experience of keeping a journal only requires a bit of discipline and a few minutes of quiet time. The important thing is to simply begin. The words that make their way on to paper or the computer screen are for you alone. If you feel blocked and nothing comes to you, begin by writing “I don’t know what to write,” or “I can’t think of a thing to say,” or whatever comes to mind. I’ve even started my personal journaling entries with “blah blah blah!” An interesting thing happens when you just start writing something…anything. You may remember that dream you had last night and begin to wonder what it might mean. A work frustration makes its way on to the paper and you may find a resolution or a reduction in stress by being able to get it out of your mind. Feelings of anger, or sadness, or happiness, or gratitude can surface spontaneously as your write, and then you can write about those feelings. As you continue the practice of journaling regularly, it becomes easier, less intimidating, and I find that many people look forward to the time devoted to journaling. Some may include poetry, sketches, or diagrams with the thoughts expressed in words. A journal is whatever you want it to be. It’s a way to process thoughts, feelings, and emotions which can lead to insights, problem-solving, creativity, self-discovery, reduced stress, and inner peace.

In the book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about a journaling exercise she calls “morning pages.” She instructs readers to write two pages of something upon waking each morning. The content is not as important as the exercise and discipline of writing every day, because the content will come. I even suggest to clients that if two pages sounds like too much, start by writing one page. You might set a specific amount of time to journal and not define journaling by the number of pages. Set a timer and write for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or whatever amount of time fits your schedule.

Journaling can provide these benefits and more:

• Stress reduction
• Increased focus
• Improved mindfulness
• Clarifying and processing thoughts, feelings, and emotions
• Knowing yourself better through personal insights and self-discovery
• Increased creativity
• Defining dreams and goals and plans to attain them

Journaling is a personal experience and there is no right or wrong way to go about it. Just grab a pen and paper (or your computer) and give it a try.