The Post-Divorce Survival Guide

The Post-Divorce Survival Guide

I am excited to announce the publication of my new eBook, The Post-Divorce Survival Guide.Tools For Your Journey. It is available  on Amazon .

With tips and steps to escape negative thinking, emotional impasses and behavioral stagnation, the book will help you negotiate the treacherous terrain of post-divorce life. Lightened up with a heavy dose of humor, I draw on the positive psychology literature with concrete suggestions to pro-actively manage and thrive in the difficult situations and adverse conditions that arise in the wake of divorce. 

I call on my personal experience with divorce, and years of work with clients going through this devastating life experience, to show you how you can emerge even better than you were before. The book addresses three tasks of post-divorce adjustment. The first is "Acceptance," identifying the reasons for the divorce and viewing them in an empowering way. The second, "Coping," provides help dealing with the often unexpected consequences associated with divorce. "Becoming," the final section, encourages you to aspire to be your best self and view your divorce as an opportunity to flourish. 

There are chapters on developing a positive mindset, identifying and using signature strengths, developing more optimism, setting and reaching goals, becoming happier and cultivating mindfulness. There are also chapters devoted to practical aspects of post-divorce adjustment including acceptance, emotional reactions, coping with your ex and dealing with issues like holidays and vacations, relationships with friends and relatives and dating.

I hope you find it useful and enjoy it. I'd love to hear your comments. 

Are You Addicted to Comfort?

If you're addicted to comfort, divorce will solve that problem for you. I wrote:


In our constant search for happiness and the good life, we may be shortchanging ourselves by seeking to eliminate all negative emotions, thoughts and experiences from our lives. That's what Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan say in their forthcoming book, The Upside of Your Darkside. You can see a preview in Biswas-Diener's TEDx talk about comfort addiction. 

Consider that our desire for creature comforts (do I really need Google Glass?) and intense efforts to avoid discomfort (the vacation to Club Med instead of a real place) make us increasingly unable to deal with the discomforts life inevitably brings. 

Happiness experts uniformly suggest that curiosity and challenges, with their associated discomfort, enrich our lives. 

Read more here:

 

Avoid Post-Performance Blues…Develop Your Recovery Routine

If you consider your marriage to be something like a uninspired performance you must recover from,  these suggestions about developing a recovery plan will be useful.

In an ironic turn of events, the day after finishing a half-marathon, and a week after I finished writing a book, I came across my notes for a possible article about post-performance routines. It was sorely needed, as I was feeling the lackadaisical lassitude of the post-partier. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of the party, but what now? 

Unless you're a professional party planner, you probably don't consider the events of your life to be like a big event you just arranged, and you probably don't systematically examine what worked and what didn't work. We all have our personal parties, be they public speeches, musical or athletic performances, or our performance as parents, partners or employees. 

During the party, you have difficult moments you may have anticipated, like when the cake doesn't arrive on time and you must find a substitute, or you're two minutes behind target at the midpoint of the race. 

Read more here...