Post-Divorce SWOT Analysis

You know how SWOT analysis is used in strategic planning for organizations? Even if you’re not familiar with it, the idea is to analyze the organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It’s a good post-divorce planning model. Consider yourself an organization. Newly incorporated if you like.

Let’s start with your strengths. Take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths if you get stuck. Or just be honest with yourself and don’t let your inner critic guide you. Friends are also good at pointing out our strengths. Your strengths might include honesty, intelligence, creative problem solving ability, strong parenting, empathy. See how you can parlay these into good skills for meeting people and figuring out what you want to do with your life? Use your honesty and intelligence to engage your next date and your problem solving ability to figure out how to manage the visitation schedule.

Weaknesses are easy for most of us. Too much of a strength can be a weakness. Like being too trusting, for example. Afraid to try new things might be another. Afraid of being rejected yet another. Weaknesses can be paralyzing if you let them get the best of you.

Opportunities come naturally out of weaknesses. Too trusting? Try modulating that in the next relationship, whether it’s with a new landlord or new friend. If you’re afraid to try new things, set yourself the goal of trying something new every day, whether it’s just a new flavor of coffee or talking to the person next to you in the grocery checkout line. Or even something big like trying that on-line dating service your friend suggested. Or the new job you’ve been considering. Consider what you’d like to achieve and then identify the opportunities that are available to you.

Threats include external factors that might get in your way. One of my clients was convinced that having a little boy was going to completely dash all hopes of a date since, she claimed, everyone knows that men don’t like to take on other guy’s boys. That’s an inner critic talking if ever I heard one. But having a badly behaved boy stomp on your date might present problems. Figure out how to deal with that threat in advance. I know you can use your creativity to work it out. The economy is another threat. It’s going to make it impossible for you to get that high paying job you need now, right? Wrong. Yes, the economy presents issues for all of us, but someone’s going to get that job. Why not you?

What I like about the SWOT analysis is that it forces us to take stock of our abilities and the challenges we face. And it makes it possible for us to figure out how to move ahead.

The Shared Post-Divorce Experience

One of the things I loved about Theo Pauline Nestor’s How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed was the interweaving of life-story and divorce-fact. It’s summarized here:

“It’s weird to think of all this activity as a recognizable phase of human development like the ones children go through…Apparently I’m not really an individual woman starring in her own never-been-told-before-drama. I’m one of thousands, and I’m on a well-trodden path, one with well-mapped crests and valleys and milestones as predictable as the appearance of molars and the onset of puberty.”

Of course we all want to be unique with our own unique stories. Good for us. But the idea that certain aspects of our pain are shared, well that’s just priceless as I’ve reflected on before. 

So here are some of the commonalities of experience, courtesy of Nestor and me, with a few of my suggestions for handling them:
* Rearranging our space – Damn right…I’m gonna make it mine.

* Being treated like a freak (the maitre de asking: just one?) - This may be our distortion. Indeed, an informal study I conducted found that even when I’m with someone the maitre de may ask, just two?

* People exclude you because of your singledom – it’s hell for the hostess at a dinner party to handle singles.

* Feeling like your former other cannot disengage, making it difficult for you to do so – You’ve got to do it anyway. Just go ahead and cut the cord. It’ll feel better.

* Sleeping with the former spouse and feeling guilty – Just don’t keep doing it. But certainly don’t feel guilty. The desire for intimacy is normal.

* People complain you date too soon, or not soon enough - Everyone’s an expert. You know what's right for you.

* Meeting the ex-spouses’ significant other is painful and confusing, even if you have a significant other yourself - Of course it is.  It’s evidence that part of your life has been usurped by someone else, even if you no longer want it. It’s painful in anticipation, before it ever happens. It just has to be accepted as a part of life.

* The institution of marriage itself has become confusing – Just table that for now. See how you feel about it in a year or two.

* Thinking the ex-spouse is going to be a better person with better judgment than they were when you were married –They probably are not going to change for your benefit. And I mean this in the kindest way: get over it.

* Others don’t always understand your choices, and are delighted to let you know it – Give them your best Buddha smile and nod understandingly. Then do what you want.

There are many more commonalities. I hear them from clients all the time. These are just a few of the highlights I offer to encourage you to view yourself as part of a community. You’re not alone.

How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over, Theo Pauline Nestor.

Post-Divorce Gratitude

People who are more grateful are happier. It’s simply a fact. So I’m thinking that in the post-divorce unhappy period, why not practice gratitude in the hopes of being happier?

But how to be more grateful? Sonja Lyubormirsky gives the how-tos in her book the How of Happiness. I wanted to highlight a few ideas here and you can also see another blog and newsletter I’ve written about the subject.

I like five of the ways Lyubormirsky shows that gratitude is thought to actually increase happiness. These include savoring the positives in your life, feeling better about yourself as a result, feeling more connected with others who contribute to the positives in your life, reducing the envy and jealousy which are incompatible with gratitude and actually starting to feel more positive about the good things we have. Not only are these good things for everyone, but post-divorce they’re particularly useful. They counter the natural self-esteem drops (I must be inadequate for not making the marriage work) and envy increases (look at that happy family, and that one, and that one) which many experience.

The typical way to practice gratitude is the gratitude journal written daily, a few times a week or weekly, depending on your personal needs. Thinking about gratitude without writing about it is another way to practice. And an interesting twist is to think about something for which you are not grateful, e.g., the ungrateful thought that your kids never spontaneously tell you they love you. Then counter it with a grateful thought about how they do spontaneously hug you or call you.

Another really potent approach is to tell someone the reasons you are grateful to them, by letter or in person. Even just writing a gratitude letter without giving it seems to increase happiness.

Finding a gratitude buddy is helpful to some. Being accountable to someone else may increase your chances of sticking to a gratitude plan. Sharing something you’re grateful for with another person is also a way of enhancing our own experience of gratitude.

Earlier this evening I mentioned to my son how much I love the smell of dusk at this time of year; he enthusiastically said he felt the same which was very pleasing to me. Okay, I choose to think he was being serious though I recognize he may have been slightly sarcastic (yeah mom, I smell another one of your hokey positive psychology interventions).

Post-divorce Decluttering

There’s a lot of stuff in a marriage. Furniture, papers, pictures and photos, gifts received, kitchenware and bathrooms full of stuff. I still find the odd item after nearly 9 years. Some things are keepers. You don’t want to have to buy a new blender for no good reason. Others, they have bad karma and you just know it. One must honor that and deal with it appropriately, i.e., such items must get gone. And you can see another blog entry for an example of this.

Cluttering experts believe that physical clutter reflects mental clutter. I’m going to have to agree but I mean it in the kindest way. I have piles of unread journals. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a thing. They represent something to me and I’m not sure I want to let that thing go just yet.

Now I’m not saying that if you keep stuff from the marriage you haven’t let go. But you have to consider what that particular stuff means to you. Consider if it’s dragging you down. Consider how you feel and what you think when you see it. Consider what it would be like for you if it were gone.

If you’re early on in this process, large plastic bags full of stuff for the dump or good will are extremely liberating. It’s like letting to of deadweight. There’s almost a physical lightness that comes of getting rid of stuff. It can be downright fun.

And if you have any doubt, check out John Lennon’s Instant Karma.

Forgive the Mistakes Post-divorce

Short of having the means to go back in time and change the past, how do we let go of our mistakes? Do we say, I forgive me for flunking that exam because I partied and didn't study, I forgive me for going to law school when I really wanted to join the Peace Corps, I forgive me for getting married when I wasn’t sure, or...[your issue here]?

How do we move from believing we've done something wrong to accepting our imperfections? You have to notice the self-blame and take action to forgive yourself. It goes something like this.

First, you have to admit that you've done something forgiveness-worthy. You married too young, too fast, a person you had qualms about from the start, or ...[your reason here].

Next, you must experience the feelings of shame, guilt and regret. Accepting responsibility is required. I messed up and I have no one (really) to blame but myself. No one forced me to marry, I could have withstood being a single parent, not pleasing him/her, not pleasing the families, or...[your reason here]. You must accept that you made the choice. You must allow youreself to experience that it feels bad.

Finally, you must try for understanding and acceptance. It seemed like a good choice at the time. No one's perfect. This doesn't make me a worthless person. Instead of self-blame and recrimination, you have to figure out what you're going to do about it now. How can you move forward? How can you handle the next relationship differently? How can you...[your goal here]? It's not forgetting, but forgiving and remembering to do something different.

Self-forgiving people, like other-forgiving people, have better health and mental health. It's not surprising, since guilt, shame, anger and self-criticism are stressful. So take a few deep, cleansing breaths, and let go, at least for right now. Take a step into your self-forgiving future. And while you’re at it, consider if there’s anyone else you might need to forgive.

Favorite Mistakes

And the mistakes seem to me as crucial as the successes…Richard Holmes

I found the story of Humphry Davy’s discovery of laughing gas fascinating. Not only did he serendipitously discover that it numbed pain, but then, no one wanted to use it. It seems that physicians believed that patients who expressed pain would be able to cope with surgery. They believed the pain showed that the body was fighting and it was a good thing. Ouch.

I’m reminded of people who were in painful marriages and continued, feeling they should be experiencing the pain, that it was part of a real relationship. Often these same people experience amazing relief after divorce. I’m not saying get divorced, I’m just saying that you have to listen to your pain. I hear this often about jobs . The job is painful and it’s painful to consider leaving. Continuing in the pain is perhaps not such a good thing. Continuing in one’s mistake is also perhaps not such a good thing.

It took 40 years for doctors to use nitrous oxide in surgeries. Aren’t we glad they finally figured it out? So how about you? Have you finally figured it out? What have you learned from the mistakes of your marriage? This is the glorious part of making mistakes…the ability to learn from them.

Read about the Humphry Davy story.

Listen to Sheryl Crow, My Favorite Mistake

Post-Divorce Dating

I'm about to publish an Ezine article about post-divorce dating, so I'm giving a sneak preview here.  The focus is using a different mindset when you consider the perils of dating.

 

I'm encouraging the growth mindset.  Doesn't that sound all grown up and adult?  It's about thinking more positively about your abilities and knowing that when you put enough effort into something, you're bound to succeed.  We won't belabor the fixed mindset, which, as you can imagine, isn't quite as productive.  It's the one where you think you'll never meet anyone, etc.  NOT what we're looking for.

 

For the growth mindset, keep in mind:

- Effort leads to success - Join Facebook or Match.com
- Learn from mistakes - Why didn't that guy ask me out?
- Stay positive - I know I can figure out how to survive a date
- Seek out feedback - What's wonderful about me (or not so much?)
- Take the plunge! - In the words of a famous sneaker, JUST DO IT!

For more on mindset, look at the book or read my newsletter What's on your Mind? 

Keep an eye out for my article here or read my last one.