3 Ways to Use Desirable Difficulty to Get Through Divorce
Desirable difficulty is not a word combination we often see. It’s a complicated pairing, isn’t it? Isn’t difficulty by its very nature undesirable? And isn’t something desirable usually not very difficult? It’s an unexpected concept, and I’d like to apply it to an equally unexpected topic – your divorce and divorce recovery.
In the early 1990’s, UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork introduced his desirable difficulty theory to explain why students should go through more challenging learning on the front end in order to form better learning connections for later on in the process. As difficulties scale up over time, learning gets more effective because of how it challenges students to reach their maximum potential in sort of a laddered and scaled way. He touches on how we naturally want to avoid difficulty, and in doing so, we cut off or limit our ability to really achieve deeper knowledge and awareness. His theory seeks to rework how we load up the difficult learning on the front end to serve us better in the long run.
The notion of desirable difficulty in divorce can seem like a crushing and entirely unappealing path at first glance. Divorce is a painful process with a difficulty threshold that few have ever experienced prior to walking the dissolution path. Desirable difficulty in divorce sounds like forcing ourselves to like it, even as our life as we know it is shifting radically.
Let’s go at it a little differently, shall we? Desirable difficulty in divorce doesn’t mean that you cheerlead and celebrate the divorce process – that is both ridiculous and impossible. It does mean that you take on the divorce process in three important ways:
1. First, embracing desirable difficulty means that you accept the difficulty as a means to a larger end. Desirable difficulty in divorce grows your ability to handle all that life throws at you. The challenges presented to you by new parenting arrangements, child rearing issues, and financial limits can grow you in ways that increase your capacity to manage everything. Many of my clients are surprised at just how much they can rise to even while dealing with tremendous pain.
2. It means we seek to admit to the struggle and agree to work with it and not against it. This means you work to see your pain as purposeful, even when you have no idea what the greater purpose may be. It’s hard to walk upstream, and when we insist that the pain should be over, the path should be easier, and the former partner should be less difficult, we are walking upstream. Aligning yourself with the pain, acknowledging the limits of your life while you process it, and stopping the upstream path all allow you to work with the pain and learn from the teaching it offers.
3. Wrapping your arms around desirable difficulty also means throwing away the idea that the hard part of divorce is not the right place for you to be. When I talk to clients walking through divorce, the pain looms front and center. When I went through my own divorce, it did the same for me too. The trouble comes when we think it ought to go away. What if you said yes to the pain instead? Saying yes to the pain means you get yourself in a place to surrender to it, let it do its work on and in you, and then you can release it completely.
Divorce comes with an inherently steep learning curve of pain, struggle, and if you’re thoughtful about it, some amazing growth. Desirable difficulty in your divorce will make you into the person you may have always needed to be, even though you didn’t set out to find it initially.
