The One Divorce Recovery Resolution That Will Get You Headed In the Right Direction This Year

New Year’s Resolutions are a bit of a lightning rod topic – either you fiercely adhere to the goodness that they generate in your life or you blow off the whole ritual as useless and fruitless. I tend to lean toward the goodness, as I am a firm believer that we can become what we imagine ourselves to be. Living today from a vision of your future self can radically change what your life looks like next week and next month, especially in a divorce.

If you are divorcing or recovering from a finalized divorce, I am suggesting to you this year that you commit to taking massive action in only one area of your healing. You need only one resolution to lead you forward this year. I want you myopically focused on it and seeking on a daily basis to grow in it. I call it your 2021 New Year’s Operating System Resolution.

Every person has an operating system. It’s the hardwired equipment that fuels our daily activities and behaviors in life. The first pieces of your operating system were installed in your childhood and the system continues to be shaped in an ongoing way as you grow up and encounter new people, new situations, and new traumas. It is a fixed system in those for whom self-awareness is not a regular pursuit. It can be re-programmed for those who pursue it wholeheartedly.

Your 2021 New Year’s Operating System Resolution is not to get to know your own operating system; I trust you’re working on and growing in that already. Instead, this year, resolve to become the technical expert and manager of your former spouse’s operating system.  

I am a technical expert in my kids’ dad’s operating system. With regard to our overlapping lives, I know what delights him, what annoys him, what he will forget, and what he will and will not pay attention to. I know what makes him feel threatened, and I am familiar with how he relates to time. I know what comments from me trigger reactions in him, and I know where he struggles to be at his best. I know about his childhood and the patterns he lives out today as a result. I know what he excels at and what he counts on me to handle. I’m certain he knows the same for me. 

Sounds like marriage doesn’t it?!  This resolution draws on the very same principles as marital harmony. Why? Your well-lived divorce will always draw on time proven marriage truths. Those truths are rooted in empathy, respect, and kindness. In your divorce you don’t get away from this person, you simply shift the table settings and addresses and keep at it. This rearranged relationship still needs most of what your marriage needed too.

If you took half an hour today, you could probably write up the technical specifications of your former spouse’s operating system. Write it up. When you write it, you get distance from it. It becomes the system that it is and probably always will be. It reminds you again of who you are dealing with. It shows you that the person you were married to still has a lot of the same characteristics of the one from whom you are now divorced. It may even generate some compassion, particularly as it relates to the childhood impacts your former spouse carries around.

But after you become the technical expert of their operating system, the real work comes from learning how to become the manager of it. You can’t change their operating system, only they can. Drop the insights you have for them about how to do better.  Focus instead on getting yourself in a place to manage it. You manage it by protecting yourself and by learning the new skills necessary to do so well.

To manage my former partner’s operating system, I have worked to accept what it is and what it can’t be. I have learned new communication styles that protect me from small and big irritations with him. I have a map for how his operating system triggers my hot buttons, and I have a plan for how to settle those triggers once flipped. I know how to help him feel safe. I work on what our future together looks like. I learned how to translate my hostility into words that support my greater goals.  

2021 can be the year you finally figure out how to take your sails out of your former partner’s winds. Commit to this resolution and watch the growth in your own heart deepen. Drop me a note here as you go for it, and keep me updated on your progress.