How to Get Rid Of Your Divorced Life Bed Bugs
For over 20 years, my career has been directed toward helping build housing communities that are affordable, beautiful, and meet the needs of low-income and homeless people in my community. This work has produced hundreds of affordable housing units for the most vulnerable among us and led to revitalization in the neighborhoods around them. I had no idea that the same drive to protect, care for, revitalize, and make home for these individuals and families would evolve into my current divorce coaching business. The same impulse that fueled my community development efforts is now shaping my work with a different population.
Divorce leads to a homelessness of heart for many of us and a deterioration of spirit. My own divorce story, both the lows and the highs, have connected me with many like-minded women who are tired of not feeling at home in their post-divorce life. They are tired of living with psychological static around the topic of their former partner and the debris that litters their mental front yard. They want to be at home in their own lives again.
Building housing for the chronically homeless requires some special design elements to ensure the health and safety of the residents. Most notably, we build in what’s called a hotbox. The hotbox is a small room typically near the front of the building containing a high-grade commercial heater. This heater is engineered to reach levels that kill bed bugs, those barely perceptible pests that can crawl around and bite you. Anytime a new resident moves in, all of their belongings get placed in the room with the heater to ensure that no bedbugs hitchhike their way into the community. We do this because once bed bugs get in, it’s a lot of work to get them out.
Your divorced life requires the same kind of equipment to make sure that the relational version of bed bugs don’t invade your post-divorce family life. A few that you’ll need to put in the hotbox:
1. Black and white thinking. Your former partner is neither all good nor all evil. They, like you, are likely somewhere in the middle. The extent to which you can give equal air time to their blessings and their growth areas is the limits of your enjoyment of life alongside them. We are trained to find fault. To eradicate this bed bug, treat with the heat of a regular gratitude practice for what your former partner brings to your family situation.
2. Victim status. Gay Hendricks says in his book The Big Leap that arguments are caused by two people racing to occupy the victim status in a relationship. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. It’s small, it’s diminishing, and it’s a bed bug that does a lot of damage. Treat this one with the heat of responsibility. Take responsibility for what this post-divorce life looks like and start figuring out how to work with it instead of insisting that it change to fit you.
3. Reactor nature. When we get triggered, we react. We think it’s involuntary, but the truth is you can influence it. You may not be able to remove the trigger itself, but you can exercise a notable amount of control over what you do with it afterward. As a bed bug, this one bites you by inflaming situations even more than they already were. Treat it with the heat of learning your triggers and developing actionable game plans for when they get lit.
Bed bugs typically require an exterminator to fully rid yourself of their nuisance. In divorce, you can become an in-home exterminator. To do so, start paying attention to when you act in the ways identified above. Alert yourself to the infestation and start treatment immediately. Going forward, submit your thoughts, behaviors, and reactions to your own personal hotbox. Ward off those unhelpful ways of relating before they become a bigger problem for your family.
