This Divorce Book Was Written For You

My book, The Best Worst Time of Your Life: Four Practices to Get You Through the Pain of Divorce is out this week!

I started to write this book several years ago in an attempt to understand what I went through in my own divorce. I went through so much breaking and so much remaking during that time. I needed to document what happened just for my own sense of history. I was surprised that writing this book pushed my healing to new heights. I was surprised that the healing also changed the direction of the book. You see, I wrote this book as my divorce coaching business was growing. I started encountering more and more of you who, like I once was, were going through your own versions of breaking and remaking. As I spoke to all of you, I realized that this book was not to be written only for myself. This book was to be written for you.

To honor the launch of this book and this milestone in my life and business, I offer this excerpt from my first pages:

I’m sorry you find yourself reading this book. Going through a divorce—wanted or unwanted— is plainly put, horrific. It rips at everything in you, destroys everything you once held sacred, and incites a fear of the future that is at times completely paralyzing. You feel terribly alone, rejected, angry (really angry), overwhelmed, sad, and defeated. Your basic habits, once reliable repetitions in your day, have now evaporated. Things like remembering your schedule, eating at normal times, and caring about life in general are all now hard to grasp in your once fairly pulled together world.

If you feel like you are dying, you are on to something. Part of you certainly is.

I wrote this book for you. I wrote it because the hardest part of divorce is often the part that happens before everybody knows. It happens in the quiet and loud discussions with your partner that start to reveal a tear in the fabric of your togetherness. You examine the tear, and you work at repairing it, but sometimes you wake up after all of that effort and notice that the tear is really more of a rip. You might not feel sure if your feverish sewing is really pulling any of the frays back together.

In the days, weeks, months, and sometimes years before your divorce is made public, you identify the small handful of people whom you can trust to walk with you through this. These are your people—your “boo-hoo crew,” as I call them. You probably have one. Even if it’s just your mom or a co-worker. If you’re lucky, it’s your forever friends. These people hold the light for you when you can’t. They listen as you go on (and on and on) about the injustice, the shock, the fear, and the reluctance. They hear your worry about your kids. They tell you that you’re worth fighting for and convince you to keep fighting for yourself when the pressure simply overtakes you.

While this small, faithful group holds your hand, you look for books and blogs and resources— anything that will tell you what to do next. The writings that you find tell you some fairly helpful things. Get a lawyer, get a therapist, put your kids first, speak kindly about your spouse. Basically, move through it and move on. And you know they are right, in part. You know you will need to do those things.

And then you likely seek out a friend, or a friend of a friend, who is already divorced. It’s a club you don’t want to be in, but you know you need to meet with someone who gets it. You need to look someone in the eye who has walked this road. And that person will also tell you some helpful things. It’s rough, they say. Take care of yourself. Get a really good lawyer. You listen as they tell their stories of loss, and you may become an ear for their story even as you process your own.

But no one seems to be able to answer the every day (and every night) question: How will I get through this?

Not the “how” of the process itself—the lawyers, the mediators, telling your families, the child- sharing plans, the weekends back and forth, the separation of belongings, the establishment of financial support. Not that how. I’m talking about the harder how.

When I was moving through my divorce, there wasn’t a book that could speak to how I was to cope with the absolute destruction of heart, body, mind, and soul that accompanies a divorce. Maybe some top-level materials spoke about it like it was a pretty big bump in the road, but nothing really attempted to put into words what I should do with the weight of the feelings that I went to bed with and woke up with day after day. Nothing helped me normalize the exhaustion, worry, overwhelm, indigestion, lack of eating, overeating, hollowness, fatigue, rage, shame, and numbness that could happen all in the course of one week, one day.

There wasn’t any guidance on how to have a productive conversation with the person who no longer wants to live life with you. There was no advice about how to manage the rage of trying, and failing, to simply come to agreement on the small pieces of separation. There were no suggestions about how to speak kindly when yet another miscommunication occurs. How was I to face this humiliating event and keep fixing dinner and making sure birthdays get recognized?

Couldn’t someone talk honestly about the breaking?

Friends, The Best Worst Time of Your Life: Four Practices to Get You Through the Pain of Divorce talks about the breaking. It also gives you the how-to for your beautiful remaking. Grab a copy today and let’s do this journey together.