Three Reasons Your Divorce Brain is Freaking Out
“My brain is a mess!”
This common refrain is the fatigue-ridden cry of almost every woman going through divorce. Your routines, once reliable activities in your day, are clumsy. You forget important things. You can’t track a conversation. You’re disorganized. Your work suffers. And worst of all, you can’t recognize yourself.
It’s brutal. You wonder where that woman who had her act together went – especially when you need her to show up RIGHT NOW. I’ll break it to you softly. She left. And she took her brain with her.
No need to panic. Please know, your divorce brain is freaking out due to 3 simple realities that all divorced women share in common. When you understand them, you can hopefully start to be a little gentler with yourself.
1. Your divorce brain is doing what it is supposed to do. Your divorce will have you firmly lodged in the part of your brain where your fight or flight response largely lives. It feeds on fear. It’s pre-occupied with aggression, with territory, and it gets pretty obsessive. It’s a super useful part of our brain in certain situations, but in divorce, it can get drunk on possibilities and squash any efforts you were trying to make toward calm and order in your life. It sees many things as threats. It is naturally resistant.
Live from this part of your brain long enough, and it will leave a physical mark on you. Fight or flight is draining. When it has been operating at high speed, you will be mentally and physically exhausted. We were meant to use our fight or flight response when a real threat presents itself, but divorce can make us lay down roots there. And given that most divorces can take years to walk through, let alone heal from, this scared, reactive posture can over time take a tremendous amount of energy from you.
Your divorce brain thinks it is doing you a service by being on alert. It's committed to preserving you. It’s the part of your brain that feels threatened by a loss of control, especially as you walk into an unknown legal system to handle your divorce. It’s threatened by a sense of urgency, and it gets loud when it thinks a decision has to be made quickly. It’s threatened by what might happen to your access to or your time with your children, and it barks orders to hold on to what you think is yours. It’s the part that taunts your self-esteem when you contemplate what it looks like to take the clothes off the body you have and offer it again to a new person. And it’s deeply threatened at the thought of what your finances will and will not look like a couple years from now.
2. You’ve added a major life stressor into your already full life. Dismantling your life with your partner while also shuttling your kids around town, making sure everyone is fed, contributing at work, going to parent teacher conferences, and dealing with a car repair is like adding a full time job to an already full time job. If you need an excuse to give your brain some grace, this is the one. Science even backs it up. In the late 1960's, two researchers, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, sought to explore the relationship between our health and our stressful life events. What they discovered after combing through the medical histories of over 5,000 patients was that a noticeable correlation did in fact exist. They then went on to establish the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, still in use today, which assigns weighted value to certain stressful events over others particularly as it correlates to future illness. Not surprisingly, the death of a spouse or child is ranked as the most stressful life event on their adult scale with a score of 100. Right behind it, second in line, is divorce, with a score of 73. It is stressful to get divorced. What you are feeling is real.
3. There are too many moving pieces. The final reason your divorce brain is going haywire is that you are buried in an enormous number of details and most of them are constantly in movement. You are sorting through finances as they are now – who will pay who what and for how long and will it be enough – and attempting to figure out finances for your future as well. You’re going through the whole house deciding who keeps what and why and will it matter. You’re thinking through a schedule for the kids and feel unable to predict how each kid is going to react to the changes. Nothing is in order. Everything is moving. I regularly remind my clients that divorce asks you to make a tremendous number of important decisions at a time when you are most depleted. The sheer number of moving parts makes your divorce brain an inevitability.
There is good news though. The good news is that your divorce brain is temporary. I can assure you that there will be a day in your future where you do keep track of things, you find new and sweet routines, and you can not only recognize yourself, you also celebrate all that you made it through.
In the meantime, divorcing coaching can help you to manage your divorce brain and start to help it operate in ways that support you instead of derail you. Reach out for a complimentary discovery call to see where your divorce process might enjoy some company on the journey.
