Your Self-Talk is Making Your Divorce Harder – Pull a Friend in to Change It
Have you listened to how you talk to yourself lately? We are all running a monologue inside our heads at fast speeds all day long. Despite the volume of thoughts making their way through our brains, it’s fascinating that we only notice a select few in the span of a day. We rarely notice the underlying ones that get said daily that really limit our divorce healing and our progress.
I was talking to a friend recently who is going through a divorce and we spent a few minutes noticing together how she talks to herself. It was interesting, because she’s a strong, motivated, healing-seeking, and growth oriented woman. She invests in journaling, self care, and meditation. It would seem as though she would have easy access to the narrative running inside of her head.
After a few minutes of chatting together, we started to uncover one thought that she didn’t realize was travelling underground in her soul.
She thinks she’s terrible.
She wouldn’t say it like that necessarily, but her reactions to life situations generally take her back to the thought “I am not good enough, and I never get it right.”
Wow.
That shocked me. This is a beautiful woman. She’s parenting children, working, being a great friend, making great decisions in life, and living with a challenging disease. This is how she talks to herself?
The reason she didn’t see the self-talk was because divorce takes us so far into ourselves and our story that our brains are overwhelmed by details, fear, and exhaustion. We scurry on all of the top level issues – custody, finances, house decisions, and family rearrangement – and that fills our headspace so full that we don’t hear the quiet voice underneath that is sabotaging all of our good efforts.
She didn’t notice the harm it was doing. I would venture that neither do you.
Here’s how you start getting out of it:
1. Journaling isn’t enough. You need a witness, preferably an empathetic one. You need to ask a good friend to give you 30 minutes of their time to help you hear yourself. Notice your self-talk even on this ask (I’m not worthy of their time, I’m a burden, everyone is busy). Book the time.
2. Ask your friend to ask you what you are feeling, not how you are feeling. They can prompt you with this question, “What are the feelings you are having around how you are handling your divorce?” You can and should answer honestly. Try to include at least 3 positive feelings and 3 negative feelings in your answer.
3. With the negative feelings you just identified, your friend can prompt you with this question, “What are you thinking that causes you to feel this way?” Your thoughts create your feelings, so in order to support yourself in feeling better, you need to be aware of what you are thinking.
4. After you share those thoughts, your friend can follow up with, “What situations in your day prompt these thoughts to come up?”
5. Finish off with your friend asking one more set of questions: “How do you want to feel about how you’re handling your divorce? And what would you need to think to support feeling that way?”
This is all it takes to start a new narrative. Having a vision of how you want it to be creates attention and energy around what it takes to get there. Pulling a friend in for this exercise has so many additional benefits for you and for them. It allows you to feel less alone for 30 minutes. It puts you in productive, solution seeking mode for a brief period of time. It also helps you see how you are getting in your own way as you seek a better sense of wellbeing.
Most of your friends feel powerless to help you right now. It’s hard being a divorce story bystander. This exercise gives them something solid to do. It also gives them a chance to check in on you in the days ahead about the progress you’re making or struggle you’re having toward the different narrative.
Here’s to better self-talk all around, friends.We rise to our own belief in ourselves. Let’s make sure we aren’t the ones making it harder for ourselves.
