Life After Divorce: Rebuilding, Reinventing, Reemerging

 

Ten years ago, I endured a painful trial I never dreamed I would have to face: I crawled, climbed, fell, and barely survived a high-conflict divorce, my own personal “valley of the shadow of death.”

It was expensive in every area: emotionally, mentally, financially, and physically. Looking back now from the mountaintop, I’m thankful for the woman it made me into.

That event was the catalyst for my passion: using my story to bring perspective, healing, and freedom to those who have been damaged from their past and stuck in stagnant mindsets.

Divorce is a scary, chaotic, and challenging event, no doubt about it. But there is a way for you to turn your loss into leverage, to rip off the shirt of shame and rebuild your life.

After years of helping clients break free from abusive relationships, I have developed a momentum creating formula:

Clarity + Purpose + Framework (healthy emotional and physical habits) = a BOLD new future.

Healing begins with the transforming of your mind. It begins when you decide to rise from self-pity, walk out of the victim mentality, and reemerge to thrive.

Using this formula will help you not only divorce with dignity but position yourself for an unstoppable chapter two. But it requires a couple of steps:

Stop obsessing and ruminating so you can gain clarity and emotional stability.

I know your mind feels like it’s in a blender. If you want the blending to stop – and all the doubt and mania that comes with it – you’ve got to flip the switch. You have the power to control your thoughts through meditation and mind-hacking.

Replaying how you got to where you are post-divorce won’t help you get to where you’re going; it actually causes deeper ruts in your brain and keeps you in the trauma. It’s time to let the past go and gain clarity by mastering your thought process.

Obsessing over the ways your marriage went awry will lead you to doubt your self-worth and question your ability to perceive reality accurately. After walking through your valley, the foundations of your healthy thought processes have been eroded; you have to dig deep into your mind to reconstruct from the ground up by reinventing your narrative for a clearer, calmer mind.

Identify problematic and self-limiting patterns to get rid of shame and guilt.

Your obsessive thoughts are leading you to practice problematic habits. And you get stuck in these habits because unjustified shame that you’ve carried from your partner as well as childhood is causing you to confine yourself to self-limiting beliefs and patterns. If you’re feeling discarded, not enough, scared, lonely; it’s time to recalibrate. Those feelings are potholes that will keep you from walking forward.

If you find yourself chasing after toxic people, striving to please people, or isolating yourself from people, you’re still practicing survival mechanisms that you needed before you escaped your trauma. I always encourage my clients to turn their loss into leverage; to use that loss to empower them to break free and press on.

When you shift your mindset and change your self-limiting patterns, you can stop doubting your competency, embolden your confidence, avoid those potholes, and pursue an intentionally architected life. 

Create an environment of structure and routine to architect a plan for your future.

It takes commitment and grit to leave one life behind for a new one, no matter how healthy the change is. Once your body, mind, and soul have a proper framework to help grieve and process through your divorce, then the excitement begins!

That’s when you begin to deeply learn who you are and refine your non-negotiables that serve to reinforce your freedom and healing. Recoding and rewiring your mind and then reorienting your routine through small actions will lead to immeasurable change.

Design and then create a physical environment that is comfortable for you and fill it with people who will support you and systems that will help you maintain your healthy habits. Then, in your daily routine, you’ll show up fully in your parenting, friendships, romantic relationships, and career.

You’re the architect of your life; each small action step you take is an investment into your future. We are all learning how to be brave and vulnerable despite our wounds. What often breaks us, makes us. And none of us have to live broken or limited to the blueprint we once used to build our life.

While at the time my divorce nearly swallowed me whole, little did I know who I would become because of it. In the end, I live in a place of gratitude for being broken wide open; otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pull back the curtain and get raw and real.

Now, I’m fully dialed in and have deep clarity and purpose. I’ve created a strategy and a framework to rebuild, reinvent, and reemerge strong, confident and emotionally intelligent. Just like a glow stick, I had to be broken so I could be a light to serve others through the process.