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Divorce Recovery and the 3 Stages of Transition: The Key to Avoiding More Trips to Divorce Court

Any successful divorce recovery program must eliminate any resistance to change that threatens a successful transition from married to single.

The 3 Stages of Transition in the Divorce Recovery Process

Resistance to change, experienced as emotion-based pain, fear, and uncertainty, can be attributed to one’s reluctance to: (1) accept divorce as a life-altering fact of life for power, (2) make the necessary adjustments and changes that will allow you, (3) to be happy and successful in the next chapter of your life.

The process to dissolve this natural human resistance to embrace and thrive in your new life situation includes the following 3 stages:

(1) STABILIZE your emotional reactions to your ex and to the divorce.

(2) RELEASE your fear of an unknown future and your anguish over your losses; and

(3) PREPARE for the future, including your next committed relationship.

Stage 1: stabilize your reactions to divorce

This stage is based more on emotions than logic.

First, you need to stabilize your current emotion-based reactions to your divorce, your ex, and your life after the divorce. It does not matter if the divorce is ongoing, recently concluded, or happened years ago.

This stage is necessary because your emotion-based reactions distort reality and make it almost impossible to solve the tangible problems you face in your daily life after divorce. In addition, your emotional reactions act as a “super glue” that keeps you firmly attached to the life you are experiencing. used lead in the past, but haven’t done it anymore.

Stage 2 – Release your fear and anguish over loss

At this stage, emotion and logic are equally important.

There were aspects of your past life that They were nice, especially in the beginning. Nobody, and I mean None, wants to give up the good things in a relationship. We are all reluctant to fully accept our new life situation after our divorce because it also means giving up the good parts.

However the hard reality is that your past life that you shared with your ex no longer exists. It is no longer your current life.

At this stage, you dissolve attachments to the past that you no longer need, while preserving the parts of the past that are still useful. You dissolve your resistance to change by confronting and “correctly sizing” your fears and mourning your losses. true losses, not perceived. With the completion of this stage, the debilitating effects of your emotion-based reactions dissolve, allowing you to prepare for your future.

Stage 3: Prepare for the future, including your next committed relationship

This stage is more based on logic than on emotions.

This is the most logical part of the transition process. At this stage, you develop your plan for the future, including the four areas of your life: finances, health, love, and self-development / self-expression. Particular attention is paid to ensuring that your next committed relationship escapes the same fate as your last relationship.

It may sound counterintuitive to describe the process of finding your next committed relationship as “more logic-based than emotion-based.” In fact, our culture tells us just the opposite. That finding the “love of your life” is totally a function of your emotions. “Listen to your heart,” they tell us.

However, chemistry can exist between people who are perfect for a one-night stand, or even a six-month affair, but who are totally wrong with each other in a long-term relationship. At this stage we accept the need for chemistry. You must find someone who attracts you. That is easy. Just listen to your body.

However, when looking for your next long-term “soul mate”, you need to use your head and your heart. Specifically, you must be clear about your demand, not just what you want, in a relationship and apply cold and hard logic analysis to determine if a relationship with a potential partner can provide what you need in the long run.

The goal: to make your last divorce your last divorce.

The consequences of ignoring one or more of the stages

Each of the three stages is critical to having a successful recovery from divorce. Exclusion from any stage will sabotage all efforts to have a full and complete recovery.

Can not stabilize Your reactions to the divorce result in you remaining stuck in your grief. For example, people who are still angry at their ex and the hell he put them through, even years after the divorce was final, have not yet fully stabilized their emotional reactions to the ending of the marriage.

My sister-in-law is an example. She held onto her anger at her ex for 25 years saying, “How could he have done that to me, the son of a bitch?” He died young without experiencing another loving and committed relationship during the last two and a half decades of his life.

It goes without saying that when you are focused on what someone did to you in the past that is no longer in your life, it makes it almost impossible to give the present the attention it deserves to make your life fulfilling and rewarding.

Can not release the past results in being trapped in fear and pain. People can get caught up in their inability to release their fear of an unknown future and / or their heartbreak over what they feel they lost when their relationship ended, although what they objectively lost is almost always much less than they think they lost. We hear them tell us how their life used to be good, but it can no longer be because of all that they lost in the divorce.

The idea that they should accept the reality that the relationship is over, and should focus their energy on how to realize the full potential for good in their new current life situation scares them because “How do I know that things won’t be even worse? if I do? “They are paralyzed with fear and cannot take even a modest risk to regain the happiness they once enjoyed.

Can not prepare for the future results in divorcing again. This preparation involves treating mate selection as a conscious choice that requires us to logically ask ourselves, “What do I do? demand in a couple and how it differs from simply want in a couple? “

Our culture tells us that we must “listen to our hearts” because “love conquers all”. We are told that viewing a relationship as a logical problem to solve insults the spiritual and magical nature of all committed relationships until death do us part. The most likely outcome? Another visit to the divorce court.

While the divorce rate for first marriages is high enough at 42%, the divorce rate for second and third marriages is a staggering 66% and 75% respectively. The bottom line is simple: If we allow our head to be as influential as our heart, our choice of a committed relationship is very likely to be satisfying in the long run, not just a temporary visual appeal that has no staying power.

Otherwise, we are more than likely to end up in divorce court again.

So what is the point?

You must accept the need to have some work to do. But you can relax knowing that you know what to do and why. While it may seem overwhelming at first, know that by following this process you will be able to recover from your divorce up to 10 times faster than the normal divorce recovery process in widespread practice today, with the long-term prognosis of finding a new one. relationship that actually lasts very promising.

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