Divorcing: Reality...
A blog by Claire Standen Coaching
Sometimes I feel like I’m a bull in a china shop. Crashing around, hurting people… smashing things…
It’s felt like that sometimes, especially on the path to change. But you know bulls aren’t really supposed to hang around in china shops, and as much as the owner might give me disapproving looks, or try to get stuff out of the way in time, it’s not really going to change the fact that I’m a bull, and a china shop might not be the best place for me. Then here comes the personal development world on the horizon, singing out the powerful message that if you want to do things differently, you can! It’s just a matter of discipline, hard work and consistency. Repetition, affirmations, resolve. ‘I am a beautiful butterfly’. ‘I am a beautiful and charming, delicate butterfly’. Well… maybe, somewhere deep inside of me is something that identifies with being a beautiful butterfly. I’m open to that. After all, we are never only one thing (we are all way more complex and nuanced than that), but what if I stopped fighting the bullish part? What if I removed myself from the china shop, for a start? Acknowledging, of course, that there may be other breakable things along the way- that the skills I learnt there amongst the fragile racks of fine china may be useful at times in the future. But I don’t have to dwell there, where I’m not welcome, where my skills and abilities are not noticed, certainly not celebrated. Perhaps I could remain open enough to keep looking for the place that a bull is a welcome addition. Seeing myself, grazing peacefully in a wide open meadow, for example. This leads me on to other humans, and why I cannot and will not believe the idea so commonly bandied about that ‘some people are just evil’, because I think that as a species we do ourselves a huge disservice by holding up this dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Even as a victim of sexual assault, I believe that there would be more to gain from seeking understanding and focussing on healing than on the rhetoric that ‘bad people’ should be ‘locked up and the key thrown away’. It’s a VERY big topic, but what I know intuitively is that I don’t want punitive justice for the person who harmed me. I want to seek understanding, and to pursue healing, not punishment. This has been unexpectedly contentious. It seems that once you are the person harmed, the World wants to decide for you what will happen, what is just and what is ‘right’. It’s been a long time since I operated with such a model of the world as ‘right and wrong’ or even ‘true and false’, though, and that seems to be an important piece to have had in place before this happened to me. It’s almost as if I get a chance to road-test a principle I felt I had- that punishment is not the way to best deal with transgressions from our best selves. When an idea, principle, belief or value comes from us as people, it infiltrates every part of our life. For example, as a ‘victim’ of crime, I feel no more convinced by punishment as a solution as I do as a parent of two children or as a former Veterinary Nurse. If I will not rub a dog’s nose in its own urine to ‘teach it a lesson’, nor shut my child in their room to ‘think about their behaviour’, why would I believe that similar actions are an appropriate, just and fair way to treat someone who committed a crime against me. Some might (and have) say ‘but in doing that, the criminal took away their right to be treated fairly- they didn’t treat you well, so you shouldn’t feel compassion for them’. To which I would reply with the story of Thecla. Thecla makes my heart sing the loudest of all the courageous women in Megan Watterson’s Divine Feminine pack that I hold so dear. She is sent to trial and sentenced to death in a stadium, where she is supposed to be attacked by a lioness, who instead protects here. She eventually baptises herself, and the women in the crowd start to see that she has been misjudged, and will not let her be harmed. Further to this, I would love to draw attention to a story I heard about an African tribe (I can’t find the original source, but if nothing else it demonstrates a principle beautifully), in which a woman hears a song before conceiving a child, teaches it to their partner and then sings it throughout the child’s pregnancy and childhood. If, at any time in a person’s life, they break the societal rules of the community, they are bought back to the centre of the community in circle, and their song is sung to them, to bring them back to themselves. One of my mentors, Marlee Liss (the first person to take a sexual crime through restorative justice in the US) talks about the questions which occurred to her after she was raped, which was ‘what happens between when a baby is born and someone becomes a perpetrator of a crime’? For me, there is so much within that question that holds so much hope. If we really want a safer, kinder more just World, we need to look at questions like these, first and foremost. It seems to me that for too long, our attention has been diverted towards the punishment and retribution rather than healing and moving forwards. Especially since, in my own and many other cases, the justice we are told we should seek is out of reach. The statistics in the UK for bringing perpetrators of sexual crime are horrific. Truly unacceptable, to me anyway. But that’s not the same as saying I want everyone thrown in jail. It doesn’t work. The same way putting your toddler on a bottom step to stew in the horrible feelings of having done wrong, doesn’t work. We need to re-think everything, from the bottom up. From our education system’s ‘traffic-light’ behaviour management systems, to employer’s ways of disciplining their staff, to the police and everything in between. The way we do this is to dig in. To not turn away in distaste from the parts of society that trouble us or don’t work. To see the struggle for other people is not so different from the one we face. To understand that the same system that makes a victim a victim makes the perpetrator a perpetrator. To look for the ways in which we can effect change, within us and within the structure and systems in which we operate. I believe the biggest thing we can commit to doing is to the work of personal change. To live from our values, principles and beliefs even when it is not the easiest thing to do. Even when it means we don’t get to be ‘right’, but instead need to seek understanding in those whose behaviours, thoughts and beliefs do not align with our own. Fiercely, Claire X
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Unlike some marital breakups, what I’ve always acknowledged is that my kids have an excellent dad. I didn’t enjoy being married to the man, and we fundamentally disagree on some of the basics of life… but he’s a great dad (and who cares what I think anyway!). Moreover, he wants to actively parent, despite having assumed that his role would naturally drop away over the years and months, he wanted active involvement (albeit on his terms). Yet somehow, we fell into a familiar pattern that seems to be the norm in Britain. He became a ‘weekend dad’. You see them in the park, in the queue at McDonalds… counting down the minutes until ‘I’ll be taking you back to your mum’s’. I’m not making this up, either- I’ve heard several dads saying exactly that.
So when did we get so stuck in this loop- where single mums are taking it all on- sometimes to the extent of living in a completely separate location from the other parent? I want to make two side points here. The first is to acknowledge that I’m assuming that one parent is male and one female. As someone who has been in relationships with both men and women, I’d like to just flag that I realise these relationship dynamics may be different (or the same!) depending on particular circumstances. Secondly, there is always the unspoken thing where abuse may have influenced the decision to live further away from a co-parent. People who leave abusive relationships are badass and brave and I salute you, and the choices you make to keep your family safe. Frankly, I salute any mother making any decision for her family that feels right at the time. Not just deciding, which ultimately is the easy part, but acting on it. Here, though, I want to speak of the situations where once free of the relationship (and I recognised elements of emotional and financial abuse in my marriage which I have since worked to heal), the most empowering thing is to release control of how the other parent handles their time with the kids, and to work towards a more equal parenting balance. I have recently completely changed the time ratio with my kids, and now have 50:50 parenting with my kids’ dad. Even through the week, so that school pick ups and drop offs are shared equally. It wasn’t always that way, though. In fact, he had deemed it impossible due to full time and inflexible work patterns. I maintained that full time and inflexible working were a choice he was afforded which impacted my choices in that regard. Whether that’s true or not, I was ready to explore difference, but it didn’t happen instantly, so lets look at how it unfolded. In the middle of the pandemic, for reasons known only to my deeper intelligence, and with work almost impossible due to home schooling two children, I told my ex-husband to stop giving me maintenance for the kids. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, anyway, and I was uncomfortable with the energetic ties it created between me and my ex. I’d been feeling that way for a while, but then I read a book that influenced my decision heavily, which was ‘Kickass Single Mom’ by Emma Johnston. In it, and in a couple of podcasts I listened to, she argues that taking maintenance money from their ex partners keeps women from fulfilling their full potential in a variety of different ways. I had to admit, I used the money as a cushion, and it didn’t really fit with my feminist values to accept it (though that could really swing both ways!). Anyway. Rather than saying ‘I don’t want your stinking money, you stingy b******rd’, I said ‘I set you free, and I set me free’. And it was done. Of course, the next month I lost my ability to earn any money temporarily, but that’s another story for another day... You know how the old saying goes 'Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes'... Well. I found myself feeling judged by my ex-husband the other day (how much of this was true and how much was a mirror, I'll never know!). I was thinking to myself that he shouldn't judge me, that he should be more understanding of me and that he should look at things from my point of view. Yet, in all of that, I made no space to look at things from his point of view. I was expecting something of him that I wasn't prepared to do myself. As usual, this new thought bought me some freedom for the emotional pain I had experienced while thinking (and believing) that he 'should' do all of those things. Ultimately, I'm in charge of me and my thoughts and actions. He's in charge of his.
Across the four years since we've been separated, it's always been the case that the times I've had the least influence and suffered the most, have been when I'm hoping, or expecting for him to change. The times I've felt the most empowered, have been when I'm changing how I see things, and gaining more flexibility myself. Which led to to this blog post, and something that occurred to me yesterday. The harder it is to see from someone's perspective, the more freedom there is to be had from doing so. That is to say, if you can seek to understand something that exists from a way of looking at the World you would never dream of adopting, the more of a 'brain workout' you get. So next time you encounter someone with a map of the World that has you scratching your head, thank the Universe for this opportunity to gain more flexibility. You don't have to agree with what they think, say or do- but if you accept the invitation to attempt to understand (rather than to proved you're right and they're wrong), then you just might find that out the other end of the encounter, you're experiencing more peace. Many times I have seen women express that they were gaslit by their narcissistic ex. I too once read an article about gaslighting and looked afresh at my relationship dynamics with my then husband. Across the ages, women’s truths have been questioned. This has never been more important to me than now, as I continue my quest for justice after I was sexually assaulted in 2020.
Yet as a coach and a practitioner that is interested in getting the most possible wellbeing for myself and my clients, I have to remain open to what works. It seems to me, that spending eternity thinking about and blaming an ex-partner for the troubles in your life (low self-esteem, self confidence issues etc) is a somewhat disempowering stance, and I started to look for what might serve me better in creating the kind of life I want. So, what is ‘gaslighting’? Well, google tells me it’s when somewhat deliberately denies your version of reality in an attempt to control or undermine you, ultimately leading you to question your sanity. Well! That’s pretty unpleasant, no? Yet at the same time as someone is ‘doing’ this to you, the opposite must be true. If they don’t believe in your version of reality, then you don’t believe in theirs. How can we be free of this never ending spiral of uncertainty? Where each person disbelieves the other, with varying degrees of malicious intent? I think it’s time to call out ‘the truth’. The truth is, there IS no truth. They believe what they believe, and you believe what you believe. Beyond that, its all smoke and daggers. By which I mean, perception. Because, you see… we do not see the World as it is, we see the World as WE are. So you may actually have perceived different versions of reality, and all the arguing in the World won’t have you see each other’s ‘point of view’. Now. That’s not to say that there isn’t potentially some other stuff going on. Maybe you’re being coercively controlled in other ways. Ugh. Because it happens. And that sucks… AND no-one can actually BE IN your mind, controlling it. So. How do we ‘take back control’? I think it comes down to being more open, not less. TO learn to trust yourself and your version of events. To understand that when respect is not being served, you don’t stay and eat, you leave the table… this is radical responsibility for self. Am I victim balming? I hope not. I am, however, speaking as someone who has been on this journey. Who has felt controlled and restricted, and then taken the journey to understanding that the biggest restrictions I’ll ever face (no matter who I’m married to, who my boss is, or what my mum says) are all in my own mind. Which is actually excellent news, because ‘we are now entering the dimension where we have control… the inside). So if you’ve ever been faced with someone who denies your reality… I want you to stand a little taller, knowing that you matched them all along, without even knowing it, by denying theirs right back! Now as to the beliefs you have and values you hold that had you create that reality in the first place, perhaps that’s a blog post for another day… Fiercely, Claire x What can I add to the conversation about shame, that Brene Brown (the famous shame researcher) hasn’t already said? Well, I guess my personal take. Shame is such a sneaky human emotion. I don’t want to talk about emotions as if they’re actual ‘things’ yet it seems shame would have us believe we’re really not worth anything, or that we’re failures... or that we’ve screwed up massively and fallen short of expectations. What I want you to know is that shame is not coming from ‘out there’. It’s not inflicted upon you by anyone. And it’s not an actual thing. We can’t extract it in an operation. But we can do some pretty cool stuff to be free from it. To that end, I’m going to tell you a story. It’s the story of my decision to leave my husband, and that’s a spoiler. What went before was driven by shame. I don’t know how long I ‘knew’, but it’s fair to say I didn’t act straight away. It was only when I realised that one of the principal reasons I hadn’t acted on the knowing was because I was concerned what people might think, that I realised I was jeapordising my happiness and, indeed, my life- as a result of what people might think. Here’s how I reframed it: I get this one wild and precious life, and I deserve to be happy. I will not jeapordise that for the sake of what people might think when they hear the news. After all, they’ll soon be getting on with their lives again and me giving me and my marital status another moments thought. Screw you, shame! And it worked. I left. But did shame leave? Well, kind of. It has layers. The deeper I’m able to explore what really makes me happy, the more I realise shame has been a component of not accessing that happiness over the years. All those shoulds and musts... Which brings me to an important idea, that has bought me great freedom from shame and all its little pals: fear, hurt, sadness, anger... you name it! The idea/ conceit/ thought/ mantra goes like this; ‘There is no rule in the Universe that says.... you have to do anything at all’
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AuthorClaire Standen - NLP Mind Coach Archives
January 2023
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