The 5 Stages Of Divorce (And How To Turn Your Relationship Around Before It's Too Late)

There are many things you can do to turn your relationship around when you find yourself on a rocky road, if you’re willing to team up and face reality together—and that will only happen if you both wantyour marriage to last. The key factor in getting back on track is turning things around as early as possible. It happens over different time frames for different people, but at some point, you reach the point of no return.

Marriage therapists often describe five stages in the divorce process that start long before the D-word is ever mentioned by couples. Here, I'll describe each stage and explain how you might start to redirect when it's still possible.

1. Dissatisfaction:

This is a place of disillusionment, where you have a growing sense of disappointment about the way your relationship is going and how you feel around your partner. Maybe the spark has gone out of the relationship and it feels flat. Criticism may creep into your everyday conversations and actions.

Ignore these warning signs at your peril—finding yourself regularly feeling disappointed and flat about your relationship is no small thing. Getting help at this point is likely to be beneficial because you’re probably still both open to change and not yet so resentful of each other that you stop wanting to try. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes couples make is to shut their eyes and keep careening dangerously towards the end of the road believing things will just magically fix themselves. Most of the time, they don’t.

How to turn it around:

Turning around means consciously putting energy into your love like you did at the start, creating a shared focus on connecting, increasing awareness of your relationship vulnerabilities and strengths, seeking strategies to reconnect deeply, learning skills, and building generosity of spirit toward one another again. You must move away from dissatisfaction and back into happiness before too much damage is done to your relationship.

Start by finding the courage to own how you really feel, without defensiveness or blaming. Consider getting couples counseling earlier rather than later, because that’s when it will be most helpful. If that’s too difficult or daunting, at least gather some basic resources that will help you start a new conversation together—some books or an online relationship class to prompt you to face your dissatisfaction head-on together.

2. Emotional erosion:

This is where you stop caring as much about your partner—or worse, developing a sense of resentment and apathy about doing anything to improve your closeness and communication. The distance between the two of you may seem to increase every week. but you don’t pay too much attention. Couples who don’t turn around at this stage tend to increasingly distract themselves and hope the relationship will fix itself. It can last weeks or years depending on how much you can stomach.

How to turn it around:

As you drive around the communication boulders on this rocky road, you start to clearly see why turning around sooner would have been a better idea. The less interest you have in healing the relationship, the more resistance you'll face when you try to turn things around. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily too late. If you care enough to save your relationship, that's enough to take the first step. At this point, professional intervention is your best bet. Try to start regular counselling on your own, if your partner isn't open to it initially—as soon as possible. That way, even if it doesn't work out in the end, you'll know you did everything you could to save the relationship. And you'll be prepared to move forward in a much healthier way.

3. Loneliness:

In this third stage of a fading relationship trajectory, if you open your tired eyes, you’ll realize that glaringly obvious danger signs have been all over the road for miles. The signs tell you to find each other again urgently—to reactivate intimacy or risk losing it permanently. This is a place of emotional detachment, to the point that other interests—children, friends, work, sports, or even another potential lover may become more important to you than each other. Instead of the disappointment and confusion of dissatisfaction or the anger and resentment of the erosion you may start to feel what Pink Floyd called "comfortably numb." This stage usually ends when something bright and shiny at the side of the road suddenly catches your eye and you feel alive again, awoken to what you’ve been missing. Trouble is, you’re likely to jump out of the car on your own to chase it, causing injury to every heart.

How to turn it around:

Act now if you want to save the relationship with openness, energy, empathy, love, and most of all by teaming up again. This is your relationship’s trial by fire. It shouldn’t have come to this, but it has. Now, you must really fight for each other. Turn to one another with a shared focus, or keep gazing out the side windows, ignoring each other, at your own peril.
Still haven’t managed to turn the car around?

If you've been trying your best and it still hasn't happened, know that it's not your fault. You can't do it alone. It absolutely takes two. Taking the best path is ultimately knowing in your heart that you did your best.

4. The fork in the road:

The fourth stage of the journey to divorce is the fork in the road. Here, single street meets the road you've been on, and your paths diverge. It’s here that you must make the final decision to turn the car around together. Otherwise, it's time to go on alone. Either way, it’s your responsibility to yourselves and any children you have to choose your path with dignity and handle the fallout with maturity and grace.

People survive divorce, but abuse, unkindness, and chaos cause damage—whether a couple stays together or not. If you decide to go your separate ways, don’t let it be any more painful than it has to be.

That's not easy to do when you feel (understandably) angry, lost, panicked, and hurt, but here's how you stay in control.

Remember that behaving in any way other than with kindness and within your values will hurt everyone even more—including yourself. It will extend your recovery time and intensify the pain all round.

If you haven't yet, get help now. Breaking up is hard to do. You must both get all the support you can and treat each other with compassion.


5. Mourning:

The final destination on the journey through divorce is a place of sadness and reflection, but maybe also relief. Here, you can finish this relationship journey, remember what was good, and strive to understand what went wrong. You can hope for a better future for all parties involved and do your best to create it.

Acknowledge all the things you are mourning. The end of a marriage means changes to home and family forever, but you will survive and you can all thrive again.

Get support. Allow yourself to feel pride for the mature way you handled things during such a difficult time in your lives. Then focus on growth and learning so that there will be less of a chance of repeating past mistakes in future relationships.

Source: https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/5-stages-of-divorce-how-to-stop-your-relationship-from-ending

Raising My Son With My Ex-Husband Is the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done

For years, I’ve been waiting for someone to come clean about co-parenting. Celebrities and social media would have us believe it’s easy, even enjoyable, and I’m tired of contributing to that narrative. It’s not true. As a co-parenter and frequent social media over-sharer, I’m guilty of perpetuating the notion that anyone can seamlessly transition from a couple to co-parents with grace, dignity and ease. 

Sure. There have been happy moments in my co-parenting journey where that felt true, but those moments are not the majority of my experience. Shared family vacations and weekly dinner dates didn’t happen without endless negotiations and blurred lines along the way.
So, here we go, I’ll say the thing that no one else wants to say: Co-parenting sucks.

My son was 1 years old when I moved out of the home I shared with my husband and ever since then his father and I have tried multiple ways to co-exist.

We’ve tried mediation and meditation, and seeing each other in moderation. We’ve lived separately, together and have even tried nesting (a name for the cohabitation set-up where the child stays in one home while the parents rotate in and out). We’ve tried cooperative parenting and parallel parenting, going no-contact and going full-contact (a name for the emotional set back where you start sleeping together again against all better judgment).
I could write the Kama Sutra on co-parenting. After five years, the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s nothing natural about this. Successfully sharing the person who brings you the most joy with the person who brings you the most pain is nothing short of a miracle.

I always laugh — and then scream — when people suggest getting divorced is taking the easy way out. I can’t think of anything more difficult than failing at marriage, and then having to raise a child together without having the necessary time and distance to recover from every micro and macro heartbreak that has occurred. There’s nothing easy about this easy way out. In fact, the only thing that’s easier than leaving a relationship that isn’t working is choosing to stay in it.

I didn’t realize that divorce doesn’t really exist when you have children. If it does, it looks something like this: “I now pronounce you ex-husband and ex-wife, you may keep seeing each other for the rest of your lives.” That’s where I am now, the separate but together forever until death do we part. That vow doesn’t go away even after all of the other vows have been broken.

When I filed for divorce in 2012, I wasn’t yet ready to let go. I still felt so much love for the man I was leaving and I was still gripping onto the idea of a perfect family. What I didn’t understand back then is that the love I have for my son and the love I had for his father would always be tangled up together in knots. I couldn’t admit this to anyone else because I was too busy pretending I knew what I’d gotten myself into, pretending for my son’s sake and for my own sanity that my divorce didn’t faze me.

We tried really hard to be the world’s friendliest exes and in photos it was believable, but in reality we were actually two people desperately clinging onto the fantasy of what we thought our family could look like. A fantasy where there was one Christmas, not two, no separate mommy time and daddy time, no elaborate and colorful calendar to help us keep track of where our child would be sleeping on any given night. It would take years to face the facts of separating. No matter how much my ex-husband and I love each other, how much we’ve forgiven one another and how much we’re willing to work together, divorce means we set fire to the fantasy.

And what’s left in the ashes is harder to accept than I imagined.

Co-parenting means my child will grow up always missing one of his parents. When he says to me in tears, “This isn’t fair,” I tell him that he’s right, there’s nothing fair about this. When he says, “I miss daddy,” I want to cry with him and say, “I miss daddy too.” But I take a deep breath and I tell him what I know is true: “Anything less than always will feel like not enough time together.” There is nothing natural about the fact that my son will grow half his height while I’m not watching or that he’ll tuck half of his baby teeth under the pillow at a different home. He won’t get the little sibling he wants anytime soon, and if he ever does that child won’t share his father’s eyes or my lips and he’ll only spend every other Christmas with him or her.

I didn’t know back then, when I was one foot in the fantasy and one foot out, how much I would dread dropping off my son with his father. How do I describe how alone a home feels when a child has left it? Maybe you already know this feeling. Maybe you too have sat, or collapsed, on the living room floor and looked at old photos and videos of your child. Maybe you too have given in to the unexpected and overwhelming feelings of nostalgia and self-pity and regret.

A married friend once told me how much she envied me. “At least you get some time off,” she said. The comment wasn’t malicious, but it was misled. How could I explain to her that there is no such thing as time off when you’re a parent. The minute my son is gone I wonder where he is and what he’s doing. I wonder whether he’s hungry, tired or sad. I fill up my calendar so that every hour we’re apart is accounted for because if I don’t do this there’s a good chance I won’t get out of bed.

It’s in these moments that I wonder what is wrong with me. And I’m not entirely convinced that there is something wrong with me because I don’t know how other co-parents cope. We don’t talk about it. We nod and we smile and we fill our calendars on our “days off,” and for the rest of the world we put our most evolved foot forward. At least, I did. I kept up the act: I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine.

But for a long time, I wasn’t fine. And now, I’m done trying to convince myself that I’m part of a secret society of mothers who stay best friends with their exes, travel together with their exes and regularly reunite for a bedtime story or bath time routine. This might be the reality for some divorced parents, but it isn’t mine — not yet, not really and maybe it never will be. Slowly, I’m beginning to accept this fact.

What I know now and desperately needed to hear then is this: Let go of the family you thought you’d be and accept the family that you are. Redefine your reality. It won’t be easy and there will be days when it feels nearly impossible. You will feel guilt, but you are not guilty. You will feel shame, but you did nothing shameful. You will feel regret, but you did the right thing. There is a space that exists between the family that you were and the family that you’ll end up being. You’re not alone in that space. I’m right there with you. And my guess is that we’re not the only ones.

Source: http://time.com/5183804/co-parenting-difficult-hard-jessica-henriquez/