Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Welcome back this week, y'all. Okay, if you got to listen to last week's episode, we had a lot that we were talking about. Yes, Quinn? Oh. I mean, I think back on that episode, there was so much there that as we built out the second episode, I thought this one has just as much. If not, even more. So we have learned a vital lesson, y'all. Most of our episodes will probably be part ones and part twos in the future. That is just how we go with a topic that is this big. So last week was us coming from a um listener's email. If you haven't listened to that episode, definitely listen to that one first. To kind of just, I thought we did a gorgeous job just diving into some of the nuances, the perspectives around that first take on this, which is if you are divorcing someone, but they're still a good guy, you know, I'm putting that in air quotes, in that they're gonna show up, they're still gonna parent. Um, that was a lot of we spent a lot of time on my story and my perspective, because that's what ended up happening in my situation.
SPEAKER_00I think it's also notable that even if a woman stays, but she wants to improve her economic situation so that she has more choices in the future, she may need to get child care if she hasn't before and build that into the structure of how she stays. And a lot of the things that we spoke about last week isn't just about an ex-spouse, it's the discomfort that you may feel in trusting anyone with your children.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And we specifically were realizing that like a lot of what last week's episode was focusing around is how you let go of your self-concept as the mom. If you're going to get divorced, and I love you making that point, you may, in order to provide for yourself, need child care now, where you are not the primary caregiver or your caregiving is split 50-50 with your spouse. And if, as I was, you a stay-at-home mom, if that is a huge part of your identity, there is a whole process and work to do around that. So that episode's amazing. Definitely listen to that one. Um, lots of beautiful work to do there. But this one is gonna be, I really feel like kind of a whole different ball game and flavor because we're gonna be approaching a very different scenario where you are considering divorce, but you, as that listener said in her email, you are actually worried that your children or your child will experience neglect, abuse, um, emotional abuse when they are away from you with their parent. And your role in the marriage may have been more of a like, I'm the buffer between my children and my spouse. I'm the protector. I'm the one, like, I actually know my spouse isn't safe and I wouldn't want to leave my children with them for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they have mental health issues. Maybe they're just in general more neglectful, or I think I even was a little bit worried of this just because my spouse didn't have that much exposure to being around the kids. Yeah. So it can even be, well, they just aren't the primary parent. And I don't know how that's gonna go down if they become that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And I know that for me, there was a lot of me being the buffer and negotiating the relationship between father and children. It was not uncommon for there to be disagreements or challenges in their relationships. And I would kind of coach my spouse to help him have empathy for what the child was going through and encourage my children to forgive and you're gonna be out of the house soon. Let's all get along. And so, removing me from the situation, because as we know, when we get divorced, it doesn't mean that the children don't have access to the other parent, usually. More often than not, they're going to be with that parent. You're just not going to be there to act as that buffer. And there were a lot of unknowns there, but that is one of the things that kept me in my marriage for so long was just that worry, that unknown. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I think that's really what the listener was, that was the heart of that message. Was in her specific instance, um, she even mentioned, you know, her own like childhood trauma, feeling like it was mirrored in what she's seeing with her husband and their child, and that mother's ache of like, what will happen if I am not here to facilitate or to protect or to negotiate that relationship between the two of them. Yeah. So we're gonna start off the episode by kind of diving into your. I think I want to start with just your story of kind of big picture outline of what you experienced in your process. And I wanna start that off by saying that when you were considering divorce, Untamed had just come out, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, 2020. So we hadn't gone through the pandemic yet and the post-pandemic divorce tidal wave that came from us spending a lot of time with each other in many marriages. But I had this fantasy for sure that I was going to be able to be friends with my spouse post-divorce, similar to what Glenn and Abby show is possible in with her life.
SPEAKER_01Yes, with Glennon's ex-husband. Yeah. And it was, we we read Untamed and that whole doing Thanksgivings together and having him still be such a big part. We definitely, I saw lots of women that read Untamed and would come to me and be like, this is the goal. Um, or when they talk about conscious uncoupling, right? Like we're gonna both respect each other. We're going to understand that maybe this isn't a fit for us, but we need to go our separate ways and we're gonna act respectfully and appropriately as adults for the good of the children and interacting with each other. So you kind of had a little bit of this, which as we were going back, it shocked me to think that you actually had. I think you said in your decree you had like shared birthdays and yeah.
SPEAKER_00I thought at the most foundational level that this man I was divorcing, I thought he would be a good dad. And I also believed that we would remain friends because I was not divorcing him because I hated him. I was not angry at him. I had just crossed the line where I was not willing to be married to someone I couldn't trust anymore. And we did our own divorce decree and we wrote it that we would have shared birthday dinners for our children. We discussed amongst ourselves about having vacations together still. We were going to have weekly video calls to discuss the kids. That was a part of the decree. But within a year post-divorce, I had called Child Protective Services and I was ultimately granted a protective order because of the physical abuse that would happen. It wasn't regularly, but it was like every three months, and it got so bad that I had to get a protective order. Yeah. Another part of this is that he married very quickly. Within six weeks of our divorce, he married a woman that he had met. I think he met her on a Monday. They got married on a Wednesday or Thursday of that week. And she also struggles with anger, passive-aggressive comments. She really lacks impulse control and because of a brain injury. And so I have, you know, some compassion, but that's just the way it is. And they seem to feed off of each other that her anger because of a brain injury and his anger. It just kind of all worked together.
SPEAKER_01It was like a perfect storm that kind of we went from things when you got divorced, I don't remember, it was not contrary to what you guys have heard on the podcast around Quinn's divorce. You may have thought, like, oh my God, she was exiting, fleeing the, you know, fleeing the marriage. But things were actually probably the most stable, maybe perhaps for your ex-husband's mental health pre-the-dorce.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he was very, very sad. He did not understand because I had put up with his lies from the beginning of the marriage. And so for this last lie to be the last lie, he didn't understand that, but he was not violent, he didn't scream at me, he was upset, but I really thought, I really, really believed that we're gonna get through this. I expected that he would get remarried and I would be best friends with his wife, and she would love to have children, and that it would be really great. And surprise.
SPEAKER_01It wasn't. It just, yeah. And that is gonna be a huge part of uh what we're gonna talk about in the episode is how how do we make peace with what is when it doesn't go the way that we were hoping or expecting it to be. I want to, real quick, before we dive deeper into your story, I do want to give just like the outline for where we're gonna head in the episode, some of the main points. We're gonna be focusing on three different areas because as you guys can tell, this is such a gem of an episode with you, Quinn, because that is such a, I mean, in my mind, like a worst case scenario for a lot of people of your spouse not having enough um really mental health on their own to function without you being there. I mean, you said it last week, it was so good. You were like the patriarchy. I did not realize how much the patriarchy had stunted his growth as an individual and as an emotional adult.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So he did not have the skills. And I realized that after the fact, because one of the reasons I felt like he would be a good parent is that I had taken trips, I had gone for days at a time or a week at a time, and everything had gone fine. But I didn't realize it went fine because I had structured everything. Coached the children, I had written the menus, everybody knew all the things to do. So when you remove that, it just wasn't strong enough within himself to function. But yeah, tell everybody where we're going.
SPEAKER_01Just to preface you on the three points, because we want to give these three areas of, you know, what do you do if this is what happens? If you're afraid that your spouse is going to be the one who, when you leave, and even if you're not afraid, but this is what ends up in Quinn's case. So we're gonna talk about first how you can separate out your fear from the actual risk. And that's really addressing that first our listener who wrote in last week of, you know, we sometimes get our CPTSD mixed in from our own childhood trauma projecting onto our partner. So that's just a space we need to start in. And along with that, creating safety for your children in your own home, regardless of what's happening there. There's a lot of things you can teach them that can help mitigate what's happening in the other home. The second area we'll be focusing on is being honest about what you can control and what you can't. And this is one of the toughest areas for so many of us, especially those of us that are codependent, that our way of coping is codependency, controlling everybody, trying to keep everything perfect, keeping everything the way we feel like it needs to be for everybody to be safe. And then finally, and this is the part I'm most excited to really dive in with you, Quinn, is how do we come into a space of accepting that we married this person?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then had children with them. Yep, because if you cannot like come into acceptance that this is what it is, this is the choice I made, then you're unable to make the best of it going forward. So that's a little preview of those three gorgeous areas that we're gonna be diving into, dissecting as we go through the process. But now I want to bring you back. So in your instance, you think it's gonna be okay. You know, with you guys married, this was the level he was functioning at. But then he makes choices right after the divorce in choosing to partner with another person. And I do want to emphasize that I think this piece was a big part of what has destabilized his mental health, is bringing in another individual. I mean, in my instance, I got very lucky. That's that's the only word I have, that my ex-husband did not get remarried and has not. Neither of us are remarried. We have not introduced other children to our children. We haven't started new families. And I think that did allow us some time to kind of get our feet underneath us. But in your instance, he went and got remarried almost immediately, which honestly to me was an indicator that, like, oh, he needs another woman to survive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I was actually really excited when he he introduced me to her the night he met her. Like he had traveled to Utah. They had been talking online for a week. And so he went and picked her up, drove her down, stopped in Phoenix, where our daughter was playing a basketball game, and I got to meet her there. I expected that they would date and we would get to know her. I fully expected he would remarry. I had zero problems with it. I liked this woman. She makes a very good first impression. And everyone in my family who has met her has really liked her. And so we had no idea what was coming. And I don't want to place it all on her. She came into a really challenging situation as well.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, Quinn, but I have to I have to stop you here for a second because I do remember like when you first, and maybe it wasn't the first time you met her, right? That's what I'm realizing. It was when you found out they were getting married.
SPEAKER_00I found out that they were married. I didn't find out that they were going to get married. They came to my apartment and said, We're married. Don't tell the kids.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And that was when the goodwill, the feelings of like, oh, this person, this could be great for my kids. This could be good for the situation, kind of evaporated. And we had a pretty big reaction for you that I want to discuss because that's going to lead us into this first section of starting to use the tool of separating our fear, and we're going to talk about RCPTSD reactions from the actual risk, the factual risk that's present in that moment.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I met with my ex and his new wife that afternoon. And then we all traveled to see my daughter playing a basketball game. And I'm there not telling any of my children that his dad is married to this woman. And they had only met her for about 10 minutes the night before when we had met them at a park. The story I was telling myself that brought up a lot of fear for me is watching my children react because it was incredibly frightening to them that this woman was suddenly going to be in their life, a woman that they didn't know. They were going to be living with her children that they had never met. I have a lot of daughters. She has a son. And I was like, what the hell are you thinking? Introducing this random teenage boy into a world full of these little girls. And I had grown up in a home where my parents introduced a foster child, a foster teenage boy, into our home who ended up sexually assaulting all of my sisters who were younger than him. And so I had a lot of stories about how horrific this was, the discomfort of my children. It was, it was rough.
SPEAKER_01It was, it was very, we went from kind of zero to 60 in your brain, from like, oh, you met her, he's dating someone, to he's married. And I appreciate you sharing like this on the podcast because as I said earlier, like this is in so many ways a testament to coaching and managing your mind because this was such a scary worst case scenario for you. It really felt like, oh my God, we are out. I have lost all control. You know, coming off of a divorce where you're thinking things are gonna get better, and then this is within six weeks where we've landed. So we had to do a lot in that beginning of helping you go, okay, what is this response tied to? Yes. What is this massive fear around, you know, assuming this boy that I've never met is going to do these, right? Your brain just jumping. Yes.
SPEAKER_00And this woman, like he had just met her. We didn't know much about her that weekend after I found out, you know, they were married, and I reached out to my family members, my siblings, some of my siblings started doing research, found out she'd been married twice before. She had been homeless. She always married men that were at least 20 years older than her. And so we started like building this psychological profile of who we thought she was. That, you know, some of it was terrible true, some of it wasn't, but we were scaring ourselves. Yes. But it was really difficult in the moment because it all felt so true. My children are in danger. They're gonna be with this woman that we don't know, who has a sketchy past that we don't know about, teenage son we don't know, and her daughters that we didn't know. It was just so much of the unknown. And so my brain was telling me horror stories.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And even if you don't have this level, I mean, we are really sharing like a very, very big level of left-hand turn. Whoa, we were not expecting this. That is not, I mean, from what I've seen, I wouldn't say this is the most typical. Like, you know, we're kind of on this end of the spectrum. And that is heavily influenced by your ex-husband being Mormon. I mean, Mormons get this getting married so fast, not dating at all. That is a peculiar flavor that we have in the Mormon cult trauma. The the reason I want to bring up this separating out your risk, the actual risk from the fear, is because coming back to that listener's comment, she mentioned how she's like, I know my childhood trauma with my Father, all too well when she was thinking about the dynamic that her child was going to have with his father, who she is wanting to divorce. And so this is where we want to catch ourselves in understanding this could be a CPTSD emotional flashback that is making everything feel hopeless and helpless. And when we are in that kind of a state, we are useless for helping our children navigate something that they are also going through.
SPEAKER_00Right. I'm here trying to tell my kids that it's okay because we found out he was married. He was driving her, he was on his way to go that weekend to pick up her children and all of her stuff and drive it all back down. And he wanted the kids there on Saturday to spend the weekend with this new family. And as I'm trying to console them and asking him to maybe slow it down, and he's angry at me, oh, you just don't like her, and accusing me of traumatizing the children. And I wondered if I was traumatizing the kids because I was feeling traumatized and then trying to help them process this. And him being like, Well, you're the one that created this, it's all your fault. Which is a huge CPTSD.
SPEAKER_01Not trigger as well. It was so many triggers on triggers on triggers. And we really had to, when we were coaching you, we had to keep coming back to what are the actual factual risks, not what are the feelings and the fear and the stories. Oh my God. You know, here we are further out. What hasn't happened is your daughter's getting, you know, sexually molested by their stepbrother. That never happened. No. But your brain, because of your own trauma, was pretty certain and very afraid that this was what was going to happen. And whether it's going to happen or not, we have to keep coming back to am I able to function and be there for my kids in the best way I can be dealing with the situation that is what it is, as we'll talk about a little later, of like, you don't have control over what your spouse decides to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so coming back to, and we did this a lot where it was like, what are your thoughts? And what are those thoughts creating? How are those thoughts feeding this loop of fear and grounding back into some of the facts, which were, okay, your kids are still with you half the time. Your kids have a phone. They can call you, prepping your children ahead of time to be able to communicate. I think you even educated them a little bit more on like, hey, here's some, you know, let's brush up on places you're not supposed to be touched and how to, you know, speak up for yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And those are skills that they would need whenever I felt like we needed to talk about specifically then. But every time you would bring me back to what are the facts, because I was in this flashback, it was really difficult for me to see beyond it because it felt like, but there are these risks. Brittti, you're not taking the risks seriously. These are real risks. But I was living in this room where I could not see out of it. I really had to slow down and go through that process of mourning and getting back into my body and again and again and again looking at the facts. These are the facts. We can deal with the facts. We can't deal with risk very well. There's only so much we can do. We've got to stick with the facts. Yeah. And that's what got us through it. Trying to come back to neutral.
SPEAKER_01That was a big and facts help us to neutralize things. Okay. One of the facts is he's married. You know, oh, she was homeless for a period of time. She must be crazy. Oh, she was this. That is all thoughts that we are adding on top and really taking this is where you had to come into self-responsibility for how much am I terrifying and torturing myself with my brain about what could happen ahead of time and going to the worst case scenario, which I loved you bringing up that you are in a room because I've talked about this briefly on the podcast previously, and it's an episode I hope to do in the future. But I really have started to think of our CPTSD emotional flashbacks as rooms that we walk into. When we have a trigger that is big enough, a belief gets activated. And it's like we open a door and we walk into a room that is a reality built on that belief. And one of the beliefs, you were probably in like multiple rooms, multiple terrifying rooms from your childhood at the same time with this, because we're getting triggered in all sorts of areas. But you know, one of those beliefs, right, was like, oh, if my daughters live with a male that is not related to them, they will be sexually molested. That is a terrifying room to live in. That if you don't understand CPTSD and you don't understand what's happening in your brain, you just assume because you've walked into this room that this is reality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But what we kept doing over and over was trying to help you step out of the room, understanding there is a door. And in, like you said, regulating your nervous system down, helping you process really, which, like you said, was just a lot of the grief, the anger, the sadness that you needed to feel more than the hyperfixated, I've got to control everything. How can I change this that we go into to avoid the emotions?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And one of the ways that I recognized that I was in a room, I remember waking up one morning and feeling well-rested for about 20 or 30 seconds before I remembered what had happened. And then my body immediately went into that adrenaline, we're not safe. And I thought, that is so interesting. I was fine until I remembered the story. And the story is what is making me not fine. But having that contrast of feeling peace and then feeling terror, I knew that there was a choice to be made. That I could get in there. Like I had a choice. Yes.
SPEAKER_01And I think too, when we are in those rooms, you have to understand you're not present in the moment. You are not actually experiencing reality as it is. You have the CPTSD flashback puts on, it's like you put on these lenses, these glasses, and you are seeing everything through that lens. It changes your perspective. It changes how you show up. This last week, in fact, Gwyn got to coach me through. I had a pretty big trigger happen that we did not expect to be as big as it would have been. Some of the people in the community got to hear about it with Joe, you know, doing some shifts for work away. And it triggered a childhood belief of mine that, like, I can't trust people. I don't know why it did that, but that's what got triggered. And for the next week and a half, I felt completely shut off emotionally to him. I like I behaved differently towards him. I thought about him differently. I saw him differently. I saw our relationship differently. And for that week and a half to two weeks, it was like dealing with a different world. I had stepped into a room, I lived in that room, and that room sucked. It was, it was a tough room to be in. But that's what I mean by you have this lens. And it's really important for our listener that wrote in to understand that when she's saying, I know from the pain of my own childhood with my own father that she probably has a lens. Or, you know, we're using these different metaphors, the lens coming on or stepping into the room, she is stepping into a room that may be making the risk and the fear seem much greater than it actually is factually. Now, I do want to say, even though we're talking so much about this piece of being aware of your CPTSD flashback and that you may be in a room that's coloring kind of your perspective, if there are factual safety issues happening with your children, you definitely want to document and use the legal system to protect your child. And I really feel like, Quinn, you have seen how, contrary to maybe what we believed in the beginning, that that wouldn't really get us anywhere, that you can, um, in your instance, you had a judge that's been very favorable to hearing out your children's feelings to what they're going through through you sharing it with the judge in your instance and actually putting in place protective orders to help your children.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think that the fact that even though I felt like they were unsafe a lot from my own projections early on, the facts did not back up that they were unsafe. As the facts shifted and there were physical instances of abuse, and my children came to me. I wasn't creating this in them. I was not projecting onto them, your dad is physically abusive. They came to me and said, This is what happened. I don't feel safe with him. And yet I was still very anxious because I am financially tied to him through alimony and child support. But I know that my children needed me to step up and protect them. I was still very uncomfortable doing it. I had never done that before, but I figured it out. And we figure it out as moms. We just figure it out. Yes.
SPEAKER_01As we were discussing this episode, this was a big kind of area to be aware of for yourself around how much am I actually factually seeing that my children are unsafe with their other parent? And how much am I projecting that from my own trauma and what I experienced with my parents and how I see my co-parent kind of parenting in that same way. And that's the real understanding kind of what the courts will or won't work with. And that's that's really something you have to trust off of your gut.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. Like I think in my instance, I definitely think I was worried about narcissistic abuse and manipulation and emotional. That was something that factually was not going to land in a court system and actually didn't play out long term, right? That was a lot of me having to manage my own fear around how much I had been like, my husband has narcissistic personality disorder and I need to get out and all of that story, right? But in your instance, as you went along, you actually did have factual, you know, you had your children coming to you saying, this is what's happening. And that was something that you could work with. And later on, I know you did end up getting a protective order for yourself as well. That was because you had email documentation of that interaction.
SPEAKER_00Yes. As the facts change, you get to change your actions. But it's great if you can manage your mind to where it's neutral because I don't want to make life harder for my husband. I want his life to be amazing because it impacts my children. It impacts me. I want my kids to have two homes where they feel safe. And so part of that is my skills, and part of that is teaching my kids some skills. Like age-appropriate self-advocacy.
SPEAKER_01This was so big. I feel like your kids, because of the way your divorce went, you have really leaned in in this piece of okay, this is what it is. To getting where you can with the courts, with the legal system, protection in those ways. But in the areas where you can't, giving your children the skills to be ready. And it, I mean, it does help. Tell me again, how old? I just how old were your children when all of this happened? What were the age ranges?
SPEAKER_00My youngest would have been, would have turned seven. So I would have had like seven, nine, all the way up, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, I think were the ones at home. And then my very oldest, she was there for the last interaction that triggered the first protective order. Um, but she wasn't living with us at the time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So your kids were old enough to be able to communicate, for you to be able to say, and and tell me more about when you say age-appropriate self-advocacy, what does that look like in your home? What were you teaching them?
SPEAKER_00I think it's important to teach our kids how to speak up for themselves through ways that don't feel like we're framing their future interactions as dangerous. And so the way I teach my children a lot of the skills that I work on for how they behave and interact in our home is through role play or games. And it can be skills that I want them to learn in our home about how to disagree with me or accept a no answer. And so they were familiar with, oh, when we're learning new skills, we're going to role play. Because I think it's not enough to tell your child stranger danger or don't talk to strangers or look for these kinds of people, or these are the words to say without them having practiced it. I think it's much easier for a child to be able to say, don't touch me there, if they have practiced the words, don't touch me there beforehand. And so we had done some role-playing around abuse prevention when I learned that they were going to be living with a teenage boy. But also when they would come home from weekends with their dad where things had happened and we would kind of talk through it, I was also able to say, okay, in the future, let's think of some other ways that we could handle this. Or what could we say to your dad? And a lot of times they would simply shut down because they didn't trust that their dad would hear them. This is their dad's third marriage. They felt like he's gonna do whatever he can to save that marriage. We're not the priority, she's the priority. So they have their own stories around it. But if they were in a situation where they were in danger, we talked about who are the neighbors that you could go to? Do you have their names? Do you have their phone numbers? Do you know the path? Do you know where there's a flashlight if you needed to exit the house for whatever reason, if there's a fire? Yeah, this was in Eve.
SPEAKER_01This was in the beginning of really, you know, reckoning with like, okay, there may not be adults over there that are going to keep your children safe.
SPEAKER_00And so he lives on a farm. So there aren't people as close as in my neighborhood in suburbia to go knock on a door. It will be a little bit of a walk. And it might be at night. You know, let's just talk through and then asking them what part of that seems scary to you or what seems hard to you. Is this something that you feel like you could do? And it just gives a sense of confidence. Empowerment.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I am not a victim in that if something happens to me, I don't have adults or resources that I can go to to help me. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And when it became evident that their stepmom has some anger issues and throws things sometimes, we talked about how can you stay safe? Are there places, are there some outbuildings if you need to go while she cools down? And to her credit, she usually leaves the house when she gets really upset. And so just talking through as facts changed, we changed our approach. Given these facts, given this first time when she threw food, what could we do next time? Yeah. And we just kind of roll with it and see what works, what doesn't. But even just bringing it up, we never sweep it under the table. And if at any time they feel unsafe, and there have been times where just a week at a time, they say, I don't feel safe with this parent or this step parent. And then I inform my husband they're not going to be there this weekend. This is why. Could you address that? And they they try, I think, because it it gets better sometimes and it gets worse sometimes.
SPEAKER_01That open line of communication there, I want to clarify for everybody that the reason you can even send that is because as the facts build up, you pursued legal protection for the children. And you, through your attorney, rewrote the parenting plan to be able to include that your children could say, you know, I'm not feeling safe, and be able to choose not to go to their dad's house, which for you, this was like an ever-evolving situation, kind of worked because your ex-husband was also kind of getting overwhelmed with the situation, with the new marriage, with the kids. And honestly, kind of it was like a bit of a lifeline for him to know okay, they're not coming for the weekend. Cool, they're not coming for the week. At times it seemed like it was a relief for him. And and this is where we get down, y'all, to like the very real reality of sometimes the people we married are not emotional adults or mentally healthy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that reality, I think we think if we stay married, we get to avoid our children experiencing that abuse. But I would offer, and we'll talk about this a little. This is our final point that we're gonna make later on in the episode. At least with what's happening now with your children, they are learning very clearly all of these skills and tools of how to use people who cross boundaries or don't respect how to advocate for themselves, how to move out of situations like that that will serve them later on in life, rather than being in, you know, just paint a little bit of a picture of how your children still experienced abuse within the marriage. Maybe it wasn't this level, but it was normalized.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was normalized. And one of the ways that we know that is that every time dad would leave for a business trip for a few days, we all took a deep breath and were able to relax. And as soon as he came back, we were all very hyper-vigilant because there was this sense that we always had to be productive, kind of the pioneer grit, Puritan work ethic kind of thing. And then he was physically abusive with, I mean, and you you notice how I'm even struggling saying that because I was there. Like you would take one of our my younger son and put him out in the snow and tell him to cool off, or he um would like to pull on kids' ears to get them to follow him or something like that, or just be rough. And I was there for it. I didn't stop it. And so I still have like this, oh. Ugh, yeah, it wasn't as bad, but now listening to my children and their experience of the marriage and how they lived under such stress and fear for so much of their lives, I wasn't doing them any favors by staying married. I I really wasn't, but it blinded me to what was happening right before my eyes.
SPEAKER_01Well, and that's often because in the marriage, you have to show a united front.
SPEAKER_00Right. The parents. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's it's kind of like a implicit, and it's it's not okay to kind of call that out while you're watching it happening. Makes me think so much to that type of parenting. The Strong Willed podcast. Yes, yes, yes, yes, where they're talking about um that puritanical parenting style of, you know, the child is bad and you need to beat it out of them and they need to be controlled. And that a lot of us were raised with a lot of our generation experienced growing up in environments like that. So I want to move forward now into this beautiful little gem that we have in the podcast where we wanted to say to be prepared for surprises.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Because as you've heard a lot more about Quinn's story, you might be thinking that, like, okay, she's now got the situation, you know, where early on we were like so excited for you having 50-50 and you getting to have time apart. We talked about that often on the podcast. And you really had to be kind of light on your feet going through, and you kind of still have to with your partner. Oh, yes. Because as much as you guys have a parenting plan, ultimately there is not someone there to enforce him taking his parenting time, right? No.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he moved out of state for two years. I wouldn't know if he was going to show up. He still maintained a residence down here, but also a residence in Utah. So sometimes he would come down and then just call and want to take the kids. And I tried to accommodate those sudden appointments for visitation. But there have been other times where I thought I had the weekend to myself or several weeks to myself, and all of a sudden my children are walking in the door. So when I I was heartbroken at the beginning of the divorce thinking about not being with my kids all the time, I now have my kids all the time. Every once in a while, they do go to their dads. He has moved back down. But in the time he's been back down here, he's only kept them for the entire visitation time, like 48 hours of a week. He's only done that once.
SPEAKER_01And you went through so much mental drama when you were getting divorced around how you were not gonna have your kids.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Do you remember that? And I thought, this is amazing. I get to go do all these things. And it was one of the things that I thought about when I went and got that first protective order, knowing that if I get this protective order, the kids are with me all the time. And so they were. And since that time, some of the kids have always been at home. Some of the kids have opted out completely from visitation with their dad. So even when some kids go for visitation, I always have kids at home. And it has been a process to teach them skills and take care of myself, still resource myself, but it has been a process.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. What this highlights is that we go through life thinking we are in control of life. And our human brains love to take a scenario, build out a story, and then believe that that is the story and that's what's going to happen. And we want the certainty that, like, this is life. And so in the beginning, we did so much coaching around getting you into the like, okay, you're not gonna have your kids half the time. And that's great because you're gonna have time to invest in you. And you really leaned into that story, and that story was serving you, and it was helping you to like take what is and make the most of it. And then what is changed. It changed in a way that was out of your control. You know, it involved someone else that made choices with your children that to, and this is the whole like you stayed in integrity with yourself of showing up for your children in the way that you wanted to be there for them, which led to them being home with you more. And I remember us having to coach through grieving that now that time was gone. Now your children were home. And for lots of people, this is where their life gets stuck. They don't ever update the story. They stay focused on the change that was out of their control, their life not going the way they thought it was. And you could have stayed stuck there, always angry at your children for being around all the time now, blaming your ex-husband, so pissed at him, filled with resentment and cankering dread, and probably being like, I made the biggest mistake I ever could have made getting divorced. Oh, no, no, no. That never crossed my mind. Quinn, Quinn's mind never went there, but there are definitely, definitely women that let their brains go to that place. Yeah. And then live, you could have lived a really miserable life, but you didn't. What we did is we went, okay, we need a new story. We need to update your beliefs. We need to take the root the facts of what is, and we need to reform the story. And the story became I can still have time. Your children were old enough. It was like, I'm exactly, I'm gonna invest in teaching them more resources. I'm going to still take my time away. I'm going to still make space for me, which looked sometimes like I'm going up in my room. Do not disturb me. I need some mom time. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Or sometimes it meant I'm going to be gone for the night and they knew I was going to spend the night with my lover, and I'll see you guys in the morning. Still had to prioritize resourcing me. And I think that that's important, no matter how much or how little you have your kids. Because even parents who don't have their kids, they don't necessarily spend their time away from their kids resourcing themselves. And I think it's so important. And I also wanted to mention how we get this idea that we can expect something from our ex just because there's a court order in place. There's a parenting plan, but if I wanted to go to court every time he dropped my kids off early, I would be spending so much money and emotional labor and time like that would dominate my world. And I'm not gonna let him. I just have decided I can roll with this. It's okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was a decision that we coached, that we had to navigate through you, you know, and and that really when we talk about making the choice of considering divorce, that is the skill right there of weighing the options and going, what do I want most? Where do I want to spend my time and my energy? And where you got to as we coached and we processed around the grief of like, yeah, this person's not going to show up for me. This person's literally going to show up and not take his parent time. He's he's he's going to say, I don't want to watch the kids right now. I'm dropping them off at your house and just show up. You can't make him parent those children. And you ultimately, we did explore the option of like, okay, what do we do legally? And it was like, oh my God, legally to force this. Plus, you could feel in your body too. This was a little bit of that, like checking in with your body, that just felt so like a no for you. Where for someone else, that might be what feels like you're opening and like, yeah, I need to pursue this. So a lot of your journey came down to checking in with your body.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Processing when things would switch, and then finding the soul call connection piece of intuitively going, okay, where are we actually headed? What makes the most sense? What's aligned with my values, my integrity in the way that I want? And what's the future that I want?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And that's the biggest payoff for me. It's not that my kids are here every weekend and we go and do adventures and we build this incredible life together. A lot of times I'm working or studying on the weekends. We don't have a lot of interaction, but I know they're safe, they're fed, we just have a weekend, but I know I'm playing the long game. They know that anytime their dad drops them off, I'm here. They know how to get into the house. They know how to cook food. They know that mom's gonna be back. And the consequence, there's no financial or legal consequence for him parenting or not parenting. His consequence is in this relationship with his kids. And you see it now and you can project it forward. Yep. Yep.
SPEAKER_01This takes us so beautifully into our second piece, which is what you can control and what you can't. And we kind of have been dancing around it a lot in this first section because it's just the heart of what you are going to be dealing with if you have an ex-husband that is not in mental adulthood that or that is not mentally stable, not an emotional adulthood. You have to really come into what do I actually get to control? And what is just what is?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because it's not that we have no control. In fact, the part we can control is the most powerful part. But sometimes we tell ourselves stories that think that no, if we could control him, if we could control the legal system, if we could control our children, that's where the power is. But it's not. I think the key here is learning to build the skills, which we did through coaching, so that you can trust in your own ability to show up really steady and consistent and loving for your kids. And that is the anchor. It's the anchor for you, it's the anchor for them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because ultimately, as we've seen in Quinn's story, like your ex-husband, and this, I want to just preface this by saying for a lot of you, especially those of you so addicted to control, which I'm raising my hand as well. This is the biggest drug for those of us that are on the codependent side of the equation. Okay. Hearing this list may be a little activating for you, but I really wanted, we wanted this episode to be a little more just in the raw reel of what it can look like when you get divorced and it doesn't go the way, you know, my divorce has gone. So I want to list some of the areas that we just don't get to control when we get divorced. Areas where we have to give up this drug of choice when our brains are more codependent. And some of those areas that I was shocked to realize were like, oh, I don't get to control screen time. I don't get to control whether when he's with the children, he's actually present with them and engaged with them. Yeah. I don't get to control. Um, we had actually a coaching call in the community this week where there was one of our members really struggling with like not getting to control whether they turn in their homework or not when they're with him. You don't get to control how much sleep they get at his house and whether they actually go to bed on time. Tell me some of the ones you noticed.
SPEAKER_00You don't get to control how he feeds them. You don't get to control who he dates, who he marries. You don't get to control his parents or siblings, or your parents or siblings, or the stories they have around your relationship. Ultimately, you don't get to control your ex.
SPEAKER_01And that when you have been the facilitator, the buffer, the one trying to manage everybody, that can feel really overwhelming. Disorienting. Yeah. To go, oh my gosh. But I have to ground you back into this fact, y'all, which is this is their parent too. We as women trained in this culture to believe that we as the mother have this just overwhelming role tend to kind of forget this piece of like, this is also their parent. And he gets to parent them in the way he wants to parent them during his parenting time. And if we focus on that and that lack of control by wanting to be all up in his business and what he's doing, we miss out on the the other side of that, which is that you also get to do all that as well now in your own way in your space.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You get to have your own way of feeding them at your home. You get to have your own way of putting them to bed, bedtimes the way homework is done at your home. Like, wouldn't you say, Quinn, that has been one of the biggest benefits in getting divorced, I would say for both you and me, is that we get to parent and raise our children now in ways that feel good for us. Yes. And that I view as especially, I mean, especially in your instance, very supportive for your children. I think they are getting much better parenting than they were when you were married.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because not only did my ex change, I changed a lot. I didn't realize what an awesome parent I would be when I wasn't walking on eggshells. I didn't realize how much love I could pour into my kids. I didn't realize how well my kids could step up and learn different skills and advocate for themselves. Like this isn't this isn't a tragedy for my family. It simply is what is. And I love who I've become as a parent through this process. And I love who my kids have become through this process as well.
SPEAKER_01Love who your kids have become. I feel so much safer about your children going out into the world because they now know what boundary violations look like. They now know how to not put up with bullshit because of the way that you have structured. And they now know what it feels like to be somewhere that's safe. And that gives me so much hope in the future for them finding partners that will actually be genuinely safe and supportive for them.
SPEAKER_00Yes, they recognize it. Just recently, my 20-something daughter was dating a man and she said, I like him. And I said, Do you like him or is he just tall because he was tall? And but she noticed that when she was around him, she kind of felt on edge and that she had to brace herself for some of the conversations and that he the way he interacted felt kind of familiar, but not in a good way. And so it was a very short-lived relationship because she has become very good at noticing when she might be falling into a childhood pattern of something feeling familiar, but not safe and in a good way. Man, these these kids of mine, they can spot a narcissist from a mile away. Yes. You go, girl.
SPEAKER_01Yes. So there's, yes, there is a lot that you have been over-controlling in your marriage to try and keep this ship stable that is going to now be out of your hands. And if you focus on that and you keep your sights over there, obsessing about what you can't control, you will drive yourself crazy and you will run yourself ragged, trying to overcompensate and manage for all of that versus coming into, like Quinn said, the area that you can control, which is where the most power is for you, which is your thoughts. What am I gonna believe? What is the story I'm gonna tell about this? The feelings that come out of those beliefs and that story, and how all of those thoughts and feelings drive your actions, how you're showing up. And it moves from a, oh my God, I can't control him. This is so scary, which is kind of the space our listener who wrote in was in, right? Of, oh my gosh, I don't want the same thing that happened to me to happen to my son. It's moving from I can't control him into I can control me and my response. And through that, I can create an environment where my children are prepared for people like this in the world. That's the thing. Like, if if you ended up marrying this person and having a kid with them, they're out there in the world, y'all. That's what we seem to forget. And we want your kids to be prepared as well. How do they get prepared by contrast? Right, Gwen, tell me about contrast.
SPEAKER_00I think contrast is one of the greatest gifts we give our children post-divorce because having two households that are run in very different ways, my ex has very different values than I have religiously, politically, personally, like on just so many levels, the way they keep their home, the food they eat. There is it's such a high contrast kind of existence. And rather than it being kind of this whiplash, my children are very adaptable, but they have their preferences. Yes. And it's very clear to them how they want to be when they grow up. But they're sh they're being shown options. And these options aren't just within our households, they're within the world. And they're seeing how each parent loves what that feels like, what feels like safety, rather than just being words. My kids are learning the lived experience of advocating for themselves, being able to protect themselves, to speak up for themselves in all of these really great ways. That being said, even though I disagree with his values or whatnot, I trust that they're picking up things that they don't even know they're picking up from his way of being that may support them in their future life. Yes. I'm done with him being the villain. It's like we just deal with the facts. If there are villainous facts, we deal with those. But I want my children to feel safe at both houses. And I'm hoping that what I give them here allows them to do that and feel that there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I think where we've had to land is just trusting that, okay, they will learn what they need to learn from the contrast. And also you cannot control how your children take all of this. Because there was a period of time where you had one of your children who was very aligned with the way he was seeing things over there that really, you know, because I we are framing this a lot through like your children will see it. They will see the abuse, they will get it. Your child, some of your children may not see it that way.
SPEAKER_00They may disagree with you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. They may be like, actually, I really love it over there. That's that's the framework I'm enjoying. That's what I want. Yeah. Um, and it makes me think kind of a little bit of how I had to, that was my journey this year of having to swallow my own story. Cause we had really built this story of like, my children are gonna feel safe here. They're gonna learn what it's like to, you know, be regulated. And then when my oldest wanted to move over to his dad's, once again, it was a moment of like, oh my God, what does this say about me? What does this mean? I had to update that story. I had to update the story and come back into the heart of understanding and respecting that my children's journeys are their own. Yeah. You know, that's what that was. It was, I'm not gonna fight him and force him to stay here to prove my story right that I am the better parent. Yes. Yeah. Which is not where things tracked for me. I mean, honestly, I was just saying to Joe yesterday, my ex-husband was messaging, like figuring out all these schedules on a group thread with a couple of other parents that we're close with. And I turned to Joe and I was like, I am so here for my ex-husband, like momming hard right now. Like in a lot of ways, we have kind of switched roles at this moment in our children's development. I am leaning much more heavily into my career. I am much more like you guys need to be independent. And where he has kind of recovered, I think, financially post the divorce, is feeling a little more relaxed in that area and is devoting his energy and efforts into dating. Yeah. And letting my son go there, trusting that that's his journey. And you said this multiple times in our outline, just emphasizing that you have to accept that what your children, the story they are gonna tell about this divorce, the story they are gonna tell about you, you do not get to control.
SPEAKER_00Oh yes. Even if you're quote unquote doing everything right, just like our parents felt like they were doing everything right, I think, and yet I vehemently disagree. Same with the way that I was raised. They have no control over that. And I'm just doing the best I can, but my children probably will need therapy, like most humans, because life, not because divorce, but just because life.
SPEAKER_01Ooh. Yeah, and that just makes me think so much too of how like our parents didn't get divorced and we still need therapy. 100%. 100%. And our parents stayed married, and we don't have a relationship with our mothers. You know, my mother's passed away now, but before that, part of my journey was ultimately realizing I didn't like her story of my life. I didn't like the way she had parented me. And I actually got to have that story for myself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I want to share with you an example that kind of epitomized this idea for me in the last year. I have a child who did not have contact with his dad for a while and he needed some medical care. My husband would not allow the medical care. I had to go to court to get it. But immediately after my son received the care, he wanted to have a relationship with his dad. And I noticed when he said that, I felt such deep betrayal. I was like, what the fuck, dude? I just had to go to court because of your crazy ass dad. Now, I did not say this out loud to him. I just was like, smile and nod because that was for me to digest. I brought it to my coach. I did not bring it to my son. My son now has a very healed relationship with his dad, probably healthier than it's ever been. The problem I had with my son, having a healed relationship with his dad is my problem. It's not for my son. It's my problem. It showed me a mirror and an aspect of myself that I felt a lot of shame about because I want to be the kind of mom that always cheers for them having as healthy a relationship as possible. But I saw in that moment that I wasn't nearly as healed as I would have liked to think I was, because I was kind of enjoying my son not having a relationship with his dad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was like a consolation prize for all of the struggle with your ex getting to feel like, but ultimately my kids prefer me. So I'm the parent. I'm doing I'm I'm the parent that actually is doing it right. And I do want to, we've talked a lot about that in this episode with your kids seeing the contrast, but also providing the opposite side of watching yourself when you do this. And and life will give it to you, as it did in both of our instances. Yeah. Where there's this moment where you're like, ooh, this hits me in a way that stings, and it stings because I feel like I'm owed something here in allegiance or a, you know, I just to be considered the good parent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now this takes us though, I think this is gonna take us beautifully into our final piece, which is at the heart of all of this, when we don't have control, we tend to go into a space of I have to protect them. Then I have to make sure that my kids don't experience these things. And what we want to offer instead to close out this episode is that we want you to move into accepting reality, like the facts that the it is what it is. We've said that multiple times in this podcast, and ultimately move your focus to the long game. So to take us into this, Quinn, I wanted you to give us similar, we just gave you a list of some of the things you can't control, but I wanted Quinn to share a list of some of the things with her ex that she does not get to control or protect her children from at all.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. My ex gets to tell his version of events to my kids. He gets to blame me for every painful thing that has ever happened in his entire life. He gets to call me names. He gets to share religious and political ideas with my children that I find abhorrent. He gets to shame my children and tell them how disappointed he is in them. He gets to be somewhat violent, at least at the first of the divorce he got to, because we live in a state that allows corporal punishment. He gets to scream at my children and at me. He gets to lie and tell my children that I said things that I didn't say. And my children get to see their dad for who he is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And this is the piece, y'all. When we say I must protect them from seeing this, what I think we're doing there is a twisted patriarchal dance that women have been tied into of needing to be that buffer that you can't see your parent for who they really are. And of course, this is we're talking about in this instance where you actually have a parent who is really on this end of going to do these types of things. And really questioning. Like, I want to point out, y'all, that we seem to feel this responsibility to protect our children from seeing their parent for who they really are, taking on this responsibility of like, I need to protect them from this person that, and here's where we come into accepting reality, y'all. This is where we're gonna put on our big girl panties all together and be honest about the situation, which is ultimately grieving that you chose to marry this person. Yeah. If you do not do this work, you will spend your whole life, potentially years, staying in a marriage trying to protect yourself and your children from looking at a choice you made that maybe you want to grieve and move forward from. But if you don't sit in the moment of going, Yep, this is who this person is, this is how they want to show up. I don't get to control that. And I now get to process my own grief and anger and sadness. A lot of that often directed at myself that I made this decision, which makes me think so much of the, you know, we have to let it die. In letting it die, the door opens to looking to the future in accepting what is, then we can be present and we can make strategic decisions for what we want instead, rather than spending years trying to patch together and band-aid up a decision. I mean, if you're worried that this is what your spouse is going to be like post-divorce, then oh my God, how much patching of holes and band-aiding are you doing right now in your relationship?
SPEAKER_00Right. Post divorce, I truly felt that the thing I was most proud of in my life was that I got divorced. And the thing I was most ashamed of was that I had married him. And it took me 23 years to get divorced. And I carried that shame, and it took a while for me to metabolize it. But here I am, four and a half years out, and I don't feel that shame anymore, but I still carry that pride that I was strong enough. I know what it took to be in that marriage, and I know what it took to get divorced, and I'm living the consequences of that, and I would choose it again a million times. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And that is not just given because you get divorced, y'all. That's what I there is a deep personal reckoning process with your own story, with tracking back through your own childhood, with reckoning with the trauma that happened in your childhood that led you to be the person you were, that chose to marry this person that now you find yourself not wanting to be married to and not wanting to leave your children with. And if you don't do that piece of coming into accepting reality, and by accepting, I'm meaning we're just standing here and we're looking it in the eye and we're going, This is who I chose to get married to. And we're doing the work to understand why we did that. Because, you know, we've seen this in the community that a lot of women without the support of the reframing it move into a lot of self-anger, like you said, just really regretting and hating themselves for making this decision. And regret is so, so sad to me because when we spin in regret, we move all power to move forward into a future. And we just end up staying where we are, looking at the past, wishing things could have be been different while not making the changes now that will make the future very, very different than the now we are in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So when the shame and anger is directed at us, at me for having made that choice, we're acting like I made that choice in a vacuum, that I wasn't in a cult, that I wasn't, I didn't come from a certain family of origin that valued certain things. The culture at large, all of those things played into it. So for me, it was an exercise in self-compassion because I would not speak to a friend or a daughter the way I was speaking to myself about you're such an idiot. I can't believe you did that. You should be so ashamed of yourself. You knew so long ago that this was who he was. And instead challenging that voice. And that's some of the CBTSD work of challenging that main girl voice in your head and not letting it go unchecked, but sinking into self-compassion. And we do a lot of that, not only just self-compassion, but community compassion within your stay or go community.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. Reframing, understanding you pegging yourself as the villain just doesn't get you anywhere.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01And also focusing on your partner being the villain as well. We we all just keep spinning in villain, victim, savior. Um, that takes me to the drama triangle. If you guys haven't seen that image, go look that up. But that is what most of us learned in childhood. It's what we stay in for the rest of our lives, and we wonder why we are so unhappy. It's because none of those roles, even playing the savior, still does not get you what you want it to get you. So once we can come into this space and it's a process, right, of accepting, okay, this is who I married, and I married this person for certain reasons, and now this is where we are, then things start to open up and we start to see the potential for a different future. And we get to see where there are silver linings to the story, which for you, you know, I think it's that yes, as we talked about that list, those are things you don't get to control. Those are experiences that your children are going to have in this life, but the silver lining is they now get to do that with contrast at your home, as we mentioned previously.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And I think it's important that in my home they are safe to speak about their dad. I don't always participate in those conversations. Sometimes they just want to unload the weekend with their older siblings who weren't there. And sometimes I will excuse myself because I don't want to influence them. I want them to truly have their own experience with their dad. But when before I was divorced, I was very afraid of them having their own experience with their dad.
SPEAKER_01And now Yeah, and you curated that massively.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I curated their experience of their dad. And now they get their experience. But I try, and I'm not perfect at this for sure, I try to stay as neutral as possible about his actions. When they say he lied about this, I'll just say he gets to say that. Or they'll tell me some story, he gets to do that. Or when they ask, can we do this thing while it's his parenting time? I'll say, that's up to your dad. It's during his parenting time. You're gonna have to check with him. I just try to stay as neutral as I can. And that takes a lot of work on me because kids know. They, I mean, of course they know, you know, how I think and feel about their dad, but it's work that I do with other adults. I don't do it with my children.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yes. And I think it as you said that, I think that's gotten easier for me as well with time post-divorce of getting more neutral, of understanding this is the life that I got dealt. This is the hand that I got dealt. Uh, it's like we finally look at the hand and we go, okay, this is the hand I got dealt. How do I want to play it? And I chose to play it the divorce route and moving through that in a more neutral approach of, yep, there are things I don't get to control. There are things that are in my control, there are things that aren't. And we just keep moving forward with each piece as it plays. But in order to do this, we're making this sound like, yeah, you just do it, y'all. To do this, it means you have to take responsibility and clean up your side of the road. Yeah. And that is a lifelong pursuit that is dealing with your childhood trauma, that is understanding your CPTSD and actively managing it. That is supporting yourself in the, you know, getting enough sleep, taking care of yourself so that you can show up for your children. That is learning through the tools we teach in coaching and the resources that we share, the books that we talk about, like how to move into emotional adulthood and take responsibility for the unhealthy patterns you have learned. You know, honestly, your own emotional childhood that you now get to raise yourself out of.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Right?
SPEAKER_00Yes. And it's very difficult to do it in isolation. I don't know that I could have. I needed to have a coach that could call my mind on its own bullshit. And I don't think that it's healthy to even try to do it on your own. I think things like this podcast, pointing things out to you. You've mentioned journaling. That's a great exercise where you talk to your parts, but also the community where you get support, but you also get the coaching, where there's you're seeing the patterns in other people because we're not as unique as we like to think sometimes. The human brain really likes to think certain things. And we have stories in our culture about divorce, and you're not going to be supported in moving on or not playing the victim. The world loves to support women as being the victim and the savior of their children. Yes. You have to have some, I think, some outside support if you're actually going to make progress in this realm.
SPEAKER_01It's amazing that I do have the community now to offer. That was not something that was available to us. We really went through it with coaching each other, learning the skills to manage our brains, and then coaching each other through that, which was just catching each other's stories for each other and processing emotion and reframing it as we went through over and over and over with all the different iterations of our stories that, and and there will be more to come. Yes. I mean, that's the other thing is this skill of reframing your story that is so apparent in your journey is the same one I had to do this last year with Joe coming in. I built this whole story of like, I can do this on my own and I'm independent, and it's so much better when I'm not with a partner. And so it's a lifelong skill that you learn, and it's a skill that your children are learning from you too, in how you frame this experience, how you frame their parent. So even if your ex-husband doesn't parent in the way that you would want them to, even if you don't end up with doing Thanksgivings together and, you know, uh co-parenting in this very beautifully connected way that we all dream of, consciously uncoupling and instead you find yourself in this space that I feel like you've shown. Thank you for letting us peek so deeply behind the curtain, Gwyn, into what that looks like. It's keeping in perspective that even if it doesn't go, quote, perfectly, which is what we as codependents want, your children are learning flexibility. They are learning perspective. They are learning how to navigate different environments. And ultimately, more and more, what I'm seeing in the world is that is what children need. They need resilience training.
unknownI'm
SPEAKER_01About y'all, but this year has shook me. Right? Our parents should have gotten divorced, so we could have learned some better skills. Some skills around like the world is not potentially stable. The things that you think are gonna be there can change. That's resilience training. That's your brain learning. I can go through hard things, and there will still be people on the other side that love me. And I can, I can speak up, I can develop my own skills, I can have boundaries. Yeah. So we're hopefully in this episode helping you go from this space of, oh my God, I can't leave my kid with this person. I must protect them to really diving in and understanding that this is at the heart of it, I think, in accepting of your path, choices you have made, where those choices have led you, and then making the most of that path instead of continuing to try and like bury our head in the sand. Like if you've married a partner you're not proud to be with that doesn't show up in ways that feel good to you, staying married and continuing to cover that up for your kids, in my opinion, just guarantees they're probably going to end up with something similar. And that's just me drawing from both yours and my experiences.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's just history. It's just history. And we know it keeps getting repeated. But I'm forging a different path for my kids. And that's what's exciting. That's the contrast, is that there's another way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01One of the things we wanted to end on was emphasizing that for us, where we landed was that the number one priority in our lives is not protecting our children. It's keeping our sanity and connection to ourselves. Yeah. Because, and it's just, it's just understanding that this idea we were sold that like your number one job is to protect your children as a mother. You cannot do that if you are not mentally sane and connected to yourself.
SPEAKER_00And you can't do it, period. End of sentence. You cannot completely protect your children. Whether you're married, whether you're divorced, doesn't matter. You're not going to protect your kids. And the sooner we get over this, I don't even know, this fantasy that we can somehow protect our children.
SPEAKER_01We can by staying in a nuclear family. Yeah. That's that's the piece. And yes, it is a road out. I mean, you got to see that, Quinn. I think you are such an incredible example of a rocky road out, a lot of twists and turns, surprises that you were not expecting. And yet at the end of the day, when you look at what you and your children have been through, you are like, yeah, I would do it again. Even though, in a lot of ways, that listener that wrote in your worst-case scenario of abuse with their parent happening happened. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it did. And I handled it. I fucking handled it like a boss, like a mother. And so can you. It's just skills. We are just lacking a lot of skills, as are our children, and we learn new skills through divorce. It doesn't have to be drama. It's just skills. We can figure it out. We can figure it out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And we have both through that process of figuring it out, we now get to live with that connection and sanity within ourselves. That I just can't say enough. For me, staying married, that was not working. This the piece of connection with myself and the sanity that just was not a piece that could fit. And this is this is that tension, right? From that listener where she's like, I know it is not good for me to be in this marriage, but I want to protect my kids.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And understanding and making peace with what is. And then, like you said, you can learn the skills. Your children also have a journey to go on. Yeah. And we think, oh, seeing their dad for who they really are, or experiencing less than ideal and perfect parenting, which you think you're controlling within your marriage, will be the worst thing ever. Thank you for sharing your story today to show.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01In many ways, yes, it's been tough for your children in its own ways, but I feel like they are so much more prepared for the world that they will encounter as adults. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And we still don't know how they're going to interpret all of this because that's something I can't control. They may grow up and be very upset about my parenting. And that's okay. They get to be upset. Or they may love it. I don't know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What I do know is you're gonna grow up and love your parenting. Yes, yes, I love my parenting.
SPEAKER_01Because that is the one thing you do have control over, is what you think about yourself and how you show up for yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for myself, for my kids. I even like how I show up for my ex because putting up with his shitty behavior would not be doing him any favors. So you're welcome.
SPEAKER_01I love it. That is such a perfect note to finish out this episode on. Quinn, thank you. Thank you for another deep dive. Thank you for really sharing a lot of those personal aspects of your story. It's such a gift for women to actually get to hear real experiences of what it's like to go through that kind of a process where kind of a worst-case scenario happens, and how do you reckon with all of that? So Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I also want to thank your listener that emailed you with a true heartfelt question that she needed some answers to. I, for one, am excited to hear from other women, their experiences, their fears. I am one of your founding members over on Substack. So I will be a part of the conversation as well.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Quinn. So happy to have all of you over there. And next week there will be an episode just from me here on Substack. So tune in then. Bye, y'all. Bye. Whew. Hell yeah, y'all. I just have to say, you guys are getting the clean edited version of that recording. Um, this is me jumping on post Quinn and I getting off. But that was a tough one for me and Quinn to get out. That is a tough topic. That is something that is just difficult to discuss, and especially with it being so personal to Quinn. So I'm feeling really proud right now about us getting that episode out to y'all. Also, um, I just wanted to remind everybody, especially because this week we had a coaching call in the community that was absolutely on fire. Many of you may not realize, I realized this. I was talking with Quinn and she's like, many may not understand what you mean by a coaching call in the community. So I just wanted to share with you all at the end of this episode that in the community, we do two live group coaching calls. So if you're listening to this episode, going like, okay, I do need more support. Like Quinn was saying, I she was saying she couldn't have gone through this without somebody watching her brain, but you can't have a personal coach. The community is an incredible resource for this. And we actually do live coaching. So two calls each month where my women in the community can write in if they are wanting specific coaching, and then they get coached live on the calls. And those calls are recorded and then kept in the community so that other women that maybe couldn't make the call can watch it. And y'all, live coaching is amazing, especially when you are watching other women that are in the process of considering divorce and going through very similar things. So this week we had a couple of women that I was coaching that were, you know, really stressing about they're both going through separations. Am I going to be able to handle it as a single mom? And we actually coached for one of them on the specific exact piece of the control aspect and wanting to manage her children and what's happened to them when they're with dad. And it's by far some of my favorite coaching that I've done in the community. So if you join the community in September this month, you will have access to that recording because our calls each month go into a monthly call library that we have. And so if you're specifically like, oh, this is an area I am struggling with, know that that is a call that you will have access to when you join the community. And along with that, you know, even in the community, just being able to post things in the chat, being able to post what you're going through and get feedback from other women, that is its own form of community support. I'd even go so far at times as its own type of coaching, because there are a lot of women in my community that are doing their own work, are using their own resources. So they're sharing those resources with each other. They're talking through things. So yeah, the community, if you are interested in joining that, you can text stay or go community all one word to 33777. That'll take you directly to our signup link. Also, if you are wanting, as always, that one-on-one, you can go look into my 90-minute sessions. You can get a link directly to those by texting 90MIN to 3377. And then over on my website, I've got my one-on-one coaching. That is what I have got for you all this week. I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye, babes.