The Loving Truth

Healing Through High Conflict Divorce

• Sharon Pope • Episode 130

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“My spouse is not going to allow for a peaceful divorce—no matter how much I want that.”

Karen McMahon joins me for this special episode of the podcast to answer an important question: “How do I navigate divorce with a high-conflict partner?” 

Karen is the Founder of Journey Beyond Divorce and the Host of The Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast. She has 14+ years of coaching experience guiding 650+ clients through the legal and emotional battles of high-conflict divorce. 

In this episode, Karen shares her personal story of high-conflict marriage, divorce, and co-parenting through it all to help you navigate your own struggle. 

Listen in to our conversation about how to prepare for an UNpeaceful divorce (even if you’re trying for peace). We also talk about how even one peaceful person can break generational dysfunction and the oft-overlooked impact of divorce on our adult children (and our relationships with them).a

Struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you’re serious about finding that answer?

Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Loving Truth Podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host relationship expert and certified Master Life Coach, sharon Pope. Hello, loves, this is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. If you have ever thought about ending your marriage but think you know what? Sharon, I hear you make it peaceful, but my spouse is not going to make it peaceful. This is going to be really hard Then, my friends, today's podcast is for you. We have a guest with us, karen McMahon.

Speaker 2:

Karen's passion is to help men and women navigate the emotional difficulties of high conflict breakups and divorce. Karen founded Journey Beyond Divorce in 2010 after discovering that the pain of dissolving her marriage had been the very stimulus for her personal transformation. For her personal transformation. She is the mother of two emerging adults. I love that. A graduate of the world's leading coaching institute, institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching, and a certified member of the ICF, which is International Coaching Federation. Welcome, karen. Hi Sharon, nice to be here. Thank you so much for being here and just sharing your wisdom as it relates to what we might just call high conflict divorces. Yeah, so I suspect that you got into this because you might have had a high conflict marriage, and and I was.

Speaker 1:

I was 34 when I met my, my ex-husband, and so I figured I'd been out and about for 15 years in the world and I I knew. I knew what I was. I wasn't a kid, you know. But a couple of years into it I was just confused and overwhelmed, and I was raised in a family with an alcoholic dad and an rageaholic mom, and I became a version of my mom, and so I ended up going into therapy.

Speaker 1:

We tried marriage counseling a number of times. I didn't understand neurodiversity or mental health issues, and so I just thought I'm a pretty sharp cookie, what the hell is my problem and why is he such an SOB? And it took us three and a half years. We had no money and it was 50-50 custody so we could talk about why does it take years and years and years to divorce when there's nothing really to decide? But it did. It took three and a half years and it was excruciating.

Speaker 1:

I would say that my divorce was both three and a half years of a living hell. I lived in the attic, I had two kids barely in grade school, and it was also the greatest gift I had ever been given. And when I emerged in 2006, I was so delighted with myself. I remember calling my best friend and saying you know, I got to be honest with you. I feel like such a refined version of myself that if someone said you had to do it all over again to be who you are today, I would do it on a dime, like I was that clear on the transformation I personally had gone through.

Speaker 2:

Wow, and so you two had lived together the whole time. You're in the process of divorcing, which I know is common because like to find and support two houses. I know it's common because like to find and support two houses. That wasn't the reason.

Speaker 1:

That was the reason, although we could not have supported two households, my ex-husband, when I filed for divorce, there was still we were still a fault state in New York. So we had to prove fault and he was right. He's my. We had an attorney for the children. So just a little bit of context. The police came to the front door, there was an order of protection, there was attorney for the children, there was a custody evaluation.

Speaker 1:

Cps went to the school three times to interview my kids. They told me it was the one and only time a six-year-old wrapped his arms around his chest and said I take the fifth. He was so afraid of sending his father to prison, which is what he was told would happen if he opened his mouth and said anything. So, so they were like, and the school social worker was like I've never in my life seen anything like that. But my son was like I am not putting dad in jail, I got nothing to say. So it was just horrible. My kids, my son, was a walking raw nerve after being such a jolly little guy. My daughter, thank God, dove into school and it became her, her, you know escape.

Speaker 1:

But it was three and a half years, the worst. One of my worst memories is having a girlfriend come and drop off food at the back door because I was a full-time working mom but I was fully commissioned and I was such a hot mess. I lost all my clients and dad wouldn't give me money to buy food for the kids, so my girlfriend was literally going to Costco and dropping food off at the back door so that I could just feed them. So mine was. When I think about it now, 15 years into my divorce coaching business, I feel like I experienced almost every horrendous thing that one could experience so that I could support people through so many different things, because ours was an incredible hot mess.

Speaker 1:

And my children's attorney said Karen, your divorce will only move as quickly as the slowest moving party. And that was something that I have shared a hundred times over and continues to be very true with many of my clients. And so dad was offended that I would divorce him. He literally stood before the judge and said my grounds were that he wouldn't have sex with me because I didn't want to use the grounds of him being abusive. I didn't want that to be public record, right. So I said so. He got up and he was like I'll have sex with her. She won't have sex with me. Tell her she has to come home and stay married.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, Wow. And that's because you were in a state that wasn't no-fault divorce at the time.

Speaker 1:

Which, by the way, I know that they're trying to roll back that clock in almost every state of the country, and we do not want that.

Speaker 2:

No, because then you have to prove Fault. Yeah, you have to prove false. Yeah, you have to prove. You can't just say, oh, we've grown apart, there's no irreconcilable differences, and yeah, so so which, by the way, will also keep many women in abusive marriages. One hundred percent, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So that was so. So people often say to me you know, I don't think I'm in a high conflict marriage, because and I would have said the same thing If someone said I was in a high conflict marriage it's just like you don't label it that way when you're in it, because you're in it for years or decades and it's normalized and it's like oh, he's just angry, he's just, you know, he has some annoying tendencies anger issues or something like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so what are? What would you consider? Let's just define that then for people. What would you consider to be a high conflict marriage?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's such a perfect, early on question, and so I am going to describe a dance to you, and first I'll describe the spouse of and then I'll I'll describe the people who come to me. So you, if you're married to somebody who has black and white thinking, they're very rigid in their thinking. If they tend not to show empathy even when you cry or you sit and you bring your issues to them, if they tend to project oh oh, you're upset about that. Well, I'm three times more upset about this. So they'll deflect and you'll defend. They're very uncompromising. There is no flexibility. It's my way or the highway.

Speaker 1:

History can be revisionist. I don't remember any of those things that way. The way it happened was it's actually crazy making when you're living with somebody who has this ball of wax and while everybody wants to say they're married to a narcissist, I will say I now know a lot about neurodiversity because both of my children were born of a neurodiverse parent and so you know, and many of my clients, it's like you're not married to a narcissist. Your spouse is on the autistic spectrum and this one's on the bipolar spectrum and many of my clients, it's like you're not married to a narcissist, your spouse is on the autistic spectrum, and this one's on the bipolar spectrum and this one's on the borderline personality or the anxiety or the depression, and so there's this whole ball of wax of people who are wired differently. So when we're not wired differently to our conversation earlier on the Journey Beyond Divorce podcast, when you're not wired differently you still earlier on on the journey beyond divorce podcast, when you're not wired differently, you still haven't been raised with great communication, the ability to deal with conflict resolution and all of these.

Speaker 1:

And then you take someone who's neurodiverse, or many of the spouses of the neurodiverse, many of my clients. They're dealing with PTSD just from their childhood. So they were raised by either unconscious parents or parents on some spectrum. So they're dealing with their trauma from childhood, their trauma from their marriage, and they might be people pleasers, codependent, conflict avoidant. And so here we are. What's a high conflict marriage? That's it it's like. And so here we are. What's a high conflict marriage? That's it. It's like it's having two people with their wounds, their brokenness, their shortcomings, that come together and create a hot mess.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know what I think a lot of times when you're trying to have those difficult conversations and your partner's just denying or rationalizing or gaslighting you or whatever, it can cause the other person to shut down sometimes, and then I think it would be easy to say, well, that's not conflict, because we don't argue that much. I tend to just shut down.

Speaker 1:

I had a client who's who cause I do an energy thing and the lowest energy is victim and the energy up from that is conflict. It's a kick. It's a good kick to have when you're going from victim and she said, she said I, I do not have any conflict. And and she had so much internal conflict and I was like, do you worry? Yeah, do you get frustrated? Yeah, do you have unforgiveness? Yeah, do you like. And we went through the whole thing. So it's like conflict does not mean explosive fighting. It could be implosive. In fact, I had a client who was married to a man who would go into his cave. He never answered, he, he, he literally rarely communicated. She spent over 40 years trying to guess what was going on with this guy. Huge conflict, like utter stress and tension and conflict, just very silent conflict. In many ways I had the explosive conflict. My ex-husband had anger management issues and so the whole neighborhood knew there was a problem. But those silent ones can feel so bone chilling and and painful in a very different way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Okay, so when there is a high conflict marriage, then there's probably you would suspect that the divorce might be high conflict as well, should you choose to go that way. So talk to me about what do you think? How should people prepare themselves? What should they be thinking about? What should they be focused?

Speaker 1:

on. Well, the first thing I'll say and this is just I get this all of the time for the spouse of the high conflict individual I know you want an amicable divorce. It makes sense that you want an amicable divorce. You're deluding yourself. How goes the marriage? So goes the divorce, and I'm going to say it again how goes the marriage, so goes the divorce. And I'm going to say it again how goes the marriage, so goes the divorce.

Speaker 1:

If you have not been able to communicate, if you've not been able to problem solve, if you've not been able to hear your spouse and acknowledge him or her, and vice versa. That's not going to start happening during the divorce. Here you're negotiating your future, you're negotiating your time with your children, you're negotiating what finances are going to look like. Everybody's going to be triggered, and that high conflict person, while they love swimming in conflict and they're much more comfortable in it than you are they're also doubly triggered. And so the way you prepare for that I would say, sharon, the first thing is be honest and realistic with yourself and then start looking at what are the shortcomings that haven't served me through this marriage. Because I'm going to tell you, you're afraid to put yourself first and you feel selfish when you do, and you have to put you and the kids first.

Speaker 1:

Going through the divorce, your communication is probably incredibly, your nose is soft, your yeses are tentative and tenuous. Learning, you know, learning communication and learning boundaries is going to be vital, because you need to make really big decisions and you can't do that if you're not standing on a foundation of confidence. And so we build our confidence by noticing our shortcomings, but not letting our inner critic beat the shit out of us with the bad. We notice them with kindness and self-compassion and then we begin to attend to them. And you want to work with someone like Sharon and I who can really support you in noticing mindset issues that don't serve you. Like you know, fear is is like a circus mirror right Fear is you look short and stubby or tall and skinny. Fear is going to take what might happen, happen. It's going to make it a hundred times worse, squared, and then you're going to be in a trauma reaction and you're not going to be able to do what you need to do. And so understanding mindset, understanding emotional regulation, working on skills like boundaries and communication are all going to serve you really well, and not just through your divorce.

Speaker 1:

I mean, the bottom line is my kids were barely in grade school. I had a co-parent with somebody who called child support my monthly extortion check, who put my son down because he was a loser and a quitter like his mom. Like you're going to deal with things, I dealt with my kids coming home, my six foot son throwing his body on the living room floor, crying his eyes out because his dad crushed him one more time. If you are divorcing a high conflict person, you're going to be the only healthy parent and the children only need one healthy parent. And so when you do all of this work, you get to be a stand for breaking generational chains, for teaching your children how to navigate not just their parent but all of the difficult human beings they're going to run into in their life. You build emotional intelligence in yourself, you pay it forward to your children and, god willing, like me, you find that your divorce may have been hellacious, but it was also the best thing that ever happened to you.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's powerful. I think I agree with you that the whole like not every marriage needs to be saved and that you can Break generational dysfunction. That can happen because all we do, we come into marriage only with the example of what we saw at home and that's what becomes normalized. It's how like you, can you know if you saw your mom in an abusive marriage it's not unlikely that you would become, you would turn into, you know, someone who's going to be in an abusive marriage yourself. It's like we we just we normalize the example that we saw and then we repeat it over and over again until we become conscious to it.

Speaker 1:

Right, and if you don't do this work, or when you do the work, then you can pay it forward to your children and help them navigate the other parent, but navigate intimate relationships. That's part of breaking this dysfunction. And my kids were four and six when I sat them down to say I was leaving dad. My daughter is 26. My son is 28. I watched them go through a number of relationships that looked identical to me and their dad. My daughter has some neurodiversion and she was the more high conflict person sometimes, and sometimes she was with a high conflict person. She was actually in a one physically abusive relationship. My son was almost always the codependent.

Speaker 1:

But because of the trust that I was able to build not by telling them but by inviting, asking questions and inviting them to understand like my son would come home and I'd say, well, what happened with dad? And and how did you handle it? And how do you wish you handled it? And why didn't you say that? And what do you need to be able to say that? And and and none of it involved. He's a bad guy.

Speaker 1:

It was all about you, christopher, like, what is it that you need? And so when we do that, we open these lines of trust and then, through teenage years and emerging adults, if they trust us and they come to us, then we truly can break those generational chains because we can be there to help them connect the dots when that felt so bad, just like what daddy used to do to you, or you did that thing just like mommy used to do, and you gave yourself up. And so it's not easy work, but for me it has been the most rewarding journey and now I see both of my children in healthy relationships and it may not be their forever relationship, but I have seen them up level. Their emotional intelligence, their relationship intelligence and their picker has gotten better and better and healthier and healthier.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that you know. You said so much good stuff there, like the, the don't. They're going to learn from not just your words. They're going to learn from your actions. You know, and being able to grow beyond what they saw at home requires you to be able to be there with them in that, not just don't do as I like, what does it do as I say? Not as I do, right? So when we grow, we give our kids that opportunity to grow beyond that as well and create healthier relationships. It's so beautiful.

Speaker 1:

And I love to bring this up, sharon, because I think for your listeners who are emerging from really unhealthy marriages, you know there's the fear that I've already created, or we've already created, such brokenness in our children and now it's just going to get worse because divorce is so bad and so conflict is much worse than divorce. The research shows that children being raised with incredible conflict is significantly worse for them than children being raised in two single parent households with love and boundaries and kindness. And so even if that's you, and even if you waited until they went to college, there's still plenty of years ahead and as you heal and refine, you pay all of that forward and you will enjoy your children and your grandchildren just being healthier and healthier and as hard as high conflict divorce is, it's an incredible gift if we're willing to roll up our sleeves and work on it.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's super cool. So one of the things that you brought to mind for me was guilt. So when you're the one that is making the decision to end the relationship, there's guilt that comes along with that. Now, you and I both know it took two of us to get to this place, but then it takes one person to say no more and then we will give up. That guilt will make us like, oh well, I don't need that. Like I know, in my, in my, when I went through my divorce, we had he, he had a business with some other people and we had some rental properties and I just gave up the rental properties because I felt so guilty. And now I'm sitting here going. That was so dumb. Like guilt makes you do just stupid things. So what are the? What are the? The little nuances like that, like the emotions that can cause downstream impacts that people should pay attention to?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think guilt, which is I've made the decision and therefore I've destroyed the family when in fact, chances are, everyone wasn't happy, everything wasn't going well, you made the decision for a good reason Shame, which is so much worse than guilt. So it's like not only am I the bad guy for making the decision, I'm a bad person, you know, and and the shame that comes with that, and that's going to lead you to give up even more, that's going to lead you to not negotiate on the best in the best interest of you and your family. And then there's just the fear of being the bad guy. I was the bad guy, and not only do I encourage you to be the bad guy, but I would say stay the bad guy, because when you don't, you start telling the children all of the dirty laundry that they have no, they should not know about, and it burdens them. And my kids got a lot from their dad and it really caused them a tremendous amount of pain. And so my daughter came to me in her early 20s and she said I'm so sorry, you just never defended yourself. And I just believe, daddy, he just told me how horrible you were.

Speaker 1:

And and she, as they all do hear this, they will come to their own conclusions. Bite your tongue. Drink the blood from biting your tongue. Bite your tongue. Do not put the other parent down. Trust that your children are intelligent and let me say, if you have young children, they are energetic antennas. They may probably know better than your older children exactly what's going on. Trust, trust, trust and and, to the degree that you can, grace and dignity, because because that really does, that allows you. You have a lot of work to do, the right thing by these two little people and and myself, but myself.

Speaker 1:

Third, I'll say that I was very codependent. I wanted to do it for them. I actually left for them and not for me. My therapist said I think you would have stayed until you died if it weren't, you know, for the fact that you saw that your kids were being harmed. Your kids were being harmed, so so so I was, I was, and I say this to say you know, if people find me now, do not think for a moment that who I am today is anything like who I was. I was the hottest mess, I was the most broken, I did everything wrong until I learned, and then I started turning it around, and it's never too late to turn it around.

Speaker 2:

That's, that's fantastic. I love you sharing that. So, um, I would love to pick your brain a little bit on adult children. So, um, I have a well, first of all, so many of my clients or people who follow me, they're nearing empty nester or they are empty nesters and they've probably told themselves a story about I'll wait till the kids are 18 or I'll wait till they've graduated high school because then it won't be so tough on them or they, you know it won't, it won't impact their lives, or they, you know it won't, it won't impact their lives.

Speaker 2:

However, I find that adult children have, they still struggle with it and they are not shy about sharing their opinions. I had a, I had a client where she, she and her, her husband they might divorce, they have separated and their adult son who, I want to say, is like early 30s and has three kids, so her grandkids and he's super religious and has told her, like you are not a Christian, because the Bible says you cannot divorce and you will not have a relationship with me or your grandchildren. I mean it's brutal. And so now she's, she is feeling really stuck and trapped. So adult kids still have feelings and impact by that. But I would love for you to just talk about yeah, the impact to adult kids and how to navigate those hard conversations.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because they are very different conversations. So the first thing that I learned many years ago, and it just never occurred to me, was that so my children so if they were four and six, let's say they were eight and nine, or eight and 10 when we literally moved out. So they've lived now at this point in they were, they were eight and nine or eight and 10 when we literally moved out. So they've lived now at this point in their lives they're not yet 30, but they've spent more time being the children of a divorced family, right and living under mom and dad. Whereas your client has a 30 year old who spent 30 years, 35 years, with mom and dad as a unit, married, and so if you think about it, it's like it's such a shock, it's such a devastating change, Whereas the younger children, you know, a couple of years in, it's like okay, well, this is just my norm. So there's that part. I think that we assume if you're married and you have kids, you know you're good, my divorce is me and dad are divorcing. That has that's not going to impact you. It impacts them more because they have so many years of mom and dad being a unit, even if they've been a bad unit. So so that's something to realize. So when you're divorcing and your kids are in college or they're married or they have children of their own, do not assume that they're going to handle it better. Just know that they had a lot of years of you being married, happily or otherwise, and so that's a huge adjustment for them. So let's just say, on an emotional and mindset issue, it's much more than we would expect it to be. And then there are boundaries on both sides that I just want to talk about. So I'll use.

Speaker 1:

You know, dad wants to let our adult daughter know that we're getting a divorce because your mother had an affair and you're 35 years old. You could handle that. No, no, no, she's always your daughter, whether she's 35, 45, 55. No, absolutely Positively no. Tell your friend, tell your therapist, tell your coach, tell your attorney. Do not share that kind of information with an adult child. Mom, on the other hand, might go. You know me and dad are getting divorced and you know I'm not going to talk about why, but I am so afraid for my financial future and I don't think I can make it, and I, you know, I think I'm going to be eating cat food. And no, no, Talk to your girlfriend, talk to your therapist, talk to your financial planner, because the burden. So now you've got your kid, who's starting their own family and they're trying to figure out their own finances. And they're trying to figure out, holy shit, mom and dad are getting divorced. And if they got divorced, does that mean that I thought I was happily married, but maybe I'm not. Maybe it can happen to all that is going on. And then, on top of that, you're going to tell them about the fair, You're going to tell them about your finances. So, so, no.

Speaker 1:

So, from parent to adult child, Uber boundaries you have to crystal clear and you do not share. Just like they were seven, it doesn't matter if they're seven or 47, do not share. On the flip side is what you said, which is, your children think that they know They've been around the sun 30 times, 35 times. They got opinions. They're going to tell you just how it is going to be or should be. In both of these cases, we're talking about understanding and practicing and practicing setting and upholding really healthy boundaries. And so you know with your client. So you know with your client.

Speaker 1:

The interesting thing about a boundary is my adult child could choose to withhold my grandchildren from me, and I don't have control there, Right. What I can do is I can acknowledge, I can validate and I can set the boundary that you know you can't shame me or if you do this, I'll do that and that can be in my head. I don't even have to say that. But, yes, one of the things that can happen is that you have to set boundaries with your adult children, and your adult children may make decisions that make the divorce even harder and you have to navigate that, and I think the same thing as divorce itself.

Speaker 1:

It's like what is within my control, Right, and I work a lot. I don't know if you have opportunity. I work a lot with parents who are alienated from their child because of the other parent, and you know they always like how do I get them back? And that's the same thing with getting an adult child back for different reasons. It's like that is a process of my tip is always the same, and it's like just be love. You be love, no matter what they show up, as you be as unconditional a loving presence as you can, and if you've been cut out of your grandchildren's lives. You send them cards and you send them gifts and you send text messages and you use every form of communication you can to be loved, Because, at the end of the day, it's the one thing that does pull people back, is we all just want to be loved.

Speaker 2:

Right, I have a good friend who went through a divorce and she said you will be challenged a thousand different times in hundreds of different ways of do you really put your kids first? Because we all say we do, but you're going to get tested over and over and over again where you're going to want to say the thing, or you're not going to want to be loving because your ex isn't being loving towards you, or you're not going to want to be loving when he brings his new girlfriend and it's awkward and whatever, like there's going to be a million different ways that you're going to be asked that question of do you really put your kids first? Yeah, and so you got to be prepared for that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I had a a story of my son having boundaries if I could share Um. So he was on the West Coast and he came back to New York and he hadn't. My ex-husband is particularly displeasing to be in relationship with, and so my daughter stopped my son, kind of paused it for a while and then he called me and he goes. You know, I don't feel good about this. I'm noticing personality traits in myself that are dads that are lovely, and I don't like not being in communication with him. And I was like that's wonderful, like tell me more. And so he said I'm going back to New York and I want to see him. And I said, okay, how can I support you? And he said I don't want to have to listen to dad, put you down. So I said, okay, thank you, um, what would that sound like?

Speaker 1:

And he was able to articulate the boundary and and he went and he he saw his dad and he called me afterwards and I said how did it go? And he said, well, I told him I came in and I said look, I love you, I want to hang out with you. I have one rule You're not allowed to say anything about my sister or mom, and if you do, I'm going to have to get up and leave there. You go Beautiful, how'd he do? He's like mom.

Speaker 1:

He did great for about 20, 25 minutes and this is what really impressed me. And then he couldn't help himself and I said what did you do? And he said I stood up and I called my dog over and I said you have a choice right now, dad, I love you and I'd like to stay, but if you really need to bash mom, I'll go and we'll get back together at another time. And he said dad stopped and we ended up having a nice visit and I share this because he came like I was called every name under the sun, I was yelling, I was screaming, it was just so, so, so, so nasty, and that was he was a little boy hearing that and for him to have come to this place where he's really minimized his codependence and he's setting boundaries, and he found a lane with dad, like a safe lane. They watch basketball and football together and they're short periods of time and he has boundaries, and so I share this with him.

Speaker 2:

It, so I share this only all or nothing. You don't have to lose a parent in the process of divorce.

Speaker 1:

Anything is possible. My daughter decided there wasn't a lane she wanted to swim in, and that's that's her choice. And and then and I'll just throw this to your listeners and then I deal with the conflict of my daughter judging my son and my son judging my daughter around dad. And so here I am, like so many years post-divorce, and of course it still plays out. It plays out in 100 different ways and it's OK, because if you're calm and you're clear and you know what your values and priorities are, and that's your North Star and you are there to support your kids, everybody gets to grow together.

Speaker 2:

I love that, so I'm interested in. What do you find? What does success look like when you're coming through a high conflict, divorce? What's the North Star that should be guiding people?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. I would say, first and foremost, um a healthy sense of self. Most of us are so. I was such a shell of myself. I was so broken. I had no confidence in my parenting. I had no confidence in anything. I was confident in my life as a professional, but my personal life, I was a doormat.

Speaker 1:

And so the first thing I would say is a successful success in a high conflict divorce is you standing in your power, focusing on yourself, healing your shortcomings, refining your skills and abilities so that you can wake up and feel self-love every day.

Speaker 1:

That, regardless of what happens with the paperwork, that is complete success, because you could have the best financial and custody settlement and not have any difference in the dynamic between you and your ex and I've seen that a hundred times and so the settlement is important and it's valuable, and we want you to negotiate something that's financially supporting you and custody that takes care of the kids, takes care of the kids, and yet, at the end of the day, you're going to be co-parenting or parallel parenting with this person, and your sense of self, your self-confidence, your self-esteem, your ability to boundary yourself and hold yourself to your own guidelines there's such empowerment in that, there's such a sense of I love myself and if I could do this, if I could dig out of that, I could do anything, and that's really what I wish for everybody emerging from a high conflict divorce is that, first and foremost, you've changed and grown in ways that will benefit you and your family for the rest of your life.

Speaker 2:

Amen, yeah, because you take yourself with you. You know, when you leave a divorce you're taking yourself with you, and so if you can come out with a better sense of self, that is going to impact every relationship you have.

Speaker 1:

And I'll even say, as we wrap up, I am back out dating and I'm divorced 18 years. I haven't. I had some family crises that kept me from having any interest in a partner for quite a number of years. If you choose to go out and potentially find a new partner, the only place you can heal certain things is an intimate relationship, and so the opportunity just shows up again. And even in the chit-chatting on Match and the kind of interesting human beings that are out there and the things that get triggered and the mindset issues or self-worth, even if it's just a little bit, issues that are still there, it really does. When the focus is always on me, everything gives me an opportunity to be a better person and that's really, you know, that's my thing going through life. It's like if I can heal and refine until the day I meet my maker, then I'm on the right path and that's what I believe would serve us all well.

Speaker 2:

Beautiful. Thank you so so much, karen, for being here. If someone is feeling like they might be facing a high conflict divorce where could they find more of your goodness?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so Journey Beyond Divorce. It's a podcast, it's our website. We do have a special rapid relief call. You go to rapidreliefcallcom and you can book a free coaching session with me or someone on my team. It's just to help you figure it out. So all of those things are available to you.

Speaker 2:

All right, thank you so so much. Thank you, this was lovely.

Speaker 3:

If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team. On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to clarityformymarriagecom to fill out an application now. That's clarityformymarriagecom.