How can I have a peaceful life after divorce?

When we think about life after divorce, most of us think about the hostility, hurt and anger that follows. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to have a peaceful life after divorce, one where you can emerge civilly and move forward with your life.

I recently listened to an episode of Peace Talks Radio called “Peacemaking After a Divorce.” In this program, there are three parts: the story of how one couple navigated through their separation to have a peaceful life post-divorce; a conversation with therapist Samuel Roll about how to have a smooth divorce, especially if you have children; and an excerpt from Sasha Aslanian’s program “Divorced Kid” that looks at the effect divorce has on children.

You can listen to the entire program here, which I highly recommend, as it offers takeaways that you can apply to your own life and individual situation. Two of these I feel are especially important when finding a way to have a peaceful life as you go through separation and finalize your divorce.

Recast the relationship

One idea is to change the language you use to describe divorce and your former partner by recasting it into something new, like “a warm friendship between two people who’ve known each other for 20 years.”

No matter how long you were married, you have a shared history with that person. Instead of erasing those memories and filing them away, think of your separation as a way to “untangle” your lives together. Judy Osborne, a family therapist in Boston and author of the book The Wisdom of Some Separated Parents, says it best:

The kind of hurt, and anger, and sense of abandonment that’s often there at the beginning of a separation and a divorce, it changes over time, especially if you have children that keep you connected. And you find a way to fill that space that was filled with anger and sadness and abandonment, with a more benign space of connection between you that depends on your relationship you’ve had for a long, long time.

Every relationship will vary, and it may take years to find that benign space, but it’s one way to emerge from your divorce and have a peaceful life after. Recasting the relationship is the tactic the show’s producers, Paul Ingles and Suzanne Kryder, used during their own divorce and the space they share in producing Peace Talks Radio.

Grieve and give up the hurt

The first step in moving toward a peaceful life after divorce is to realize that not reducing the hostility and resolving conflicts between you and your ex will hurt the children. How do you do that? Samuel Roll, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of New Mexico, has an idea:

Every separation is like a death and every reunion is like a resurrection but every divorce is like a death but it’s like a death that you can’t put away in the graveyard because the foot keeps on coming out. And so dealing with the illness aspects of the marriage, dealing with the investment in the children and then dealing with the grief or not dealing with the grief, because if you don’t deal with the grief it becomes bitter depression and raging anger.

So if you take care of those three things, you come a long way toward being able to have a relatively more peaceful divorce and a relatively more peaceful recovery because divorce is an assault, not only on the children, but on the people being divorced.

Roll gives two solutions to working toward a peaceful divorce:

1. Take a look at the unresolved issues between you and take care of them; and
2. Remember that you both have a vested interest in the well being of the children, reduce the hostility to zero and find some way to compromise.

These ideas barely scrape the surface. Working toward a peaceful life after divorce takes time, patience, commitment, and help from others.

What are your ideas for having a peaceful life post-divorce?

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