Although divorce is very common nowadays, it can be difficult to know how to best get through a divorce.
It is often a very demanding period, where, in addition to many difficult emotions, it is also very practical and legal to deal with.
Abroad, for example in the United States and the United Kingdom, a new type of divorce expert has popped up. These are divorce doulas (ed., Divorce doulas).
Usually, most of us associate a doula with births, where the doula looks after the interests of the woman giving birth and is not part of the health care system.
The doula concept is less well known in other areas of life. But in recent years, there have also been deaths in the United States that can support the dying, and abortion doulas that can help women who want abortion through an emotionally stressful process.
Many divorce doulas are former attorneys who combine their legal knowledge with their empathic abilities.
They build a bridge between what different professions can usually help with in a divorce, such as a lawyer, a therapist and a conflict mediator.
Other divorce doulas have a background in psychology or coaching.
If you google “divorce doula”, it does not immediately appear that there is anyone in Denmark. How can that be? Couples and psychotherapist Stine Zink has an offer for this:
– I guess it is because the systems are probably more complex abroad, such as in the US, where people often spend a lot of money on divorce lawyers in connection with the legal. In Denmark, it is assumed that you find out about your divorce yourself, also in relation to the legal one.
– For example, we do not need to be separated before a divorce, as is otherwise the case in some other countries, but can be divorced immediately and online.
From idyll to trauma
Most people who get married have an idealized notion of their partner. Everything seems perfect, you have found the love of your life, have so much in common, and feel that you are with someone who understands you completely.
When we get married, we typically have a strong notion that we should be married, “until death do us part”. We imagine that the marriage will remain intact without us even making an effort.
Because we are so convinced that a marriage should last the rest of our lives, we therefore perceive it as a great personal failure when the marriage does not work.
We will not be known by our guilt and shame that we do not thrive in marriage and focus instead on finding fault with the other.
According to Stine Zink, we are also not aware that the other person’s behavior triggers old raw material in us, which causes us to project negative emotions onto the partner, which has nothing to do with the partner, but which is about our past.
7 Ways to a Friendly Divorce
1. Reflect on how old failures and traumas in your life have affected your relationship.
2. Get things separated: What’s about your partner? What about you and the things you have in your luggage that have not been processed?
3. Allow your ex to be who he or she is. Show respect.
4. Go elsewhere for comfort. Do not use your partner.
5. Give yourself time to lick your wounds.
6. Turn down the ambitions of being best friends afterwards.
7. Use your network to talk about how you are feeling.
– Everything we have experienced of deep pain, failure and trauma is activated in the relationship if we have not had it processed, says Stine Zink.
For most of us, the old stuff that we subconsciously run off on our partner goes all the way back to the first emotional relationship in life – the relationship with our parents.
But we are not aware of that. Unconsciously, we try to resolve the things we have with us from the relationship with our parents, and therefore many of us end up finding a partner who is reminiscent of our mother or father.
But when we are not aware of what is happening inside us and what it is about, we do not discover that our spouse’s behavior is a sign that there is something we can get worked out and healed in the relationship.
Instead, we accuse and blame each other. And then a divorce can also be hard to get through in a good way, but end up being yet another trauma we take with us in a new relationship.
Conscious uncoupling
If, instead of blaming the other, we can look at the relationship with our partner as an opportunity to work with ourselves, old failures, traumas, etc., we can also prevent a divorce from developing into a drama.
This is the idea behind conscious uncoupling, which many first heard about when actor Gwyneth Paltrow and musician Chris Martin used the term when announcing their divorce.
But the term has been used long before. In 1976, sociologist Diane Vaughan developed an “uncoupling theory,” and in 2009, couple and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas, who helped Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin to a good divorce, began teaching students around the world the theory.
Conscious uncoupling means that a couple separates in a friendly way and retains mutual respect both in the divorce process itself and afterwards. Along the way, the couple remembers to take care of their possible children’s needs.
An important part of conscious uncoupling is self-reflection. Conscious uncoupling presupposes that one understands that any irritation and any quarrel in the relationship was a signal to reflect on oneself in order to identify inner unprocessed things that need to be healed.
The things that caused problems in the relationship were, so to speak, an echo of the past. With that approach, one understands that there are no villains in the sunken relationship, but only two people who acted as teacher and student, respectively, in turn.
By reflecting on how your own past has affected the relationship with the partner you are divorcing, you can get a friendly divorce, which can be the starting point for something new to sprout.
Self-reflection is also the only way to avoid repeating the same inappropriate patterns in relation to new partners in the future.
It is about finding a home for yourself so that you can enter into a long-lasting relationship.
When do we need help with divorce?
As a couple and psychotherapist, Stine Zink often experiences that couples may need help to become properly mentally separated.
– Some couples have been together for decades and are used to thinking in a common “you and me”. They have lost mutual respect and there are no limits to what they think they can afford to say to each other. If we ask a colleague if he can take a shift and the colleague answers no, then we will not ask why, what do you really need, it is important what you need and so on.
– We will instead respect our colleague and perhaps just say that it was a pity. But we behave differently cross-border towards our partner and later ex. And that gives problems. So that’s one of the reasons why it’s important to get help to be separated from your parties in a good way in order to get through a divorce well, says Stine Zink, who encourages people to start looking at each other as colleagues already during the divorce. This applies, for example, when you have children together.
– You become parent colleagues, and you do not trample on each other, but show each other respect, not least to make a future collaboration about the children work.
