How to Maintain Your Social Life After Divorce
One of the most common challenges in divorce can be the loss of one’s social network. Some friends and family are supportive, others have the best intentions (yet are unhelpful), and many seem to simply vanish from one’s life. The loss of friends and family during this transition can add to the stress already being experienced. Many find the necessity to reach out and make new friends yet find the task daunting. Here are some helpful tips on how develop new friendships during separation, divorce and beyond:
How to Stay Civil With Your Ex
As co-parenting becomes the norm for a lot of divorced couples, establishing a civil relationship with the ex-spouse becomes more and more important. It can be very difficult, especially at first, to be civil to your ex in regular interactions like picking up and dropping off children, but it is even more difficult when you are forced to spend extended amounts of time in each others company. At joint celebrations like birthdays, t-ball games and weddings, the time spent in each others company, or even just in each others vicinity, can be excruciating. Some tips to surviving the day are:
Divorce — Detox for a Toxic Marriage
Divorce is often considered to be a bad word, and many people respond to it in the same way they would a contagious disease. Divorce is so taboo that many married people would rather stay in an awful marriage than go the route of separation and divorce.
How Divorce Affects Your Sleep
Sleep is one of our most precious resources. It is vital to our health and well-being. Just as we need food for energy, we need sleep to relax and recharge. During sleep the body renews its energy, releases growth hormones, and heals itself. In times of extreme stress sleep is one of the first things to become disrupted. There are two types of disruption: excessive sleeping and lack of sleep. It is not uncommon to experience both of them in the same period of time and even alternate between not being able to sleep and sleeping what seems like all the time.
Attachment and Loss in Divorce
Loss is one of the most painful human experiences, and over the course of a lifetime we can experience a variety of losses. How we process and experience our loss will greatly impact how we recover from it and how well handle the inevitable additional losses well experience in the future. Loss impacts us across our lifespan. It can be experienced as part of the developmental separation from a caregiver, or in response to divorce or the death of a loved one. The more we allow ourselves to feel attached and connected to others, the greater the potential for loss, making the idea of attachment a risky endeavor for many people.