00:00 

This is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 32, "My Divorce Decision." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright. Hello there. How are you today? I hope you're doing really good. I hope that you are feeling like you are seeing life for what it is and starting to see the things that you have control over and the things that you don't have control over. And I hope that you are starting to move toward a better, more content, peaceful life. That doesn't mean that things are always going to be good, but I believe that it does mean that we will be handling them in a way that will work to our best benefit and that we'll recognize those challenges for being really great learning experiences and changes for us to move forward. 

00:58 

So today, I'm going to talk about my divorce decision. And this is something that I know when I was working through this process of trying to figure out, I called a friend one Sunday after church, and I was just struggling so much, and I had been crying and couldn't figure out what direction I was supposed to go. And I called a friend who had been divorced probably about 20 years and remarried and now in a very, very good situation. But I called her and just asked if I could come over and chat one Sunday afternoon, and I went over and sat down and just bawled and just said, "how do you know? How do you know when it's time?" And we talked about that, so I know that it's really difficult sometimes to know, because this is one of the biggest decisions and probably the hardest, single most difficult decision that I've ever made in my life. 

01:55 

And I know that since I've been divorced, I have a lot of people who will come up and ask me similar questions. "How do you know? What was it like for you?" And I think it's because for a lot of us this is just new territory and it's a place that we never thought that we would be so we don't have a contingency plan. We don't have something else in place that says "oh, well, I'll just do this." A lot of us got married thinking "this is it and I'm never getting divorced. That's not in my plans. It's not part of who I am. It's not what I think. It's not what I do." And so when we find ourselves in a situation where we find ourselves contemplating this and wondering if this is an option, it's a hard place to be. It is painful and it is gut-wrenching for sure. 

02:44 

I know that, like I said, hardest decision I've ever made in my life because it doesn't just impact me and it didn't just impact my ex-spouse. It impacted four amazing little kids and that was hard for me to come to terms with. But as I have a lot of people ask me about the process that I went through and how I got there, I thought that I would share my experience. Now just as a disclaimer, everybody's experience is going to be completely different, but I think sometimes in hearing another experience it can help us to see our own experience a little bit more clearly. Just as when I hear other coaches coach people, I can get a better sense of how that piece fits into my own life. 

03:29 

So though my experience will be completely unique and there may be pieces of it that you connect with and there may be pieces that you just go, oh so not even. But if you're going through this situation of trying to make a decision of where you are, I just offer this as my situation. I feel like right now I am in the best place in my entire life. I am four years out for my divorce, but I will tell you the years before that and specifically the four years right before that were some of the hardest years of my life. 

04:03 

So here we go. My marriage pretty much was a struggle from the beginning and not just for me. It was a struggle for my spouse as well. We both just, it was a hard place for us to be. We got married really quickly without knowing each other very well and I would dare say that we probably didn't even love each other really. I think we tried to tell ourselves that we did because we were getting married, but we didn't have a lot in common, but we felt like we were supposed to get married, which if my daughter tried to do that, I would struggle with that, because now at this stage in my life I see so much more that needs to be happening in a marriage and in preparation for that and in your relationship and things that need to be happening. 

04:48 

But we started off pretty rough and I would say that for the most part of our marriage probably every, as I've gone back and looked at my journals, every year and a half, two years, we had situation where divorce came up and where it was talked about. And I was married for 24 years. So there was a lot of years of struggle. And yet for the bulk of when that discussion about divorce would come up, I was always like "oh no, absolutely not. I didn't get married to get divorced. Marriage is a hundred hundred. Divorce is not an option." 

05:15 

Well I think I said just even in the last podcast those are great phrases if you're in a healthy place with two healthy people but I was not and those were horrible phrases for me. They kept me in a place where I felt like I was stuck and I didn't feel like I could I could move. My attitude toward getting divorced was an absolutely not even going there. Yet I couldn't find a way out. I was using every tool that I knew how to use at this point. As I look back I think "oh, I've got a lot more tools now and I see things more clearly," but I don't know that I could have gotten to the place I am now while I was still in the marriage. And so for me I think the divorce was part of my progress and part of what I needed to go through in order to grow how I needed to grow. 

06:12 

So my story with coming to terms with divorce...so for the first 20 years of my marriage divorce was a no-go. It just was not even an option to put on the table. And when it was brought up in the previous years of my marriage I would panic a little bit and I would get like "oh no, this just isn't right. This isn't what we're supposed to do," and I would try to fix things. And I would try to be a better wife, and I would try to put myself out there more to do the things that my husband wanted me to do and try to make him happy more. And yet it just never seemed to work. 

06:50 

So at about 20 years, I was listening to a parenting book in my car. I was listening to a book while I was driving around and the parenting guy that was talking started talking about enabling and how we enable our children on what was going on and I had this huge aha. You know how sometimes the Spirit has something to teach you and it just feels like it rocks your soul? This was one of those times for me where I just went "oh my gosh." And this was my first inkling that I was not setting healthy good boundaries when I saw some enabling behaviors and things that were going on. And at that time I didn't have the verbiage to say boundaries. I was calling it enabling. But as I look back it really was boundaries that were holding me up. I was not setting appropriate boundaries. 

07:45 

And this is where I first started to see my part of what was going on. And so that was a big aha for me. And about a month later, I was listening to another book and this was from a psychologist, I believe, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his name was John Lund. And this was a series of presentations that he gave, but in one of those, he was talking just to women and he said something to the effect of, to the women who are divorced. He said, "how do you know that God didn't know that your marriage wasn't going to work out? Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew that your marriage was not a celestial marriage. But maybe he also knew that only in that marriage could you and your spouse learn the things that you needed to learn to become the people you needed to become." 

08:44 

And that hit me probably stronger than anything else ever had. As was driving in my car, I felt the spirit just drive that into my heart. And you know what, I don't believe that that's true for everybody, but through my experience and through how the Spirit touched my heart when he said that, I feel like that was for me. And so I took that idea that, you know what, maybe God knew that it was going to be like this. Maybe He knew it was going to be hard. Maybe He knew that we would end up divorced, but maybe He also knew that this was the path that I needed to take and that he needed to take for us to become the people that we needed to become. 

09:30 

And that brought some perspective to me about divorce that started to change how I saw it. Previous to this, I had had some close experiences with a couple of siblings who had gotten divorced and I totally could see their situation. I was just like,  "yes, you do what you got to do. You got to take care of it." But a lot of times with other people that I didn't understand their situation, I was not so generous with my compassion and I was a little bit more judgmental. And I just thought, you know what, "you can fix it. You can make it work." But I finally hit this point about 20 years into my marriage where I just started to realize that, "you know what, sometimes you can't always fix it and sometimes you can't always make it work." 

10:15 

And so I started to see what was going on. I started to receive some guidance that changed how I was viewing what was going on. And at this point, I decided to go see a counselor. And I went to this counselor and as we talked about things, he helped me see things that I had been unwilling to acknowledge before. He helped me to see things that I had been unable to see before. And through that process, I really started to realize that divorce really was an option. And this is when I started to set some real boundaries in my marriage and this was not received well. Right up front it was pretty tough. It was hard for me to stand my ground with my boundaries and it was hard for my husband at the time to have boundaries because I hadn't had boundaries before. So all of a sudden saying "nope, this is not going to happen," "nope, this is..." you know, and I don't think they were unreasonable. But for the situation I was in I felt like they were very necessary. 

11:15 

It was tough because for him I was changing the rules all of a sudden, things that I had always been willing to do I was just like "nope, not doing that anymore," and that was hard for him, which is understandable because I was changing the rules. But for me they were boundaries that should have been set very early on in my marriage, but I didn't understand that I needed to set those boundaries. I thought I was protecting our marriage by not setting boundaries. I thought I was keeping the contention at a low and I was keeping things from escalating, but what I didn't realize was that they were gonna escalate eventually anyway because the situations were not being resolved. 

11:59 

And so eventually we kind of settled into a new normal of what was going on and it was still rough and we were not resolving issues at all. And we went through about three years of pretty rough. And part of this for me was that the very first year after I started seeing that counselor and had these realizations that divorce could be an option, I got panicked and I freaked out a lot. And I spent the next year doing everything I knew how to do to try and make things work and trying to fix this. And I'm sure that if you ask my ex-husband, he would go, "I didn't notice anything," probably because I didn't talk about it. I just was trying to do things. I was trying to do anything that I could, but I found myself so focused on the difficult marriage that a lot of the other things that were most important to me for most important, my children, I had started to kind of neglect a little bit. 

13:01 

Now, not in any serious ways, but in ways that I could sense that they were starting to struggle more. And after about a year of this and really trying to do what I could to take care of things in my marriage and trying to fix things while still having boundaries, I went out to lunch with a really dear friend, and she's about 15 years older than me. And I'm so grateful for these older women in our lives who help us figure stuff out. And she had not ever been divorced, but went out to lunch with her and was just talking to her about the situation. And she had been a confidant during this time. And she just looked me in the eyes and she says, "but Tanya, how are your kids doing?" And, again, I was flooded with this Spirit just saying "your kids are hurting. Your kids are not getting what they need." And I'm so glad that she asked me that question because it helped me to stand back and I thought, "you know what, I'm spending so much time trying to fix a marriage that doesn't really want to be fixed. And meanwhile, my kids are suffering. I'm not focusing on my children and their well-being as much as I need to be." And so that was a rough realization for me to come to, but I did. And I started to come to terms with it at that point. 

14:25 

And so at this point, I started to focus on the things that I could control. And this is really where my biggest shift started to take place because all of a sudden I started to see that I could not control my circumstance. I couldn't control what my husband at the time was thinking or doing or saying or participating in. I couldn't control any of that, but what I started to see was that I could control me. And so this is where things really started to change for me. 

15:05 

And so I had about two more years of just struggling. And I would get to the point where the situation would happen and I would get so frustrated and I would be so angry with things. And I would kneel down and I would pray and I would say, "Okay, Heavenly Father, I can't do this anymore." And I would go to the temple and I would fast. And every single time the Spirit just came back and said, "just wait, not yet. Not yet." And I remember sometimes just looking up into heaven and  saying, "Are you freaking kidding me? Like, how do you expect me to do this?" Because I was hurting so much and I didn't know how to fix it and I didn't have the tools. And it was so hard and I just kind of kept going through this process. And about every four or five months I would just feel like, "I can't anymore. I can't." And I would pray and God would just say, "No, just wait. Just wait." And so it was just hard and I struggled a lot with that. 

16:04 

And finally, about three years into this process, so we'd been married about 23 years at this point, I went and had dinner with my sister and her husband. And we had such a good talk about what's entailed and what was going on and what I could be doing. And it was just very, very such a balm to my soul at that point. And I don't really remember anything specific that we talked about, but I know that I went home and I just felt like, "Okay, okay, if this is where I am, this is where I am." And I remember praying that night. just saying, "okay, Heavenly Father, I get it. If this is where I need to be until my kids are all out of school then this is where I'll be. But help me to to know how to do it. Help me to know how to manage this and how to create a place where my kids are safe emotionally from the the drama going on in our home." Not like there was a lot of fighting and stuff, but there's always the stress. You just can't get away from that. 

17:10 

And it was interesting that the very next morning, once I got to this place of peace in my life where I was like "okay, I can handle this. I cannot be angry every day." And these weren't my thoughts, because I didn't have the language at the time, but as I look back now, where I can manage my thoughts, I can't control the circumstance. Nut I can control what I think and what I do about it. So I didn't have the model back then but I found as I look back that I was living the model in that sense, I realized that I couldn't control the circumstance, but I could control my thoughts about it and I could live in a way that was still happy and productive. 

17:54 

And so I hit that point that Sunday night and prayed and talked to God about it and just had a good heart to heart and I woke up the next morning and my first thought was "it's time." And I kind of jerked a little bit and I was like, "what?" Because just yesterday it wasn't time. And for the last three years that I've been praying about this, it hasn't been time. And so that week I fasted and I prayed and prayed and prayed and I went to the temple and I went to the temple and I grabbed a handful of tissues and stuck them in my pocket and I fully expected to be sobbing the entire session as I sat in the temple. And so I went in, the session started, and I didn't cry one tear. I just felt the whole time like, "yeah, it's time. It's okay. Everything will be all right." And it was the most amazing thing to me because I had just been in this place of turmoil, but it seemed like as soon as I got my thoughts to the point where I was like, "okay, I can live with this. I can still be happy even though my marriage situation is unhappy and is difficult and is very hard for me. I, as a person, can still be happy. I can make decisions based on a good place and not out of a place of anger or a place of frustration."And when I hit that point, it was like everything started to change. 

19:30 

All of a sudden God says, "okay, it's time." And so I got a lawyer and I started to get the paperwork done and I was trying to talk to my ex-husband and say, "Hey, listen, here's our paperwork and if we kind of go through things now we can get from being in a place where we have to spend a ton of money later on, where we can we can work through a lot of things on our own." And he was just not willing to really do that and he just kept saying "it's not right, it's not...this is not what we need to do to our kids." And so then I kind of allowed myself to get back in this place of "well, I thought it was right and I think it is right, but what do I do?" So this was August and I said "I'm going to give you until December and these two things really need to happen," and one of them was that we needed to go to counseling and we needed to talk about the counseling outside of the counseling session. In the past we had gone to counseling, but it was never anything outside of the counselor's office. It was never talked about or discussed or anything. And so that was one of these two stipulations of what needed to happen. 

20:11 

And it went on and and we did go to counseling a few times, but it wasn't doing anything. And I guess I should say that we weren't doing anything. We weren't moving forward with anything, we weren't really discussing outside, and so there was nothing really happening along those lines. And January 1st came and we were on a vacation with our kids, because we usually would take them on a vacation over the Christmas break, and I was still in the same place. I was in the same place that I had been a year previous to that. I was thinking "okay, the deadline has come and what do I do? Do I actually move forward on this deadline or do I not?" And I struggled with it a lot. And it took me another two or three weeks, even knowing that that deadline had come and gone, and the counseling we had touched on but hadn't really done what we needed to. Powered by Notta.ai

20:11 

The other stipulation that I had had hadn't even been touched. In fact I was basically told "no that's not really an option." So I finally just made the decision, "you know what, i've done everything i can do." And I felt good about it, even though it was still a tough decision. Yet I still felt really good about it and I felt like it was okay to start moving forward. So I did and I got things moving. It was fascinating to me though that the two things that were the the biggest concern for me, first of all, my children. Obviously that's where I was willing to stay if I needed to, was for the good of my children and making sure that they were safe and that they were in the best place ever. 

22:36 

And the second was financial. As a school teacher, that's always an issue to make sure that I would have enough money to live off of and enough monies that I wouldn't have to uproot my children's lives even more by moving them out of their home and out of their ward, their church congregation and out of their schools. I just didn't want to have to do that. And it was fascinating to me that by waiting those extra few years when God kept saying, "nope, just wait, just wait," that it put both my children and myself in a better place where I think that it was the best timing possible. 

23:15 

Now does that mean it's been easy? Absolutely not. If you listen to "Divorce and the Kids" a few weeks ago where my daughter talked about her situation with my divorce and how challenging that was for her, you know that it wasn't easy for her. And it was not easy for my other three kids as well. It was easy for me, and I know that sounds a little bit callous, but I believe it was easy for me because I was doing it when God finally said, "okay, it's time." So I was in a good place there. I really, really felt like I had done everything that I knew how to do to help my marriage to survive. 

23:53 

And does that mean I did everything right? Absolutely not. It doesn't mean that I was good at it, and it doesn't mean that I wouldn't do things very differently now, four years later, because I'm a different person, and I have a very different understanding of how all of this works. But at the time, I felt like I had done everything that I knew how to do to make it work. And so for me, the timing was right, and I could look back on that, and I still look back on it, and I don't have one regret going through that situation because I feel like I turned over every stone that I was capable of turning over at the time. 

24:31 

And so since my divorce, I have been in a great place of peace, personally, and my growth has been out of this world. I just cannot believe sometimes where I am and the amazing place that I'm in right now because of this. And so it was a challenge. It was a challenge for my kids. It still is a challenge for my kids. I still have one child who really, really seems to still be having a hard time. There's no discussion about it because this child doesn't want to have a discussion about it, but they still seem to really be struggling. But then I have daughters like Allison that you met last week who were just like, "wow, it was a good thing. It was a better thing." You know, the things that she's learned and how she's grown that would not have presented themselves had we not gone through this. It's been better for her, she feels. 

25:32 

This is the thing about divorce. I don't think divorce is the best option in every situation. I do think that there are marriages that can be saved with the right information and with the right change of heart, but I do believe as well that it takes two people fully committed, and two people who are willing to really put forth the effort to make it work because it is a tough thing. I do feel from my own personal experiences that I am in the place that I need to be right now, and that I have learned things through that process that have made me into the better person that I need to be and helped me to become what God needs me to be right now so that I can do the things that I'm meant to do. And this is one of those; creating this business is one of those things that I feel that I am called to do right now and that God wants me to do, to make the world a better place and to add value to the lives of other people around me. 

26:37 

So there you have it. My story is not going to be your story and there may be things now that you go, "yeah, I can connect with that," and other things that you just go "oh, not even," because all of our situations are very different. But the things that I learned from mine, some of the big lessons that I learned: trust God because He knows and He will tell you. This is a big deal. Divorce is not something to be taken lightly. It is a big deal to take a family, which I feel is a sacred unit, and to divide it up. It's a very big deal and God cares and He will give you answers. But sometimes, as I went through three years of Him saying, "no, not yet, not yet." And I didn't understand it but now that it's over I do understand it, because I understand that there were certain things at work and certain things with my business that I was able to put in place during those three years that set me up for now and for a more financial secure future, and that got my kids to a place where they can be in their best spot to deal with this. 

27:49 

So one of the biggest things I learned was just to trust God. Another thing that I learned was I have to be in a good place. I feel that had I approached the divorce with feelings of anger and frustration and all those things that come with that. If I would have gone into it in that emotional state focusing on all the negative things I really don't think that I would be in the place that I am right now. So I think that part of what made this such a positive experience for me was the fact that by the time I actually really filed for divorce. I was in a good place, and I was not angry, and I was not hateful, and I was not spiteful or revengeful. I was in a good place where I was like, "you know what, I really do wish him the best, and I wish me the best, and I don't want to be in this anymore, and I don't think God expects me to be in this anymore." 

28:54 

And so getting my thoughts first, and then my heart into the place where I could focus on the goodness and the positivity in my life, really helped me to come out of this in a better place. Because this is the thing: you're going to have to come to terms with it either way. You're either going to come to terms with where you are and have to get to that good place, either before the divorce or after the divorce. It took me four years to get to the point where I knew from the time that I knew that. So going from coming to terms that it was impending and it was coming until the time that it was final was just over four years. 

29:34 

And during that time I had a lot of soul searching because before that time divorce was not an option. And I could not even come to terms with the idea that I was going to be a person who was divorced. And so it took me some time to work through all of that and I'm glad that God gave me that time because it really did set me up for greater future. So as you go through this just you can't go through it without God. You can't go through it without seeking His guidance and His direction and trying your best to get yourself where you need to be. I firmly believe that and I believe that when you get yourself where you need to be you will not make a decision out of anger or hatred or spite or revenge, but you'll make the decision out of loving kindness for yourself and even for the person that you're divorcing. You know, you can feel compassion for someone and still not want to be married to them. And I think that when I got to that point that that's where things just really turned for me and that that's where my decision became easier for me to make. 

30:47 

So there you go. I hope that for some of you there's some information there that's helpful and that is helping you figure out your own situation. These are tough. There's nothing about this that is easy, I promise you that. But I do know that God will guide you and direct you in every direction that you need to go to find what you need to find in your life and to make the decisions that you need to make. So there you go. I love growing up. I really really do. I love hitting this point in my life where I can see things more clearly and I understand better the places that I am. what God needs me to do. 

31:32 

So I'm going to call that a day. That's what I have for you today. So I hope you have a really terrific, awesome day and that things go well for you and that you find yourself in a good place. And whether you're in a place where you're contemplating divorce or not, I hope that you can also find a place where you can seek to feel the Spirit in your life and make decisions based off of God's will for you and really doing what God wants you to do, because His timing is impeccable. His timing will never put us in a bad place. I know that. So have an awesome day and I will talk to you later. Bye! 

32:14 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!