Episode # 18 – How to cope with a divorce as an immigrant in America?

Hello my friends. This is Ewelina, life coach for immigrants and I hope you are doing well. 

Today we are gonna talk about going through a divorce. So this episode is for those of you who are facing a divorce, or maybe you are going through it or you know that a divorce is a strong possibility in your relationship and you are wondering what you could do to make sure that the future you, the YOU who will be going through the divorce will have what she needs to face the difficulties. 

So today you are going to learn what to do when you are faced with that reality. When you realize that from that point on, life will not be what you thought it will be, that the happily ever after is not gonna happen like you expected and you get hit with deep fear, sadness, maybe anger. Big emotions. I am going to share with you how to best manage yourself through that time, I am going to share with you a few a-ha moments, and overall I will try to give you 

the main tools I have used continuously for the last 6 months and I still use them, because even though the divorce is final now, the grief still continues, the sadness still comes up, and I am sure it will for a while yet. These feelings are welcomed and I will tell you today what to do when they show up and how to get to this spot of acceptance of these different big emotional states. What to do when you are all of a sudden hit with a memory, and your eyes get teary and your heart is breaking again. 

So for those of you following me here, listening to me regularly: Yes this is why you have not been seeing much of me. This obviously was a huge shift and I needed time and space to deal with these changes and to process them. But before I give you the tools let me give you a quick background story. 

So about 6 months after coming to the US in 2005 I met my now ex husband James. We fell in love.  I have never had feelings that big, love so deep like that towards anyone before. I was thinking recently about what it was about him that made me fall in love with him so fast. I think it was his incredibly accepting and loving heart. I felt so alone when we met, I felt misunderstood often, and I missed my family, my friends and James made me feel accepted, cared for, loved.  So as you can tell already he is a very very good person. In fact, and I am really not exaggerating, he is one of the best people I have ever met in my life. I feel truly blessed that it was him who was my first love and that we had 18 years together and that I got to be his wife and I got to be a part of his family. There was a lot of good in our life and even though we are divorced now it would be impossible for me not to acknowledge the love, the kindness and the support I’ve experienced from him, his parents, his siblings, and so many others in that family. 

So we were together for 18 years.  Some better, some worse, but overall we had a good marriage. And for that I am so grateful. 

So let me bring you up to date, in February of this year we have decided to get divorced. 

It was a mutual decision. There were some things that led to it obviously, and still when we decided that it was over, and the divorce was the best thing for both of us I was heartbroken. He was my best friend. We were supposed to be married forever, so when I realized that it won’t happen, of course my heart was breaking. 

Today I am going to share with you some tools that have helped me deal with this whole transition from being married, being a wife, to realizing that it’s over, dealing with all different kinds of deep, messy emotions,  and making peace with it. I will also share some a-ha moments, some ideas that showed up in my mind as a result of the inner work I was doing as I was going through it. 

Some of you might be questioning me, like Why are you doing this Ewelina? What for?

Well let me tell you. Here is why: Being a life coach trained through the Life Coach School, I had a huge advantage of knowing the skills of mental and emotional management. These skills made the biggest difference. And I want you to at least hear about them. You will utilize them or not, it’s up to you, but I feel an obligation to share them with you.  Because I have been through some hard things in my life. And some of you will think that the divorce must have been the hardest and it was hard, but overall because I was being proactive in taking care of my mental and emotional state… I know it would have been a thousand times worse if I didn’t have these tools. Because I know how I suffered in the past over things that were not as monumental, they were still heart breaking but this made such a big difference for me I need to share with you what I did. 

So first of all: journaling. Writing things down, answering deep questions. Why, why is this important? Because when it comes to mental management. It is so much easier to work with your mental field when you can write your thoughts down and see them on a piece of paper. We have on average 60K thoughts per day and considering how much our brains are distracted and stimulated, doing this work in your mind without writing it down is gonna be hard. So you want to for sure be doing this with a piece of paper and a pen. Get yourself a journal! Yes, that’s like mental and emotional management 101 – buy a journal. 

So first and foremost my friends. I am gonna say what you heard me say on this podcast before but for those of you that are hearing this the first time this is gonna be a big one, but it’s a basis to it all.  Your thoughts create your feelings. I will say it again because it’s the most important thing you will hear from me today: Your thoughts create your feelings.  If you’ve never heard about this, put a pause on and let that idea sink in. YOUR THOUGHTS CREATE YOUR FEELINGS. So what does that mean? It means that when you are experiencing an emotion, the source of every single emotion is found in your thoughts. So when it’s hard because for example you just found out that you are getting divorced, and that your future is gonna be completely different from what you thought, because you are now going to be single and that whole idea, that you will be together till death is false, it’s not gonna come true. When you feel heartbroken because you just realized that, now it’s a perfect time to look at: What are you thinking about it? What are you making it mean?  How is your brain interpreting this? What is happening in your mind? If you are feeling such a deep, deep emotion feel it, feel it,  but also look at what is happening in your mind. What is producing that emotion?

So when we made a decision to get divorced, that was the first thing I had to explore, because I felt a heavy, heavy heartbreak for days, it wasn’t going away. I would wake up, my first thought would bring the realization of what is happening and immediately I would start feeling a heartbreak. It was an interesting experience in itself to go to sleep with a heartbreak and wake up and have like a few seconds of no pain and right then almost immediately start feeling it again, because you remember what’s going on… You probably have had this experience already, you know what I am talking about, right? And that first thought that shows up in your mind, that reminds you what is going on in your life creates that heartbreak again. But before you think that thought you have like a second or two of none of that, you have a few seconds of reality without that pain.  One of the first aha moments I had was that even though it was so incredibly painful, it wasn’t killing me. I was suffering but I was still alive. Of course I have had heartbreak in my life before, but this was a different level. And it started pretty much immediately after we made this decision. 

So here is what you could ask yourself and answer every time you feel heartbroken or sad or angry, or confused, or afraid or any other emotion that’s causing you pain, you could answer these 3 questions, and don’t worry if you are multitasking right now, like you are driving a car or you are listening to it doing something else and you can’t write these questions down, I am going to put them in the description of this show.

So here are the 3 questions:

What am I thinking about this?

What am I feeling when I am thinking that?

What do I do when I feel that feeling?

To give your heads up one of the emotions that for sure is gonna show up is going to be fear. 

For me like the world was ending. Like there was not going to be any life after this. Like it’s done. I am dying. I get divorced and I am gonna die. 

I know this sounds really extreme and ridiculous, some of you are thinking: Wow! That’s exaggerating it, of course you are not going to die Ewelina. 

Yeah I know and I agree with you, it is extreme. It’s not logical but this my friends is a human brain for you. Specifically the lower part of the brain, afraid of any change. There was a huge change coming and the part of my brain responsible for my survival interpreted the situation accordingly. So yeah, there was a lot of fear. Deep fear and of course, looking at my mind, analyzing myself was allowing me some sense of control where I felt there was none, because the life as I knew was ending. The whole life I felt was ending.

And keep in mind, James and I got married 6 months after we met. 90% of my life here in the US was spent by his side. The life that I knew in the US, 5000 miles from Poland,  was 100% related to him being in my life. So of course it was terrifying because what does it mean that I will be living here but without him? How? How will I be able to do that? Will I even stay? Will I go back to Poland? Where will I be? Where do I wanna be? Can I go back there after 18 years and be happy? Or should I stay here? All these big questions start showing up in your mind as well and since often you don’t have the answers that sense of not knowing creates extra anxiety, right?

I had to look at that part too, and being okay with not knowing. 

I don;t know what I am gonna do in six months. I don’t know where I will live and that’s okay. Today I know where I am at, and today I know I am safe.  

Now there is another tool that is incredibly helpful and you can use it at any point of your life when you feel stuck and afraid of your future. When you are facing this kind of situation, when there is a huge change happening. I call it Cause that’s what it is. It’s a line and represents your life. Here is what you do, you take a clean piece of paper and in the middle of it you draw a horizontal line. This line represents your life. So on the left side at the beginning of the line you write your birthday and on the other end you write how many years you’d like to live or if you are not sure you could just give yourself 100 years. 

Next  mark on that line whatever is the day that you are doing it, so I am recording this podcast on September 20th 2023 and I would mark Sept 20th. 

The next thing is mark your wedding day, so when you married your spouse, and then mark the day you got divorced, or the day you will be divorced, ( it doesn’t have to be exact if you don’t know, so if you’re thinking it will be maybe six months from now, that’s okay, that’s what you mark.) Next thing is you want to color the space between when you got married and your divorce date. You wanna color just that space.  Now look at that life line and realize that 

you see from the perspective of your whole life. Not just this period of time your mind is hyper focused on. This line of life will clearly show you that yes there was marriage there but there was also time before you met your spouse and there is a whole lot of time after you get divorced. 

Again I know this is such a simple concept but this is an important reminder. Because again of the lower brain being threatened, thinking that life is ending many of us get stuck in this sense of: My life is over. I don’t know how I will live without him. I am terrified of the future. I don’t know how I will make it work… 

But this line is showing you that you somehow made it work before you met him before you married him, and with time you will figure out how to live without him. 

Now the extra layer of drama for us immigrants, especially if you are in a similar situation to me where I didn’t have any family here to call for support. I am on my own. So yeah it’s hard, right?

Now, one of my friends said to me something that I really needed to hear at that time. He said: life will go on. Such a simple thing, right? Life will go on. It’s such an obvious thing but to me my life was really ending. So yes my friend, life will go on, and that life line exercise will help you see it too. 

The next thing you might want to examine is your thoughts about your spouse. 

What do you think of him or her? How do you feel when you think that? What do you do when you feel that? Examine what it is in your head right now about that person. Because if you are feeling a lot of anger when you think about him, if you feel frustration or disappointment or whatever, those feelings are created by the specific thoughts you have about that person you are the one experiencing the feeling though, right? So you are the one suffering. And from that point if you are creating a lot of anger, you feel very disappointed, decide: Do I wanna keep on feeling anger or not? You can decide here, how do I want to feel? Do I want to be angry everytime I see him? Do I want to get sad and grieve? Do I want to yell and be furious at him? Do I want these emotions within me? The anger, sadness, frustration, what do I want here? 

Personally, this is what I did. I refused to dwell in anger. It was hard enough for us both, and anger was an emotion I decided was unnecessary. And honestly looking back I am grateful I made that choice. That I spared my heart from that. 

Now remember one thing, I am not telling you that anger is a bad emotion and that you should never feel anger, that’s not what I am saying. I just want you to notice that if you get angry, you are the one suffering, not the person you get angry at. You are suffering.

If you feel it there is a reason for it, okay. But just remember, just like with any emotion, anger too is created by our thoughts. If you have anger within, do what you can to release it.  Write it all down. Why are you angry? What did he do? What do you think he should’ve done instead? What wasn’t fair? How did he disappoint you? What did you make it mean about yourself? How are you angry at yourself? How are you disappointed in yourself? Write it all out. Now, one extra thing, remember, as you are answering these questions that anger will be coming right up. Because you will have thoughts that create it so of course it’s gonna come up. 

Anger is one of those emotions we release through our hands. I like to punch pillows when I am angry. Actually my body naturally wants to start throwing things, that’s what I wanna do. And if it’s safe, if I have something I can throw it feels so good and I will do that, but I got to tell you punching pillows works really, really well. 

The point is: anger is a very heavy emotion. Please do not punish yourself by carrying it in your heart for too long. Write it out, see why you are feeling it, accept what is going on and then release it. It’s okay to be angry, but when you are dealing with the stress of the divorce it’s better to actively work with it vs storying it deep in your heart. You do not want to carry it around. It’s like a poison. Don’t do that to yourself. You might need to release anger, ten, twenty times it’s all good. As long as you work with that feeling and you are not storying anger on top of anger you are taking care of yourself, and that’s what this whole podcast is about. It’s about you taking care for yourself as you are going through a difficult situation. 

Now I’ve mentioned this already, that you can decide how you want to think about your husband from this point on. Why would that be beneficial? Because again: Thoughts create feelings, feelings cause action.  So you are going to be feeling and interacting with him differently when you think to yourself that he is the worst person on the planet and you are going to be feeling and interacting from a different point if you have a sense of gratitude and acceptance within you. 

So you could think:

It didn’t work out but he was trying his best. I can be grateful for that. 

It’s hard for him too, I don’t have to make it harder by being mean. 

We had a lot of great times, I can always be grateful for that.   

And also you can decide what you want to be thinking about yourself as you are struggling through it. I have a few thoughts for you that will help you create a sense of self compassion and acceptance: 

This is hard but I am trying my best. Sometimes I will have a good day and sometimes I won’t, that’s okay. This is a big transition in my life and I am going to meet myself with compassion and kindness. 

Eventually when you are ready make a list of all the good things that happened that you can be grateful for. Because your marriage, no matter how you ended it, had some good elements within it. YOU fell in love with this person, you got married, you believed this person will make a good life partner for you. 

So you can write down a list of your favorite memories, and this can include the rest of the family, and does not have to be with your partner only. The gratitude, will help you see the good side, because so often when we are in the mist of divorce and we have all these negative feelings, we have also a lot of negative thoughts. This will help you shift direction towards gratitude and it will speed up the healing. 

You also could write down a list of all the qualities you have developed as a result of the difficulties in your marriage. Because of course, it’s life, we are humans. You are a human being that has some good qualities and some negative qualities and so does your ex husband or soon to be ex husband. That’s normal, right? It’s normal that we have difficulties in our marriage. There is a reason why this marriage ended, so let’s think from the point of how were the difficulties beneficial for your charakter? For your life? How was that happening for you? So maybe you had to develop patience, understanding, faith that it will be alright, maybe an ability to listen, maybe you had to learn how to take care of you? Maybe that;s the biggest benefit of it all? 

And remember as the situation unfolds you will be ready for new questions:

What are  you making it all mean? That;s a really really good question. What am I making it mean? But then you could also ask: What am I making it mean about me? The fact that I am going through the divorce… what am I making, like this whole situation, the fact that I am, that we are going through a divorce? What am I making it mean about me? About us as a married couple that is about to be divorced? What am I making it mean about my life overall? What are you most afraid of? What will I do if that worst case scenario happens? How can you prepare for it? Can I do something to prepare for it or maybe not? Maybe there is nothing I can do today, maybe it’s better for now to let life unfold as it will and not worry about it, because it’s possible that it won’t happen. 

Another good question is: What are you assuming that other people are thinking about you as you are going through a divorce? How are they judging you? What do you think? 

This is important because let’s be honest. Many of us feel like a failure. Like we are bad people for getting divorced. We are thinking of all the loved ones that are disappointed by this decision. 

We think about our parents,  maybe our church community. So we assume that we will be judged but in the process we end up judging ourselves and the people around us. And so often we create division. When we need support from the people that love us and want to support us, we create division. It’s not good my friends. Just because we have a lot of assumptions about how other people are judging us, so be mindful of this. What are you telling yourself about the other people judging you through this situation, what are you making it all mean? Additional layer to all of this is blame. Self blame. Because as we assume that other people are judging us we are the ones that are judging ourselves,  and then we start blaming ourselves. But who benefits from self blame? No one. So as you explore your mind, watch out for this. This is again where we want to go back to self acceptance, and patience and kindness and compassion. 

Listen, I know I am talking a lot about exploring your mind, and there is a reason for this. Because as you do so, will be able to understand yourself better. And you will be able to be there for yourself, you will not be abandoning yourself and ignoring yourself as you are going through one of the hardest times of your life. And you want to do this work daily. It’s gonna be  most likely a rollercoaster of emotions, you are gonna have really good days and you have really bad days. And sometimes one comes after another. And because of that so often we feel like life is happening to us and we have no control… and yeah, there is so much that we can not control, but the one thing that is within our control is our response. But our response starts with the thought, feeling, response. Thought. Feeling. Response. So that’s why we look at thoughts first. You see what tends to happen when we are going through a divorce or some other difficult circumstance, many of us will fall victim to the first interpretation our brain offers. 

So instead of exploring the mind, to see why we feel the way we feel, and deciding what we want to be thinking instead. We just believe what our brain tells us. So in my case if I was to not utilize this skill of self analysis, if I was to keep on believing that first thought that

James is my man for life, my place is by him and we are supposed to be married forever. 

If I kept on believing it I still would have been arguing with reality, creating my own angst. Still six months later. Six months of suffering. Because the reality was clear. We were getting divorced. We are divorced now, right? So if I was to argue I would feel like a victim. Like: why is this happening to me? This is not fair! 

Those are the thoughts I would have had about it. And I probably would feel frustrated and like a victim of my life, of my circumstances. It’s such a human thing to do. We argue with life but as we argue with life we always lose. Because reality is what it is so we can argue and feel frustrated, or we can accept it. So accept it. Accept it. Accept that it’s happening instead of abandoning yourself in the struggle, how about you explore your mind,  see what you feel and why? See what is needed? And as you do it, you start developing a relationship with yourself that is based on kindness, compassion, curiosity, and most of all lack of judgment. 

And this is so important my friends. Be curious, and open to hearing what you have to say.

Open to the different voice of the wife within you.

Alright, this is not something that I have learned in The Life Coach School. I came up with this, this is 100% my creation but it made a big difference so I am gonna tell you.  Let me explain the next tool. At one point of doing this mental / emotional work I realized that there were some concepts I believed in that were directly related to me being a wife. 

I realized that I have kind of this persona within me. She is the person I was with my husband, and with others when we were together, the homemaker, the cook, the friend, the lover, all the things I did all the roles I played over the last 18 years within our marriage. These roles created this: wife persona within me. So when I was really struggling I would ask myself: Who is talking? Who is upset? Cause let me tell ya, it wasn’t the businesswoman part of me. Or the part of me that shows up as a daughter to my parents when I speak to them. Majority of the time it was the wife. She was the one grieving, she was the one feeling like a victim at times, she was the one that wanted to keep on loving him and I had to tell her: It’s okay. He will always have a piece of my heart. Not the whole heart but there will always be a special place for him and she can have that love for him as long as she wants to. You know, when I gave myself permission to do that. To have the love for my ex husband, when it stopped being – black and white. Like now that we will be divorced I am not allowed to have any love for him. When I realized that it’s not true. That if I stop having love for him I am the one that does not feel the love… I decided: It’s OK wife, you can love him. He can have that special place. And when I said that to myself I got such a huge sense of relief, and it became easier to make peace with it all and just let go.  

It was so helpful for me to make a distinction and realize that there is a part of me that is having this incredibly difficult time, but not all of me. Because my husband got to see me as a wife, my parents get to interact with me as their daughter, my clients get to see and interact with the Life Coach part of me. And each one of these is a little bit different. I am not the same with my mom and dad as I am with my clients. Yes, there are similarities, it’s still me. But there are also some differences. And you have it too, You also play different roles in life. So as you are going through a divorce it might be easier when you realize and separate that part. Separate the part of the wife. So for me, the wife was upset, but the other parts of me were OK. They were alright. That has allowed me to gain a bit of distance. It’s kind of like I have this wound, but it’s not my whole body hurting. One part of me is hurting. The other parts of me are not. 

And yes there were plenty of moments when the grief was overwhelming and it felt like every cell of my body was struggling. I remember this one situation. It was evening, we were still living together, and I walked out of my office into the kitchen and saw my now ex husband cooking, he was standing by the stove and I saw his back. And this feeling hit me so hard. It took my breath away, I went back to my office, I sat down trying to calm myself but. The sadness was overwhelming, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t analyze myself. So I sat there and waited for it to pass. 

And when it subsided a little bit I asked myself: who is upset within me? Why? 

It was the wife again, She thought: “I will never see him cooking again.” That’s where the sadness was coming from, from that sentence in my mind. 

And you know what? Here is what I did next and what I would suggest for you as well, anytime you experience a big emotion. Sit with it. Check where it is in your body, what is the shape of it, what color, is that feeling moving or not… Analyze it.  When you don’t avoid the emotion but you meet it right where it’s at, it will subside. Your awareness will transmute it. 

And you will gain more clarity of mind and it will be now easier to check in with that part of you that is hurting. So right then I had a conversation with that part of me that is wife. So it was like an inner dialog. I talked to her like I would  talk to my best friend, someone I love so much, and I told her: It’s okay. It’s okay to be upset. Yes, that’s true you probably will not see him cooking again. It’s okay to be upset about it. That’s okay. What do you need now? How can I help you?

And I felt that she needs: reassurance. And so I said: I know you are grieving, I know this is hard. I will make sure that you are ok. That you have what you need. I will take care of you. I promise you that. I know this is hard but I will do what I can to support you. I’m going to be your best friend and everything is gonna be alright.

Again, this is an inner dialog I am describing here… and it’s important that you understand the way I see it.  So when I am saying this is an inner dialog, these voices talking in my mind, let me tell you how I see it. 

So it’s kind of like this: you have the main watcher, like  the soul of you, the wise, all knowing part of you. And then you have these roles you play in your life that kind of make your personality. So for me, I am a daughter, a friend, I am a life coach, I am a business owner. 

Now each one of these roles has their needs, their wants, their opinions, their dramas. 

And then there is also this wise part of me, that sees above it all, and in relation to each one of them that wise part is like a parent to a child. Like the most loving, understanding and supportive parent. 

And so as the wife was having her moment, that part of me was counseling her.  

The part that understands that life can have very difficult moments but they too pass. 

And when to wife everything was dramatic and “black and white”, and the life was ending, that soul part of me could see way more than her. That soul part of me understood that: Yes it’s difficult now, but there will be good times eventually. They will come. 

So you see, it’s like as you rise above, and you see yourself from that distance, there is a wisdom that you have access to, right? Different perspective. What tends to happen to us when you are going through a difficult situation is that we cling to that one understanding and unless we take a look at what is happening in our minds we get stuck in there. We get stuck. And so this whole episode, all of this, I shared inspired to share this with you because it made, the things I have told you about today, made such a huge difference for me. ANd if they made a huge difference for me I know they would make a big difference for you as well if you were to utilize them. 

Alright my friends. I know this was a long episode and I gave you a lot to think about.

I will make sure to put all the main questions in the description of this show. 

And I will also include a list of these main tools I am giving you so it’s all summarized for you there cause I know this was a long, long episode. Bottom line is this: divorces are hard but we can support ourselves through the process and you, my love, deserve to give yourself that support. That’s the bottom line. 

OK I am almost done but before I let you go I want to share with you one extra thing. I have a special gift for all my immigrant that struggle connecting with Americans. My course is for you if 

You spend too much time stressing about going “out there” and meeting Americans.

You feel like no matter what you do you are never going to develop true genuine friendships.

You realize that buying fancy clothes, doing your hair, makeup, nails, putting all this effort in, does not make a big difference when it comes to building connections with others… it often makes you feel even worse after: All this work and what did I do that for?

I want you to think about it… HOW WOULD IT FEEL TO GO OUT THERE  MEET AMERICANS, BE YOURSELF, HAVE FUN & NOT STRESS ABOUT IT?

It’s possible and in this free course I will teach you how to do it. You see what typically happens is that we are stressed before we even go. We worry about: not knowing what to say or saying the wrong thing. We worry about not knowing what others are talking about and feeling stupid. We anticipate feeling lonely and disconnected because no one talks to us.

And then we push ourselves out of our comfort zone and we go, and again we are feeling like we have nothing in common with people around us. We act more quietly than normal. We are not sure if you’d say the right thing so we assume that it’s better not to speak at all. We are comparing ourselves to women around us and either feeling superior or “less than”. Or sometimes we end up talking too much because we are trying to connect and be liked but later we regret it and we feel like it was a wrong thing to do, because we feel like we made a fool of ourselves. When it’s all done we feel disappointed and empty, because we feel like something important is missing.  it’s just not the same as it was with our friends in our home country.

I know this so well because I’ve been there. I’ve done it. For years. So I get it. Building connections with Americans when you are an immigrant is not easy.

But here is the truth. You are here to build your American dream and as you are doing so You deserve to be surrounded by people you feel connected to and supported by.

And to create that community around you don’t have to become someone you are not. 

You get to stay who you are. In fact you get to be more of you.

So enough of  trying to fit in and abandoning yourself.

I am gonna teach you how You can feel relaxed when meeting people and making new friends, how not to stress about it at all and enjoy building new relationships with Americans and anyone else you meet.

I will teach you what to do to start creating true, genuine connections and feel comfortable no matter where you are. That’s what that free course is about, if you need it. Look for a link in the description of this show. 

Remember, if you are an immigrant and you need mental and emotional support I am here. 

Go to my website, life coach for immigrants.com and schedule a quick call with me so we can get to know each other and see if I can help you. 

Alright! Thanks for listening and I will talk to you next time.