Oh, The Places We Go
When our minds aren’t helping us move away from divorce conflict
Our minds are capable of amazing things. Everything that’s been created in the world began first as a thought in someone’s mind. A life-changing surgical device, the work of fiction that took the world by storm, the awesome dinner you made for your kids that they loved—it all started as a vision inside someone’s head and turned into a reality. Yes, the creative capacity of the mind is miraculous and wonderful. But the mind is crafty as fuck. Think about the last downward spiral you went on because you didn’t like the way you looked, or because you didn’t believe you could do the thing you totally ended up doing, or, heck, think about the Placebo Effect! I mean, you can take a sugar pill and stop having hot flashes, only to find out you were in the control group? If that doesn’t show you how powerful the mind is, I don’t know what does.We can go to some pretty sublime places in our minds, but we all know we can go to some pretty destructive places too. When it comes to our relationship with our co-parent, it is often the case that our feelings of fear, anger, and resentment give us “permission” to let our minds think some pretty dark thoughts. Some of this is natural; limbic system lizard brain wants to be constantly on the lookout for danger. But some of this is overblown. Once we’re triggered, we get caught in a loop of negative thinking, whether or not the thing we’re thinking about is actually happening. Neuroscience teaches us that our brains do not know the difference (DO NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE!) between something that is happening in our thoughts versus something that is happening in real-time. This means that if we are thinking it, as far as our brains are concerned, it must be happening. So, if we’re thinking about our co-parent, imagining threats, danger, conflict, confrontation, or any other horrible thing they’ve done or might do, because of the brilliant evolutionary cascade from brain to body, we are not in the moment. Instead, we are literally acting out the effects of our “virtual” reality.
I’m not saying that the feelings from these experiences with your co-parent are not valid or meaningful. They are. But part of our work is to help ourselves heal from those experiences and start living in the present moment. And if there’s a lot of conflict in the present moment, it makes it very hard to see the places where the conflict isn’t there. Repeated stressors push us into fight/flight/freeze so often that sometimes it takes Herculean effort to get out. But I’m here to tell you, it’s worth the energy.
Being mindful means catching our thoughts when they’re off and running down the track of destruction. Whether triggered by something in reality (another shitty text) or by our own thoughts (fear of another shitty text coming), we must learn to recognize when our unhelpful thoughts have taken the reigns and are steering the chariot off the edge of the cliff. Noticing when this is happening is pretty much all it takes. It helps too, if we can get familiar with the sensations these thoughts create in our bodies. Racing heart, tight chest, clenching anywhere—those physical signs of sympathetic dominance are a great cue to drop the thoughts and slow it down. Sometimes, we will catch ourselves heading in that negative direction right away, and sometimes we’ll be off the cliff before we’ve seen it. And that’s ok. The key is not actually to be perfect at it. The key is to notice, again and again, when our minds have taken us to a place we don’t need to go, then grabbing the reigns and steering ourselves in a more peaceful, positive direction.
The Buddha wrote, “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.” In the case of high-conflict divorce, this is an important and powerful statement to remember. Think about it for a minute. While our ex might be a total shit show, might instigate a ton of conflict, if we are not guarding our thoughts we might be doing just as much harm to ourselves. Being aware of when our thoughts are compounding, or even creating, the negative situation is one of the first, most vital steps, toward ending the drama. In high conflict divorce we acknowledge we have so little control, but we can control how we think when we’re in it.
