October 15, 2024 • 59 mins
Hey, Fellow Travelers. Shannon spent her childhood holiday seasons listening to her divorced parents fight about who would get more time with their kids. Now 32 and a year out from her own divorce, she's dreading her first holiday season without her spouse and managing her parents' disappointment if she doesn't travel to their respective homes during COVID. We help her to see the connection between issues in her marriage and her holiday dilemma, and offer her an empowering way to reclaim the holidays for herself this year.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And I'm Guy Wench. I wrote Emotional First Aid, and
I write the Dear Guy column for Ted. And this
is Deo Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
This week, a woman faces her first holiday season after
a difficult divorce.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
My dad would bring up. He would think, like, then
does he get me for all the nights in Hanukah?
My mom, Christmas is only one night, so you know
there was some of that fighting.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Listen in and maybe learn something about yourself and the process.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Deo Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute
medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis,
or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental
health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions
you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter,
you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in powder
(01:02):
and full, and we may edit it for length. End
of clarity. Hi Laurie, Hey guy, So what do we
have today?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Well? Tis the season. Here's the letter. Dear therapists. I'm
feeling a lot of anxiety with the holidays fast approaching.
I got divorced this year, and navigating being newly single
while facing the isolation of COVID has been difficult. I
live across the country from my parents, and I am
struggling with the potential to have to spend the first
(01:32):
holiday season post divorce without my wife and without my
family for the first time. To add some additional context,
my parents are also divorced and do not get along
at all, do not talk, can't be in the same
room together. Going home has always been extremely stressful for me,
because even as an adult, I feel like I'm thrown
back into the custody schedule of my childhood, where I'm
(01:53):
living out of a suitcase and constantly going back and
forth between houses. The idea of managing the usual endthnxiety
I feel when going home for the holidays while also
navigating the risks of COVID has been somewhat overwhelming. Do
I not go home at all due to the risks
of infecting them and leave my mom to be alone
during the holidays. If I go home, do I only
stay with one parent to reduce transmission risks when I
(02:16):
know doing so will upset the other if I don't
go home at all, how do I navigate being alone
for the first time since my divorce. The idea of
being by myself feels awful, especially as my now ex
wife has already moved on. The holidays have always caused
me stress given my family dynamics, but it being my
first season without my wife and being far away in
the middle of a pandemic has added some additional anxiety
(02:39):
to the situation. I would really appreciate your help on this,
Thanks so much, Shannon.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
One of the things that comes up every year around
the holidays is that people whose parents are divorced are
faced with who do they choose, who do they disappoint?
And if they're in a situation where they're married and
this bounces parents and there are four people to disappoint potentially,
there is this tension that comes around the holiday season
for people when their parents are divorced, which is just
(03:07):
baked in unless they found an ongoing solution, and it
takes away from the anticipation and the enjoyment almost.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Every year, You're right, and it also brings up this
memory of having to deal with that tension as a child.
A lot of the time you feel as a child
like you're stuck in this place that some of your
friends don't have to deal with, where you know that
you're going to be.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Splitting the holidays.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's not that much fun because there's maybe tension between
the parents. You're missing the other parent. If you're a
one parents, it just feels different and it takes them
getting used to and then when you have to face
it as an adult, sometimes it brings back a lot
of those memories.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And the other thing that happens is that I always
ask people what are you anticipating, what's your expectation, And
invariably what they anticipate or expect is three or four
levels above of what the reality was for the past
ten years.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think one of the things that's important for her
to realize is that even though she has a specific
experience of growing up in a divorced household, most people
experience stress during the holidays, even if they get along
with their families. We have this idea of what the
holidays are supposed to be like. I think that most
(04:22):
people imagine that everybody else is having this picture perfect
holiday season and they're not and so I think it's
really helpful for people to understand the reality better so
that they can have a good time knowing that they
aren't having a vastly different experience from the rest of
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, let's just tell people that the holiday season and
especially the aftermath, this is the busiest time of the
year for us therapists.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's right, for good reason exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So let's talk to him. You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio.
We'll be back after a quick break.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
I'm Lori Gottlieb and I'm.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Guy Winch and this is Deo Therapist.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So Hi, Shannon, Hi, thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
It's good to meet you, guys. Thank you so much
for having me.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You're very welcome. So it's been a year for you.
It's been a year for everyone, but it's been a
year for you. Can you tell us a little bit
about the marriage and the divorce and how you are.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yes, So I got divorced almost exactly a year ago
at Christmas time last year, and we were married for
three years, together for seven and officially ended it a
couple of months before the divorce was finalized.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Who's the one that initiated the separation.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
I was the one that officially ended it.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, Can I ask how old you are?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Thirty two?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Okay, how are you? In terms of the reconstruction, the
rebuilding thought that comes up divorce.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
It definitely feels like a rebuilding. I am doing a
lot better. I think it was like a whirlwind. For
a really long time. It felt like my world sort
of just came crashing down in a way. Honestly, this
year has been about like redefining myself, like trying to
figure out who I am now outside of that relationship,
(06:21):
and frankly who I was even prior to that relationship.
Just trying to find like a new semblance of me.
And it's been a journey, I would say, honestly, both
a lot of real lows and then also some like
highs of kind of figuring out myself for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It's interesting that you talk about figuring yourself out, because
it sounds like you spent most of your twenties, which
are these really formative years, in this relationship, and so
now you have this both challenge and opportunity to do
some of the things in terms of the figuring out
that maybe you did do because you were in this relationship.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, that's exactly what it felt like. I mean, in retrospect,
I can see how much I lost myself in the relationship,
but going into it really had no idea. A big
part of this journey has been about finding my own
sense of self worth more than anything that I think
I lost, and frankly probably didn't have a lot of
(07:23):
going into things.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
What is your relationship like now with your ex? How
did that parting go? Not?
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Well?
Speaker 4 (07:32):
I don't speak to her at all.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
About a month into our marriage, she told me that
she had never been happy in our relationship, and that
the relationship had never met her needs, that it had
always been only about me, and that she had been
dissatisfied the whole time.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
This was a month after the marriage. Yeah, that's okay,
choice of tiny.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah, it was a shock. I was really caught off
guard and just really stunned at what that all meant.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
How did she explain the fact that you'd been together
for many, many years at that point and she never
shared this with you, decided to marry you, and then
a month after marrying you discloses this.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, I think that was why it was so jarring.
Was that there wasn't really like an explanation. It was, well,
I guess the explanation was like, she was tired of
not putting her needs first and she should have done
that before and didn't, and that now I need to
(08:43):
meet her needs and I need to prove to her
that I can, because she would say to me that
she doesn't think that I have the ability to meet
her needs, that I'm not capable of doing that.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
I still struggle a lot with what that all meant, and.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think I went into just overdrive mode of trying
to fix everything.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
I begged her to go to couple's therapy right away.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
She was in her own therapy and said she didn't
want to do couples therapy. She wanted to focus on herself,
that that was what she needed. She needed me to
put that need first.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
That first year after we got married was sort of
a like kind of spiral in a way of her
revealing all of these ways that I make her unhappy
and me trying to fix it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Can you give us an example of one of those things.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Our sex life was one example that she told me
was all my fault. She told me she would never
initiate sex ever, again that I had to fix it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
But what was broken.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
According to her, how much we had sex was a
big one.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So she felt like you would not initiate sex. The
burden was on.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
Her, and so she said that I had to initiate.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
She was never going to again.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Was that the first time she voiced that concern to you.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We had had some arguments about that earlier on when
we were dating. I thought we had worked through a
lot of that. She told me that she had tried
to convince herself that it was fine and that it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Meaning you did listen to what she had said, and
you tried to initiate sex more, but it wasn't enough
right in her view.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
Okay, And that's where the other part comes in.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
She would say, like, I need to be shown that
you're able to put someone else's needs above your own,
because I don't think you can do that.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Can you give us maybe another example as well of
where she felt that.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah, one of the their examples was like crying when
we would have hard discussions. So I tend to be
a more emotional person. She told me that, like, I
shouldn't cry when we talk because it makes her feel
like there's not room for her emotions, and so I
just have memories of just like holding it together or
(11:02):
trying to like not be me. Sorry, here you.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Are allowed to cry.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I think I'm still working on not feeling like there's
something wrong with me for having feelings.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Jan If I would have asked you two weeks after
the way, I say, oh, any time before, Hey, what's
your assessment about how balanced this relationship is. How much
is it about you versus about her? What would your
assessment at that time have been.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I would have said that we are very different people,
that we have very different needs. I would have said
she met my needs. She was there for me during
like some of the hardest times of my life and
supported me through them and made me laugh. And I
thought when we had had conversations before, like all through
(12:01):
dating and the engagement, and we would talk about our
lives and like spending our lives together, she would always
tell me like how I made her the happiest person.
And I think what was so confusing was she said
how much she was glad that we were so different
in how we expressed ourselves, that she was happy that
(12:23):
I was a more emotional person because she wanted to
be more in touch with her feelings because that was
something she really struggled with and that she wanted that
in her life.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
So it felt like a one eighty that came out
of nowhere to me.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Do you know what her needs were that she felt
weren't getting that. You talked a little bit about sex,
what else.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
She had a really tough upbringing.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
She had a mom who was undiagnosed bipolar at the
time and was abusive basically, and had always been on
her own, like from the time she was really little.
She basically was abandoned as a kid, and her dad
died when she was fifteen, and so there was a
lot of trauma that she had faced and she needed
(13:06):
a safe place.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
We had always talked about wanting our home.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
To be a safe place for us to have joy
and to have family game nights. We had been in
the process of having kids. We had bought sperm from
a sperm bank, like, we had done all that and
had talked about how for her she needed and wanted
this life.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
You talked about having kids after she had said to
you that her needs were not getting met. A month
after the wedding, or this was before you got married.
You talked about having kids, and then that was off
the table once you got married and this revelation came out.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
We talked about having kids from like month one of dating.
We had our kids' names picked out. It was always
the plan while we were engaged. Was when we bought
the sperm, and the plan was basically to start trying
right after we got married. We had our fertility doctor
and she was going to carry, and we went to
all the appointments and we were doing a belated honeymoon
(14:08):
when she got a job offer that was like something
that she didn't want to turn down. We ended up
delaying the first insemination like a week before we were
supposed to do it. That was basically right at the
time when this was all unraveling. In retrospect, I'm grateful.
I think I was just like so desperate to fix
(14:30):
to not be in the place we were in that
I was willing to keep going.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
I guess so for a year you were making efforts
to do everything you can to accommodate her needs. Two
years after that you were still together, but you just
kept that up or did something change.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
It got worse. In addition to like all these other
areas of her needs not being met. She said that
we needed to explore opening up the relationship so she
could sleep with other people.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
So there was this conversation about initiating sex. But were
you not having as much sex as she wanted? Was
that also part of it? And was that because you
have different needs around that, or because there was so
much difficulty in the relationship you were not feeling like
you wanted to have sex, or are you generally somebody
who was not as interested in the frequency of sex
(15:21):
that she wanted.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I think it's a hard question because I the time
probably would have said that there was something wrong with
me for not wanting to have sex as much as
I didn't want to have sex. I think in retrospect,
I now realized that I was feeling really unsafe.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Help me understand. Was I missing something? You weren't feeling
unsafe in the beginning of the relation at all. So
in general, she wanted to have sex more frequently than
you did. That's right, okay, And then it just wasn't addressed.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
I think it was basically, yeah, not addressed to her satisfaction.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
I didn't realize that until she brought it up after
we got married.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Okay, so she wanted to open up the relationship. You
did not well.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
When we were dating, she had said that this was
something that eventually she'd want to explore, and I said
okay to that or when we were dating, but that
it was sort of in the future.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
But was it okay for you?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
I think I convinced myself that it was okay with
me because that was what she wanted.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
It's an interesting response from the person who supposedly doesn't
meet her needs and only makes it about you. Yeah,
that's you actually doing the opposite, meeting her needs and
dismissing you.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
In retrospect, I can see that I wasn't deep down
in touch with my own needs about this, because I
would cry every time we talk about it was not
something that I was comfortable with. I convinced myself that
I was fine with it until she kissed someone for
the first time and I had like a really emotional
reaction to it.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
How did you hear about that?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
She told me.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But there were rules around opening up the relationship, and
that was that you would tell each other that you
had seen someone else, or you would tell the details,
like we had sex or we kissed. What were the
rules around this.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
The rules that we had said were basically like, it
wouldn't be something that would be a long ongoing relationship,
that it couldn't be somebody who she had any emotional
connection with, and that I had to know that it
was happening. We said that we would kind of determine
(17:41):
how much I wanted to know.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Well, sorry, this was set up in that one sided way,
that this is mostly something she'd be doing and you
would be tolerating.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, I was operating with a lot of abandonment preventions
strategies and see that now, But at the time I
was so desperate to just save the marriage that I
convinced myself that it was okay, and I really believed it.
I really believed it was okay until she kissed someone.
(18:12):
And when she kissed someone, it was almost like my
body couldn't hold it together anymore, Like, oh, wait, you're
not okay with this. And so we had a conversation
where I said I'm having a hard time with.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
This, and.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
She said she didn't care, that she was going to
keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
But at the time she was doing this, she also
started to become cruel to me. She would just burate
me for a lot of things about myself, and so
I was living in this place where nobody in my
(18:58):
friends or family knew what was going on. But she
was pursuing other people and yelling at me at home,
and I felt really alone.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Why did nobody in your circle of friends and family
know what was going on?
Speaker 3 (19:18):
We were like the Golden couple. We had this huge
group of friends and family. And so that fall I
started to talk to my friends and she got really
really angry at me. But became a really big issue
her yelling at me for like telling my friends what
(19:39):
was going on?
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Did you stop telling them? Then?
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I didn't stop telling them. I was really careful about
what I said, so a lot of them didn't know
the extent of it until it got further along. And
I feel grateful, like every day for my friend because
they kept pushing me to like speak more and be
more honest about what was happening, because that was what
(20:10):
ultimately let me realize it wasn't okay what was going on.
When she would tell me that it was all my fault,
or that I was weak, or that I was like selfish,
or that I was abandoning her all these things, I
believed them. It took talking to other people for me
(20:32):
to start to consider that that wasn't true and that
I didn't have to stay, that I wasn't stuck. But
that took a really long time, you.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Know, Shannon, He wrote us about the holidays, and the
way people think about the holidays is influenced heavily by
what they've experienced before and what they might be experiencing
at the time, as opposed to the holidays self. And
you are not even a year out from the end
(21:07):
of a long relationship. When it's your entire twenties, it's
a long time, and it ended right around the holidays
last year. So there's that, and you're grieving, and you're
also processing and going through some post trauma work, and
so all of this is going on at the time
(21:29):
that we are sold this idea that the holidays are
going to be great. It's the holiday season, and there's
a big mismatch between what you're actually experiencing and what
you're told you should be experiencing. It's a little bit
like in your relationship, you were told you should just
go along with this and be okay with this, and
there was another part of you that was saying, I'm
(21:49):
not okay with this, right, So the false self and
the authentic self, and so I just want to put
a pin in that for a minute and go back
a little bit farther. I think Guy and I were
both very curious about the divorce of your parents. You
mentioned a little bit about what holidays were like then,
But tell us about how old you were, what happened
(22:10):
when your parents got divorced, what changed in your life.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
I was three when my parents got divorced. My brother
was two. I don't remember, obviously, but from what some
family friends told me, it was pretty contentious, like they
hated one another. I still they couldn't talk to one another.
A lot of that communication was done through me. They
(22:35):
had joint custody. That schedule was a hot mess.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Honestly, it was a hot mess because they hadn't worked
out a custody schedule, or they didn't follow the schedule
that was worked out.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
They had worked out a custody schedule. But one of
the biggest issues growing up was equal time. There was
this issue of equal time to the minute or second
if it was like a minute after you know, my
dad's time. There was always just constant yelling about how
I don't have enough time, or you don't have enough time,
and so it's basically designed so that they each could
(23:06):
have the exact equal amount of time. Because they loved
us so much, I sometimes say like they loved a
little too hard, Like I know, that's silly.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Growing up, then where did you spend the holidays with
this hot mess of a custody?
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So I would do two Thanksgivings, usually on the same day.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Yeah, I ate a lot of food. Luckily they didn't
live too far away, so we could go back and forth,
and then for the winter holidays. Luckily, my dad is Jewish,
my mom's Christian. I remember growing up thinking like, thank
God because it made that so much easier. There was
(23:49):
always an issue though my dad would bring up. He
would think does he get me for all the nights
of Hanukkah? My mom Christmas is only one night, So
there was some of that fighting in addition to other issues.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Did either of your parents remarry?
Speaker 3 (24:05):
My dad remarried when I was in college, but had
like a lot of girlfriends growing up. And my mom
she dated somebody when I was really little, like maybe
five or six, and then after that she didn't date
anybody until I was in seventh grade, and then got
married when I was in ninth grade, and they got
(24:26):
divorced when I was in eleventh grade.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
The only time my parents ever.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Were in the same vicinity was once a year on
my birthday or once a year on my brother Josh's birthday.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
How did you feel about the holidays as a kid, anticipating, Oh,
it's going to be Thanksgiving, it's going to be Hankkah,
it's going to be Christmas.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It was stressful. I was excited in like the way
you would decorate. My mom and I would make Christmas cookies,
and my dad and my brother and I would light
the candles for Hankkhah, like I remember loving the trade.
But yeah, it was really stressful to be going back
and forth just fighting my dad on the phone with
(25:09):
me and me standing next to my mom and my
dad's screaming in my ear to tell my mom this
and vice versa, and like basically trying to figure out
some way that we could spend time with both at
the holidays and have it be like who are we
going to go to Thanksgiving with first, because then that
dictated whether or not I would spend the night whose
(25:30):
house I would spend the night at, which was always
a big thing.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
So usually these holidays, a lot of them are planned
around the kids. And yet it was very clearly centered
around your parents because they were fighting tooth and nail
about every millimeter. And usually when kids go up in
that situation, they learned to become attuned to their parents'
(25:54):
feelings and needs because no one's asking them how they
feel about it. And when Rebecca said to you, hey,
this is all about you, this isn't about me, your
response to it was to go into fixed mode, in
which do you, as much as possible, try to make
it about her. I'm saying all of this because here
we are facing another holiday season in which, in your
(26:18):
letter you are clear about how distressing it would be
for your mom to be alone, or for your dad
to think this, or for your dad to be jealous,
or for your mom to be jealous. And how do
I deal with all the other people's feelings? And I
think that, in the stage of rebuilding after what sounds
like an emotionally abusive relationship, that this year it needs
(26:42):
to be about you.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I don't even know what that means.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I actually agree you probably don't, but I'm throwing it
out there anyway, because that's something I would like you
to just think about as an unusual notion.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
That's probably what my friends would say and my therapist.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Sometimes when kids grow up and they're very aware of
their parents' needs in a way that maybe isn't age
appropriate because they're so young, two things happen. On the
one hand, kids feel like, I have to look out
for other people's needs and I don't know how to
even know what my needs are. But what they do,
(27:28):
on the other hand is they feel so desperate to
get their needs met because they haven't in certain ways
that sometimes they're not aware of the ways in which
they are asking other people to meet their needs. And
we do tend to regress during the holidays, you know,
we go home and all of a sudden, we feel
sixteen again, and we don't know why, Like that remark
(27:48):
that mom made, or that thing that your sibling did
or whatever, all of a sudden, you just go straight
back to that knee jerk reaction you would have had
when you were younger. Yep. And so we want you
to be really thoughtful before the this year about what
would it look like to be an adult in your
early thirties, who can sit with the fact that you're
not quite sure what your needs are, but you're going
(28:10):
to make your best guess because you're going to reflect
on it, not make an impulsive decision, and take the
time to sort through what it is that you want.
In your letter, you throw out all these options, But
I think you actually know what you want to do,
but you're almost asking for permission. Is it okay if
(28:31):
I meet my own needs this unusually stressful holiday season
where there's COVID to consider, there's the end of a
marriage that was traumatic, and then there's the history that
I have with my family around the holidays where it's stressful.
So given that we think that you said in your
(28:52):
letter what you want to do, I want to hear
you say out loud what it is that you think
you want to do?
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Oh my god, Honestly, nobody's asking me that I haven't
actually thought about it.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
If it wasn't about worrying about how other people were
going to be impacted, what is it that feels nourishing
to you this holiday season?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
I'd probably spent it with my best friend who just
had a baby and her family. Her family sort of
become a second family to me here across the country
from my own. I lived with them for like the
first month after leaving. I didn't have a place to
stay yet, and so they let me live with them.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
What was that like when you lived with them?
Speaker 3 (29:49):
I felt so lucky, just so grateful to have the
best people in my life. They sat with me and
cried with me, and raged with me about things, and
eate dinner with me. It just felt like a home
(30:11):
in my home had not for a really long time.
My home that I had to leave felt like home.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
A general tip you can use and maybe others can
use as well, is when you are unsure of what
you will need or what you want, but you have
good friends, ask yourself what your friends would say that
you needed or wanted. There's not going to be the
entire aunts, but it's a good place to stop.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
And the reason isn't that your friends know you better
than you do. Nobody knows you better than you do,
but we know that your friends are more compassionate towards
you than you are at this moment. When you learn
to be more self compassionate, your internal compass is going
to be a lot more accurate.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
And also the friends don't have that but how mom,
Wait but what will that say? They don't have that
thing blocking you, so the minute you have a thought,
it gets locked. These friends, how many of them are
there that we would say are really close?
Speaker 3 (31:09):
So many? I feel like they saved my life. Honestly,
coming out of that relationship, I have probably I don't
know ten people here who would drop anything, did drop anything?
Help me move out of my house?
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It should be one for every night of Hanaka with
a spear so you have enough friends to see you
through the holiday. If that's what you're not going to decide.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
To do, yeah, we're going to hear in your words,
this isn't necessarily what you're going to do. Just to
take the pressure off of yourself. We just want to
get you in touch with what your needs are. If
you picture yourself during the holidays, and you use the
(31:55):
word safe before and you feel safe and you feel loved,
and you use the word home and you feel like
this feels like the kind of home that I want
to create for myself. What would you do this holiday season?
Where would you spend it with? Whom would you spend it?
Speaker 3 (32:18):
I would be with my friends. They've become like chosen family.
They've given me keys to their homes because they want
me to have it feel like mine.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's so beautiful. There's something so symbolic about that that
you were talking about a sense of home and they
gave you keys to their homes so that it could
feel like you were home too.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
When I left, my best friend gave me keys.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I had a suitcase that I had dropped it off
at her house, and she made me a whole package
of things that were all my favorite stuff to make
me feel like, well, I didn't have a home anymore
like that, that this could be mine too.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
What did she make?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
There was a bath bomb because I loved taking baths.
There was wine. There was a quote because I love quotes.
There was tissues. There's a lot in there. It was
just basically trying to show me that I might feel alone,
but I'm not actually alone.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You were seen and understood and loved.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And what a wonderful thing that, given that you grew
up with parents who albeit loved you so much they
fought over you in some crazy ways, but stressed you
out because of it. Yeah, and then you in a
marriage with someone who turned out to be a very
different person than you thought they were, and yet you
(34:04):
gather around you. Yeah, these ridiculously loyal good friends. I
mean that care package was one point. Get in the bath,
have a glass of wine.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Think of the.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Quote, and here's betise, She's still when you cry. So
I mean it was very well.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Done, Shannon. Did Rebecca ever do things like that for
you in your relationship?
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Early on? She was really amazing at like showing me
love and care. There was a lot of big gestures
I felt really loved and cared for. But afterwards, the
thing that came to my mind just now was my
birthday that year. She didn't even talk to me.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
In the early part before that one month after the
wedding talk. Would you do things like that gestures like
that for her as well?
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah? For her thirtieth birthday, I wanted her to see
how loved she was, and I got all the people
in her life to send birthday messages and then I
did like a scavenger hunt thirty things for your thirtieth
birthday throughout the day and ended with giving her the book.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Did she enjoy that? Was she moved by that? She
loved it?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
That's why it was such a blind sight for her
to come and see you don't do anything for me
because he has just one example.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
That is the voice that's in my head constantly still
is like, am I crazy?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I want to give this a little bit more nuance,
which is that there are probably ways that you did
not meet her niece.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Yeah, agreed, And.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
That's a real learning experience. The issue isn't whether you
met her niece. The issue is what happened between the
two of you when this finally got discussed and it
seemed like there wasn't a conversation around this that would
make it about the two of you as a couple.
I've been feeling this for a long time. I know
(36:01):
that you do some nice things for me, but in general,
I'm feeling neglected and here's why, And can we talk
about this and even not agreeing to go to couple's therapy, Well,
how do you deal with that as a couple and
talk about it so it's not so cut and dry,
and I think that's going to be more helpful for
(36:23):
you to be able to really examine, well, what are
the ways where there was truth to what she said? Yeah,
so I'm not debating necessarily the truth of what she
said because she felt that what was traumatic about it
was the way it was handled and the way that
there was no real viable way to repair this where
the two of you were working together as a team
(36:45):
in open dialogue around this.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
I think that resonates a lot with me, because I
would say that a lot, especially as my friends were
telling me this isn't okay. There would be times earlier on,
before I talk to people, she would just brate me,
and I look back and I wished I had just
walked away or said I don't want to engage, But
I just thought that, like I needed to stay and
(37:09):
prove to her that I could tolerate it.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
There's a difference between saying here's what the issue is
and for you to feel, yeah, I could do better there, right.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah, there were so many ways I could do better, right,
And that's a learning experience.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, but it sounds like the way that that was
communicated that there was an element of shaming you.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
One of the things that happened when you said shame
was she threatened me that she was going to tell
people about what I liked or didn't like in sex.
Because I was talking to people what was happening.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
I want to point out, Shennon, I think it's a
little worse than what you're presenting, because really the subtext
of what happened the month after the wedding was she
comes to you and she says you have failed me
so drastically that I am now revoking every right you
have in this marriage. So you've lost your rights. It's
not about you anymore. I don't owe you anything anymore.
(38:07):
I don't have to do anything that. All the burden
is on you. You have to prove it to me.
And if you start complaining, oh God forbid, crying or
having feelings about it, I'm not going to accept that
because I need you to prove to me that you
can take it. So not only I'm going to be
horribly emotionally abusive to you from now on. You don't
get to have a reaction because that will be a failure.
That was the messaging. It's very severe, and I'm not
(38:32):
sure even now you've fully wrapped your head around how
bad that is what happened.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I think I get it, but I question myself so
much still that it's like hard for me.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
I feel crazy sometimes still.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I think you're having trouble holding two things in your
mind at the same time. One is that there may
be worth things that you could have done differently, and
you were aware of them, and that was part of
the learning and the growth. The other thing is that
you weren't given the environment in which you could have
(39:09):
done something productive about it. And so when you say, well,
I think I'm crazy or I don't know who's at fault.
You both did things in the relationship, But I think
ultimately what you're left with is this obsessive rumination around
am I bad because she made you feel so bad
all the time about who you are as a person.
(39:31):
That's where the shame is. Shame. Is I am bad?
I am selfish, I'm not capable, I'm not strong enough.
That was the message.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
You are in a recovery process after being in an
abusive situation, and it takes time to recover because you
will feel guilty when you start thinking about what your
needs are. Is this reasonable that I want to spend
Christmas with my friends? Is it reasonable that I feel
this way? Am I allowed to cry now? Is that
a all of that? It takes time.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
I want to add the layer of COVID to this
as well, because we're in the middle of a global
pandemic where most people are having some version of your dilemma.
My family wants me to go home. I don't feel
like it's safe in a situation where the parents are divorced.
How much do I quarantine whose feelings are going to
get hurt? Because that's going to mean I need fourteen
(40:26):
days here in fourteen days there, and it's a lot
of heavy lifting, more so than a normal year. I
think that you need to be able to give yourself
a break and say I have these very big stressors
in my life right now around the holidays. There's my
history around the holidays. I don't have memories of it
being relaxed. I don't have memories of me getting to choose.
(40:51):
I've never had that experience. I don't know what that
would even look like if I got to choose how
to spend my holidays, even though I'm in my early
three days. And then there's this issue I just got
out of a marriage that broke up last holiday season.
So on anniversaries of things, we tend to feel things
more deeply because the time of year sometimes brings back
(41:12):
those memories in a sharper way. So you've got all
that going on and what we're saying to you, and
I'm going to ask you one more time, is if
you can articulate what you want to do this holiday season,
what would that be.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
I don't feel safe traveling, no matter how much that
is upsetting to anybody else.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
So we were thinking about your history with the holidays
and what you're going through now and how it's coinciding
with this time of year, and what we'd like you
to do is we'd like you to really think about
how you can get your needs met during the holidays
and also met other people's needs, because I think one
(42:02):
of the things that tripped you up in your relationship
and probably growing up too, was there was so much
focus on whether your needs were getting met or you
were meeting somebody else's needs. But I don't think that
you really learned how to balance those two. And here's
a great opportunity in your early thirties, as an adult
(42:23):
for the first time, to say what is it that
I want? And then how can I also be aware
of what other people want where I don't lose myself
in that. So we were thinking about Honkah since that
comes first this year, and we were thinking about how
there are eight nights, and we would like you to
(42:46):
have that balance of am I spending time with my
dad and maybe your brother if you also celebrated Hanakah
with him, and then my friends who mean so much
to me, and I think you called them your chosen family.
So what we'd like you to do is on the
first night of Hanukkah, we would like you to light
that candle on zoom with your dad, and we would
(43:11):
like you to come up with some kind of ritual
that you can do every year, something that makes you happy.
Maybe it's a song that you sing, maybe it's decorating
that you do something that you can do with your
dad on zoom you can light the candle, but maybe
there's something else too, and maybe there's something even without
your dad. Maybe it is part of the decorating. Whatever
it is, but it's going to be yours, so we
(43:32):
don't want to give you too many ideas when it
to come from you. And then that's the first night.
The second night, we want you to light a candle
on zoom with your brother and again have some kind
of sibling ritual with him, so that you're reframing the holidays,
you're recreating the holidays as an adult and you're claiming
them as yours. And you mentioned the excitement before, and
(43:54):
we want that excitement to transfer over into really owning.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Them from.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
And then you have six nights left, and with each
of those six nights, we want you to on zoom
to be safe with COVID. We want you to light
a candle, pick six friends, and each night you'll do
that with one of those six friends.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
You could do more than one. I mean, if you
want to do if there are some friends left over,
because it sounds like you might have leftovers that too much.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Do it however you want, but we want we want
to start with the family and go over into the
chosen family.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
Christmas has a similar vibe. Clearly, you would like to
be with your friends, and you should, but we would
like you on Christmas Day to do something with your
mom that you would do if you were there.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
You said you might take together or do things together,
but plant and ahead of time and logistics, but hang
out with her a.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Little bit, and a little bit is the key here.
We want you to gauge your comfort zone that you're
not there to take care of her, you're there to
celebrate with her. But it's not because she's so sad
and lonely or you're so sad and lonely, because that
doesn't feel like a holiday at all. We want you
to be able to have fun together. And that might
(45:10):
be because I think maybe the dynamic might be a
little bit different. That's been set up and you're nodding,
so yes, we want you to say, Hey, mom, what
can we do for an hour on zoom? That would
be really fun on Christmas. I'm not going to come
this year because I'm not comfortable with COVID, but I
still want to do something fun with you. What can
we do? Do you want to bake something together for
an hour? Do you want to watch a movie together
(45:32):
for an hour? What do we want to do for
about an hour that would be really fun? So we
can spend that time together.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
With an idea of turning it into a ritual that
you can do with her the next time you see her,
or you can do on zoom the next Christmas you're
not with her, but then you have this thing that
you guys do. Because what ritual does as it makes
it a exciting but it also really defines it as yours.
And we want you to own these holidays.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
And it also helps because no matter what else might
be going on in your life this year it's the
aftermath of a divorce and COVID, you still have these
rituals to depend on.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
Every year, I've spent so much time.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Focused on what the holidays mean relative to my family
or to my marriage and the divorce, and it honestly
is like I have been dreading this season, and just
when you guys were saying this, it made me more
excited about it because it feels like I can see
people that I love and have something new that Christmas
(46:38):
won't always or the holidays won't always remind me of
my divorce.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
A lot of people feel like when they haven't had
a good experience with the holidays in the past, they
don't realize that as an adult, they get to choose.
They get to make choices about what would feel good
for them on the holidays, and that doesn't mean abandoning
the people that you love at the same time time,
So everything that we're telling you is about you creating
(47:04):
rituals that feel good to you that also include the
people that you love.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Both, and it's both, and it's reclaiming because this is
what you're doing now in your own life. You're reclaiming
your sense of self, you're reclaiming your emotions, you're reclaiming Honakh,
and you're reclaiming Christmas. There is one other aspect that
we want to add. There's one person that is not
invited to Hanukah all Christmas, and that's Rebecca. Despite the
(47:32):
fact that she's not invited, she might show up in
your thoughts. She will not, she might. Here's what we
know when you ruminate about something, and this would be
a rumination if she pops into your thoughts, is that
if you spend two or three minutes at most focused cognitively,
but concentrated on another task, it kind of resets the
(47:55):
brain in a way that then when you go back,
you don't have that intrusive thought of Rebecca. And the
kinds of tasks at work, the ones that require concentration,
memory tasks like can I name the list of songs
in a playlist? Or do I remember the order of
pictures on your wall? Stuff like that, just it requires
concentration for two or three minutes. It can be a
cross word, but two or three minutes is enough to
get that impulse in it and so if Rebcca comes uninvited,
(48:20):
just refocus on the people who are invited. For Hanukah
and for Christmas. We want you to not talk about
her to the people you're around. It's a vacation for you,
it's a vacation for them. It is a refocusing on
the holidays and what that season has to bring.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
And this is different from Rebecca saying don't feel your feelings.
You're not allowed to have your feelings. What we're saying
to you is we want you to give yourself the
gift of a break from Rebecca on these holidays. And
we understand that Rebecca will show up, but we want
you to make sure that you keep giving yourself that
(48:55):
gift of Wait a minute, I am here with these
people that I love, who love me. This feels really good.
I don't want to ruin it for myself. How does
that all sound to you? It sounds great, all right, Well,
we look forward to doing that from you.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I think part of the challenge for Shannon is going
to be that she's still very much in a healing process,
and in that sense, it's such an opportunity because taking
control and creating this reality of a holiday in a
way that suits her could be therapeutic in a more
general way than just the holiday. Can really help her
start to get in touch with her needs, her priorities,
(49:40):
and having this balance of taking care of other people's
needs while not losing sight of her.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
So many times people forget that when they're adults, they
have choices. In her mind, it was very much either
I get my needs met or I meet somebody else's needs,
but there was no middle ground. And I think that
this will help her to rebalance that, and it's really
good practice for her for whatever happens in her next relationship,
and it's also really good practice for her for the
(50:06):
holidays going forward, no matter what situation she's in. Absolutely,
you're listening to Dear Therapist from My Heart Radio. We'll
be back after a quick break. So, after we gave
(50:34):
the advice to Shannon, we got an email from her
and Mike, our producer, is going to share it with
all of you. Hey, Mike, can you read the email
from Shannon?
Speaker 6 (50:47):
Thank you, Laurie, Yes, I can, Dear Laurie, and Guy,
thank you so so much for the time that you
spent with me. Guy, you said that you didn't think
I've fully come to understand the severity of what I
went through. I have struggled immensely with a massive amount
of doubt over the last year. The truth is, I
was really scared of her for a really long time.
(51:08):
Those few years after we got married got really bad.
She grabbed my arm while screaming at me. She told
me divorce is in my DNA, that I would be
incapable of taking care of a sick child, that she
hates everything about me, that she isn't attracted to me
at all anymore. She started sleeping with people and wouldn't
(51:28):
tell me where she was at night or who she
was with, And all the while she was drinking, smoking,
binging and purging, cutting herself and saying that she didn't
want to be alive. She was in massive amounts of
credit card debt, and I didn't have any of my
own savings anymore because we used it when she quit
her job and couldn't find another one for six months.
(51:50):
I was both terrified of her and terrified for her
all at the same time. Thank you both so so
much for helping me to start to see that I
need to face what happened more honestly, all the best
she had it.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
I'm not surprised by what Channon wrote, because it did
seem that things were worse and that she was idealizing
a little bit as if there were no problems whatsoever
before the marriage and then suddenly everything turned terrible right after.
It's usually not that sudden.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
Yeah, And I think it's common when people start to
really face the reality of how challenging a relationship was,
that because they're still grieving, there is still a loss
for them that they're not really ready to look at
how bad it was because they think, well, why would
I have stayed that long seven years? And so I
think there's some shame sometimes in really reckoning with Wow,
(52:39):
what was I doing in this relationship for so long?
And that's some work that I think she's going to
have to do. But let's hear what she had to say.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yes, that's going to be very interesting now to hear
her voicemail.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Hey, Laurie and Guy, I'm just calling to give you
a quick update. I have been working really hard to
set up all of my rituals and it's actually been
really fun. I set up for Hanukkah Zoom calls with
all of my family and friends, my dad, the first night,
my brother the second night, and then a lot of
my friends. Everybody wanted to join, so doing a lot
of zoom calls the other nights of Honika, and as
(53:13):
part of that in building a new ritual for myself,
I'm actually because of how much I love to host people,
I'm going to host a virtual holiday party where I'm
sending out in advanced little care packages to all of
my people, and then we're going to actually do some
fun activities together over zoom and in hopes that when
we are after this COVID time period, we'll be able
to do it all together in person. Every year. My
(53:36):
mom and I are going to be baking Christmas cookies
together on Christmas Day like we usually do, and she
was totally understanding and very supportive of me not coming
because of COVID this year, so I'm excited about that.
And then I've been working really hard to disinvite my
ex from my mind and give myself, like you said,
the gift of emotional space. It's been really challenging, but
(53:56):
really good. I think it's made me realize how much
those thoughts have really warmed their way into my brain
and how much I have power to actually focus on
something else and, like you said, reset my brain. I
also just want to say how grateful I feel because
I think you made me realize how much I need
to confront very honestly my experience and what I went through.
(54:16):
I think I've been really hesitant to confront the painful
parts of the abuse that happened in the marriage, and
it's made me really committed in therapy in particular to
going deeper into that and really processing what happened so
that I can move forward, and really, more importantly also
what it was that made me stay for so long,
and how I can build a stronger sense of myself
(54:38):
so that I can focus on my needs in future
relationships and not lose them to others. So thank you
so much. I'm so excited not just for the holidays,
but honestly for just living a healthier life that is
much more aligned to what I need and at the
same time being able to bring all of my people
into that in the future. So thank you again and
(55:01):
happy holidays.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
So often people like Shannon who are going through something
really difficult like this very difficult divorce dread the holidays
and what I loved about what happened with her was
that I heard so much joy and excitement and relief
and looking forward to the future in her voice. So
(55:26):
she went from this is going to be horrible. I
grew up with divorced parents. The holidays were always very stressful.
Now I'm going through my own divorce. It's very sad.
I'm grieving, And instead she ended up with I'm having
the most connected holiday season on my terms that I've
ever had in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
I completely agree. The joy in her voice was so
pronounced it warmed my heart. And such a switch from
how she was thinking about these holidays to how she
thinking about them now, truly one hundred and eighty degree
switch of empowerment, of taking control, of being proactive, of
doing it her way in a way that will make
(56:10):
her happy. And the only lament I have is that
eight days of Hanukah the are twelve days of Christmas.
She's organized so much she probably needs a few more
days because those might not be enough. But that's a
good problem to have.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
I really like too that she has come to a
place where she said, wait, I have to do some
work on myself, and I need to focus on that
so that I can have different kinds of relationships going forward,
because that is a really important piece of this too.
And I think that sense of being trapped, being trapped
as a child between the two houses, being trapped in
(56:43):
this relationship, that was a perception that she had as
an adult that wasn't true. She could have left any time,
and I think she felt trapped around the holidays too,
and now I'm going to have this horrible holiday season.
And then once we had this conversation with her, she
started to realize, maybe I'm not as trapped as I
think I am. And she sprung herself from jail, and
(57:04):
so she's doing this reckoning with herself. And I think
the holidays bring up a lot of reckoning for lots
of people, but I think it can be a really
positive reckoning like it was for Shannon. And I hope
that people listening to this will be able to take
something from it so that they can do something similar
to what Shannon did.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
She very clearly is setting up rituals, and she used
that word, and that's what makes a holiday feel like holiday,
the rituals. And that's something we can all do at
any point on any holiday, and in a ritual that's
meaningful to us that we would really enjoy continuing going forward, and.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
They weren't just rituals, but there were rituals of connection.
When people really put in the work to figure out
what those will be, they find that they can create
those in their own lives too.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
Hey, fellow travelers, if you've used any of our advice
from the podcast in your own life, send us quick
voice memo to Loriandguy at iHeartMedia dot com and tell
us about it. We may include it in a future show.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
And if you're enjoying our podcast each week, please help
support Dear Therapists. You can tell your friends about it,
and we'd be so grateful if you'd leave us a
five star review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help people
find the show. You can follow us both online. I'm
at Lorigottlieb dot com and you can follow me on
Twitter at Lorigottlieb one or on Instagram at Lorigottlieb Underscore Author.
Speaker 2 (58:30):
And I'm at Guywinch dot com. I'm on Twitter and
on Instagram at Guywinch. If you have a dilemma you'd
like to discuss with us, big or small, email us
at Lorianguy at iHeartMedia dot Com.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Our executive producers Christopher Hasiotis, were produced and edited by
Mike Johns. Special thanks to Samuel Benefield and to our
podcast Fairygodmother Katie Couric. Next Week, a young woman struggles
to find a balance between taking care of her own
needs and care for her husband, whose chronic illness is
taking a toll on their marriage.
Speaker 7 (59:04):
We got married, we were in this together. I'm definitely
scared that our marriage could fall apart. I just don't
know what to do without making it like this is
his problem.
Speaker 1 (59:14):
Dear Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And I'm Guy Wench. I wrote Emotional First Aid, and
I write the Dear Guy column for Ted. And this
is Deo Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
This week, a woman faces her first holiday season after
a difficult divorce.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
My dad would bring up. He would think, like, then
does he get me for all the nights in Hanukah?
My mom, Christmas is only one night, so you know
there was some of that fighting.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Listen in and maybe learn something about yourself and the process.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Deo Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute
medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis,
or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental
health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions
you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter,
you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in powder
(01:02):
and full, and we may edit it for length. End
of clarity. Hi Laurie, Hey guy, So what do we
have today?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Well? Tis the season. Here's the letter. Dear therapists. I'm
feeling a lot of anxiety with the holidays fast approaching.
I got divorced this year, and navigating being newly single
while facing the isolation of COVID has been difficult. I
live across the country from my parents, and I am
struggling with the potential to have to spend the first
(01:32):
holiday season post divorce without my wife and without my
family for the first time. To add some additional context,
my parents are also divorced and do not get along
at all, do not talk, can't be in the same
room together. Going home has always been extremely stressful for me,
because even as an adult, I feel like I'm thrown
back into the custody schedule of my childhood, where I'm
(01:53):
living out of a suitcase and constantly going back and
forth between houses. The idea of managing the usual endthnxiety
I feel when going home for the holidays while also
navigating the risks of COVID has been somewhat overwhelming. Do
I not go home at all due to the risks
of infecting them and leave my mom to be alone
during the holidays. If I go home, do I only
stay with one parent to reduce transmission risks when I
(02:16):
know doing so will upset the other if I don't
go home at all, how do I navigate being alone
for the first time since my divorce. The idea of
being by myself feels awful, especially as my now ex
wife has already moved on. The holidays have always caused
me stress given my family dynamics, but it being my
first season without my wife and being far away in
the middle of a pandemic has added some additional anxiety
(02:39):
to the situation. I would really appreciate your help on this,
Thanks so much, Shannon.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
One of the things that comes up every year around
the holidays is that people whose parents are divorced are
faced with who do they choose, who do they disappoint?
And if they're in a situation where they're married and
this bounces parents and there are four people to disappoint potentially,
there is this tension that comes around the holiday season
for people when their parents are divorced, which is just
(03:07):
baked in unless they found an ongoing solution, and it
takes away from the anticipation and the enjoyment almost.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Every year, You're right, and it also brings up this
memory of having to deal with that tension as a child.
A lot of the time you feel as a child
like you're stuck in this place that some of your
friends don't have to deal with, where you know that
you're going to be.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Splitting the holidays.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's not that much fun because there's maybe tension between
the parents. You're missing the other parent. If you're a
one parents, it just feels different and it takes them
getting used to and then when you have to face
it as an adult, sometimes it brings back a lot
of those memories.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And the other thing that happens is that I always
ask people what are you anticipating, what's your expectation, And
invariably what they anticipate or expect is three or four
levels above of what the reality was for the past
ten years.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think one of the things that's important for her
to realize is that even though she has a specific
experience of growing up in a divorced household, most people
experience stress during the holidays, even if they get along
with their families. We have this idea of what the
holidays are supposed to be like. I think that most
(04:22):
people imagine that everybody else is having this picture perfect
holiday season and they're not and so I think it's
really helpful for people to understand the reality better so
that they can have a good time knowing that they
aren't having a vastly different experience from the rest of
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, let's just tell people that the holiday season and
especially the aftermath, this is the busiest time of the
year for us therapists.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's right, for good reason exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So let's talk to him. You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio.
We'll be back after a quick break.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
I'm Lori Gottlieb and I'm.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Guy Winch and this is Deo Therapist.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So Hi, Shannon, Hi, thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
It's good to meet you, guys. Thank you so much
for having me.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You're very welcome. So it's been a year for you.
It's been a year for everyone, but it's been a
year for you. Can you tell us a little bit
about the marriage and the divorce and how you are.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yes, So I got divorced almost exactly a year ago
at Christmas time last year, and we were married for
three years, together for seven and officially ended it a
couple of months before the divorce was finalized.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Who's the one that initiated the separation.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
I was the one that officially ended it.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, Can I ask how old you are?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Thirty two?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Okay, how are you? In terms of the reconstruction, the
rebuilding thought that comes up divorce.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
It definitely feels like a rebuilding. I am doing a
lot better. I think it was like a whirlwind. For
a really long time. It felt like my world sort
of just came crashing down in a way. Honestly, this
year has been about like redefining myself, like trying to
figure out who I am now outside of that relationship,
(06:21):
and frankly who I was even prior to that relationship.
Just trying to find like a new semblance of me.
And it's been a journey, I would say, honestly, both
a lot of real lows and then also some like
highs of kind of figuring out myself for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It's interesting that you talk about figuring yourself out, because
it sounds like you spent most of your twenties, which
are these really formative years, in this relationship, and so
now you have this both challenge and opportunity to do
some of the things in terms of the figuring out
that maybe you did do because you were in this relationship.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, that's exactly what it felt like. I mean, in retrospect,
I can see how much I lost myself in the relationship,
but going into it really had no idea. A big
part of this journey has been about finding my own
sense of self worth more than anything that I think
I lost, and frankly probably didn't have a lot of
(07:23):
going into things.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
What is your relationship like now with your ex? How
did that parting go? Not?
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Well?
Speaker 4 (07:32):
I don't speak to her at all.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
About a month into our marriage, she told me that
she had never been happy in our relationship, and that
the relationship had never met her needs, that it had
always been only about me, and that she had been
dissatisfied the whole time.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
This was a month after the marriage. Yeah, that's okay,
choice of tiny.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah, it was a shock. I was really caught off
guard and just really stunned at what that all meant.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
How did she explain the fact that you'd been together
for many, many years at that point and she never
shared this with you, decided to marry you, and then
a month after marrying you discloses this.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, I think that was why it was so jarring.
Was that there wasn't really like an explanation. It was, well,
I guess the explanation was like, she was tired of
not putting her needs first and she should have done
that before and didn't, and that now I need to
(08:43):
meet her needs and I need to prove to her
that I can, because she would say to me that
she doesn't think that I have the ability to meet
her needs, that I'm not capable of doing that.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
I still struggle a lot with what that all meant, and.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think I went into just overdrive mode of trying
to fix everything.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
I begged her to go to couple's therapy right away.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
She was in her own therapy and said she didn't
want to do couples therapy. She wanted to focus on herself,
that that was what she needed. She needed me to
put that need first.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
That first year after we got married was sort of
a like kind of spiral in a way of her
revealing all of these ways that I make her unhappy
and me trying to fix it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Can you give us an example of one of those things.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Our sex life was one example that she told me
was all my fault. She told me she would never
initiate sex ever, again that I had to fix it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
But what was broken.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
According to her, how much we had sex was a
big one.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So she felt like you would not initiate sex. The
burden was on.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
Her, and so she said that I had to initiate.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
She was never going to again.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Was that the first time she voiced that concern to you.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We had had some arguments about that earlier on when
we were dating. I thought we had worked through a
lot of that. She told me that she had tried
to convince herself that it was fine and that it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Meaning you did listen to what she had said, and
you tried to initiate sex more, but it wasn't enough
right in her view.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
Okay, And that's where the other part comes in.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
She would say, like, I need to be shown that
you're able to put someone else's needs above your own,
because I don't think you can do that.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Can you give us maybe another example as well of
where she felt that.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah, one of the their examples was like crying when
we would have hard discussions. So I tend to be
a more emotional person. She told me that, like, I
shouldn't cry when we talk because it makes her feel
like there's not room for her emotions, and so I
just have memories of just like holding it together or
(11:02):
trying to like not be me. Sorry, here you.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Are allowed to cry.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I think I'm still working on not feeling like there's
something wrong with me for having feelings.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Jan If I would have asked you two weeks after
the way, I say, oh, any time before, Hey, what's
your assessment about how balanced this relationship is. How much
is it about you versus about her? What would your
assessment at that time have been.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I would have said that we are very different people,
that we have very different needs. I would have said
she met my needs. She was there for me during
like some of the hardest times of my life and
supported me through them and made me laugh. And I
thought when we had had conversations before, like all through
(12:01):
dating and the engagement, and we would talk about our
lives and like spending our lives together, she would always
tell me like how I made her the happiest person.
And I think what was so confusing was she said
how much she was glad that we were so different
in how we expressed ourselves, that she was happy that
(12:23):
I was a more emotional person because she wanted to
be more in touch with her feelings because that was
something she really struggled with and that she wanted that
in her life.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
So it felt like a one eighty that came out
of nowhere to me.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Do you know what her needs were that she felt
weren't getting that. You talked a little bit about sex,
what else.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
She had a really tough upbringing.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
She had a mom who was undiagnosed bipolar at the
time and was abusive basically, and had always been on
her own, like from the time she was really little.
She basically was abandoned as a kid, and her dad
died when she was fifteen, and so there was a
lot of trauma that she had faced and she needed
(13:06):
a safe place.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
We had always talked about wanting our home.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
To be a safe place for us to have joy
and to have family game nights. We had been in
the process of having kids. We had bought sperm from
a sperm bank, like, we had done all that and
had talked about how for her she needed and wanted
this life.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
You talked about having kids after she had said to
you that her needs were not getting met. A month
after the wedding, or this was before you got married.
You talked about having kids, and then that was off
the table once you got married and this revelation came out.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
We talked about having kids from like month one of dating.
We had our kids' names picked out. It was always
the plan while we were engaged. Was when we bought
the sperm, and the plan was basically to start trying
right after we got married. We had our fertility doctor
and she was going to carry, and we went to
all the appointments and we were doing a belated honeymoon
(14:08):
when she got a job offer that was like something
that she didn't want to turn down. We ended up
delaying the first insemination like a week before we were
supposed to do it. That was basically right at the
time when this was all unraveling. In retrospect, I'm grateful.
I think I was just like so desperate to fix
(14:30):
to not be in the place we were in that
I was willing to keep going.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
I guess so for a year you were making efforts
to do everything you can to accommodate her needs. Two
years after that you were still together, but you just
kept that up or did something change.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
It got worse. In addition to like all these other
areas of her needs not being met. She said that
we needed to explore opening up the relationship so she
could sleep with other people.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
So there was this conversation about initiating sex. But were
you not having as much sex as she wanted? Was
that also part of it? And was that because you
have different needs around that, or because there was so
much difficulty in the relationship you were not feeling like
you wanted to have sex, or are you generally somebody
who was not as interested in the frequency of sex
(15:21):
that she wanted.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I think it's a hard question because I the time
probably would have said that there was something wrong with
me for not wanting to have sex as much as
I didn't want to have sex. I think in retrospect,
I now realized that I was feeling really unsafe.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Help me understand. Was I missing something? You weren't feeling
unsafe in the beginning of the relation at all. So
in general, she wanted to have sex more frequently than
you did. That's right, okay, And then it just wasn't addressed.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
I think it was basically, yeah, not addressed to her satisfaction.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
I didn't realize that until she brought it up after
we got married.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Okay, so she wanted to open up the relationship. You
did not well.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
When we were dating, she had said that this was
something that eventually she'd want to explore, and I said
okay to that or when we were dating, but that
it was sort of in the future.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
But was it okay for you?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
I think I convinced myself that it was okay with
me because that was what she wanted.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
It's an interesting response from the person who supposedly doesn't
meet her needs and only makes it about you. Yeah,
that's you actually doing the opposite, meeting her needs and
dismissing you.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
In retrospect, I can see that I wasn't deep down
in touch with my own needs about this, because I
would cry every time we talk about it was not
something that I was comfortable with. I convinced myself that
I was fine with it until she kissed someone for
the first time and I had like a really emotional
reaction to it.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
How did you hear about that?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
She told me.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But there were rules around opening up the relationship, and
that was that you would tell each other that you
had seen someone else, or you would tell the details,
like we had sex or we kissed. What were the
rules around this.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
The rules that we had said were basically like, it
wouldn't be something that would be a long ongoing relationship,
that it couldn't be somebody who she had any emotional
connection with, and that I had to know that it
was happening. We said that we would kind of determine
(17:41):
how much I wanted to know.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Well, sorry, this was set up in that one sided way,
that this is mostly something she'd be doing and you
would be tolerating.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, I was operating with a lot of abandonment preventions
strategies and see that now, But at the time I
was so desperate to just save the marriage that I
convinced myself that it was okay, and I really believed it.
I really believed it was okay until she kissed someone.
(18:12):
And when she kissed someone, it was almost like my
body couldn't hold it together anymore, Like, oh, wait, you're
not okay with this. And so we had a conversation
where I said I'm having a hard time with.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
This, and.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
She said she didn't care, that she was going to
keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
But at the time she was doing this, she also
started to become cruel to me. She would just burate
me for a lot of things about myself, and so
I was living in this place where nobody in my
(18:58):
friends or family knew what was going on. But she
was pursuing other people and yelling at me at home,
and I felt really alone.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Why did nobody in your circle of friends and family
know what was going on?
Speaker 3 (19:18):
We were like the Golden couple. We had this huge
group of friends and family. And so that fall I
started to talk to my friends and she got really
really angry at me. But became a really big issue
her yelling at me for like telling my friends what
(19:39):
was going on?
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Did you stop telling them? Then?
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I didn't stop telling them. I was really careful about
what I said, so a lot of them didn't know
the extent of it until it got further along. And
I feel grateful, like every day for my friend because
they kept pushing me to like speak more and be
more honest about what was happening, because that was what
(20:10):
ultimately let me realize it wasn't okay what was going on.
When she would tell me that it was all my fault,
or that I was weak, or that I was like selfish,
or that I was abandoning her all these things, I
believed them. It took talking to other people for me
(20:32):
to start to consider that that wasn't true and that
I didn't have to stay, that I wasn't stuck. But
that took a really long time, you.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Know, Shannon, He wrote us about the holidays, and the
way people think about the holidays is influenced heavily by
what they've experienced before and what they might be experiencing
at the time, as opposed to the holidays self. And
you are not even a year out from the end
(21:07):
of a long relationship. When it's your entire twenties, it's
a long time, and it ended right around the holidays
last year. So there's that, and you're grieving, and you're
also processing and going through some post trauma work, and
so all of this is going on at the time
(21:29):
that we are sold this idea that the holidays are
going to be great. It's the holiday season, and there's
a big mismatch between what you're actually experiencing and what
you're told you should be experiencing. It's a little bit
like in your relationship, you were told you should just
go along with this and be okay with this, and
there was another part of you that was saying, I'm
(21:49):
not okay with this, right, So the false self and
the authentic self, and so I just want to put
a pin in that for a minute and go back
a little bit farther. I think Guy and I were
both very curious about the divorce of your parents. You
mentioned a little bit about what holidays were like then,
But tell us about how old you were, what happened
(22:10):
when your parents got divorced, what changed in your life.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
I was three when my parents got divorced. My brother
was two. I don't remember, obviously, but from what some
family friends told me, it was pretty contentious, like they
hated one another. I still they couldn't talk to one another.
A lot of that communication was done through me. They
(22:35):
had joint custody. That schedule was a hot mess.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Honestly, it was a hot mess because they hadn't worked
out a custody schedule, or they didn't follow the schedule
that was worked out.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
They had worked out a custody schedule. But one of
the biggest issues growing up was equal time. There was
this issue of equal time to the minute or second
if it was like a minute after you know, my
dad's time. There was always just constant yelling about how
I don't have enough time, or you don't have enough time,
and so it's basically designed so that they each could
(23:06):
have the exact equal amount of time. Because they loved
us so much, I sometimes say like they loved a
little too hard, Like I know, that's silly.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Growing up, then where did you spend the holidays with
this hot mess of a custody?
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So I would do two Thanksgivings, usually on the same day.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Yeah, I ate a lot of food. Luckily they didn't
live too far away, so we could go back and forth,
and then for the winter holidays. Luckily, my dad is Jewish,
my mom's Christian. I remember growing up thinking like, thank
God because it made that so much easier. There was
(23:49):
always an issue though my dad would bring up. He
would think does he get me for all the nights
of Hanukkah? My mom Christmas is only one night, So
there was some of that fighting in addition to other issues.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Did either of your parents remarry?
Speaker 3 (24:05):
My dad remarried when I was in college, but had
like a lot of girlfriends growing up. And my mom
she dated somebody when I was really little, like maybe
five or six, and then after that she didn't date
anybody until I was in seventh grade, and then got
married when I was in ninth grade, and they got
(24:26):
divorced when I was in eleventh grade.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
The only time my parents ever.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Were in the same vicinity was once a year on
my birthday or once a year on my brother Josh's birthday.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
How did you feel about the holidays as a kid, anticipating, Oh,
it's going to be Thanksgiving, it's going to be Hankkah,
it's going to be Christmas.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It was stressful. I was excited in like the way
you would decorate. My mom and I would make Christmas cookies,
and my dad and my brother and I would light
the candles for Hankkhah, like I remember loving the trade.
But yeah, it was really stressful to be going back
and forth just fighting my dad on the phone with
(25:09):
me and me standing next to my mom and my
dad's screaming in my ear to tell my mom this
and vice versa, and like basically trying to figure out
some way that we could spend time with both at
the holidays and have it be like who are we
going to go to Thanksgiving with first, because then that
dictated whether or not I would spend the night whose
(25:30):
house I would spend the night at, which was always
a big thing.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
So usually these holidays, a lot of them are planned
around the kids. And yet it was very clearly centered
around your parents because they were fighting tooth and nail
about every millimeter. And usually when kids go up in
that situation, they learned to become attuned to their parents'
(25:54):
feelings and needs because no one's asking them how they
feel about it. And when Rebecca said to you, hey,
this is all about you, this isn't about me, your
response to it was to go into fixed mode, in
which do you, as much as possible, try to make
it about her. I'm saying all of this because here
we are facing another holiday season in which, in your
(26:18):
letter you are clear about how distressing it would be
for your mom to be alone, or for your dad
to think this, or for your dad to be jealous,
or for your mom to be jealous. And how do
I deal with all the other people's feelings? And I
think that, in the stage of rebuilding after what sounds
like an emotionally abusive relationship, that this year it needs
(26:42):
to be about you.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I don't even know what that means.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I actually agree you probably don't, but I'm throwing it
out there anyway, because that's something I would like you
to just think about as an unusual notion.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
That's probably what my friends would say and my therapist.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Sometimes when kids grow up and they're very aware of
their parents' needs in a way that maybe isn't age
appropriate because they're so young, two things happen. On the
one hand, kids feel like, I have to look out
for other people's needs and I don't know how to
even know what my needs are. But what they do,
(27:28):
on the other hand is they feel so desperate to
get their needs met because they haven't in certain ways
that sometimes they're not aware of the ways in which
they are asking other people to meet their needs. And
we do tend to regress during the holidays, you know,
we go home and all of a sudden, we feel
sixteen again, and we don't know why, Like that remark
(27:48):
that mom made, or that thing that your sibling did
or whatever, all of a sudden, you just go straight
back to that knee jerk reaction you would have had
when you were younger. Yep. And so we want you
to be really thoughtful before the this year about what
would it look like to be an adult in your
early thirties, who can sit with the fact that you're
not quite sure what your needs are, but you're going
(28:10):
to make your best guess because you're going to reflect
on it, not make an impulsive decision, and take the
time to sort through what it is that you want.
In your letter, you throw out all these options, But
I think you actually know what you want to do,
but you're almost asking for permission. Is it okay if
(28:31):
I meet my own needs this unusually stressful holiday season
where there's COVID to consider, there's the end of a
marriage that was traumatic, and then there's the history that
I have with my family around the holidays where it's stressful.
So given that we think that you said in your
(28:52):
letter what you want to do, I want to hear
you say out loud what it is that you think
you want to do?
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Oh my god, Honestly, nobody's asking me that I haven't
actually thought about it.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
If it wasn't about worrying about how other people were
going to be impacted, what is it that feels nourishing
to you this holiday season?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
I'd probably spent it with my best friend who just
had a baby and her family. Her family sort of
become a second family to me here across the country
from my own. I lived with them for like the
first month after leaving. I didn't have a place to
stay yet, and so they let me live with them.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
What was that like when you lived with them?
Speaker 3 (29:49):
I felt so lucky, just so grateful to have the
best people in my life. They sat with me and
cried with me, and raged with me about things, and
eate dinner with me. It just felt like a home
(30:11):
in my home had not for a really long time.
My home that I had to leave felt like home.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
A general tip you can use and maybe others can
use as well, is when you are unsure of what
you will need or what you want, but you have
good friends, ask yourself what your friends would say that
you needed or wanted. There's not going to be the
entire aunts, but it's a good place to stop.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
And the reason isn't that your friends know you better
than you do. Nobody knows you better than you do,
but we know that your friends are more compassionate towards
you than you are at this moment. When you learn
to be more self compassionate, your internal compass is going
to be a lot more accurate.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
And also the friends don't have that but how mom,
Wait but what will that say? They don't have that
thing blocking you, so the minute you have a thought,
it gets locked. These friends, how many of them are
there that we would say are really close?
Speaker 3 (31:09):
So many? I feel like they saved my life. Honestly,
coming out of that relationship, I have probably I don't
know ten people here who would drop anything, did drop anything?
Help me move out of my house?
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It should be one for every night of Hanaka with
a spear so you have enough friends to see you
through the holiday. If that's what you're not going to decide.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
To do, yeah, we're going to hear in your words,
this isn't necessarily what you're going to do. Just to
take the pressure off of yourself. We just want to
get you in touch with what your needs are. If
you picture yourself during the holidays, and you use the
(31:55):
word safe before and you feel safe and you feel loved,
and you use the word home and you feel like
this feels like the kind of home that I want
to create for myself. What would you do this holiday season?
Where would you spend it with? Whom would you spend it?
Speaker 3 (32:18):
I would be with my friends. They've become like chosen family.
They've given me keys to their homes because they want
me to have it feel like mine.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's so beautiful. There's something so symbolic about that that
you were talking about a sense of home and they
gave you keys to their homes so that it could
feel like you were home too.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
When I left, my best friend gave me keys.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I had a suitcase that I had dropped it off
at her house, and she made me a whole package
of things that were all my favorite stuff to make
me feel like, well, I didn't have a home anymore
like that, that this could be mine too.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
What did she make?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
There was a bath bomb because I loved taking baths.
There was wine. There was a quote because I love quotes.
There was tissues. There's a lot in there. It was
just basically trying to show me that I might feel alone,
but I'm not actually alone.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You were seen and understood and loved.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And what a wonderful thing that, given that you grew
up with parents who albeit loved you so much they
fought over you in some crazy ways, but stressed you
out because of it. Yeah, and then you in a
marriage with someone who turned out to be a very
different person than you thought they were, and yet you
(34:04):
gather around you. Yeah, these ridiculously loyal good friends. I
mean that care package was one point. Get in the bath,
have a glass of wine.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Think of the.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Quote, and here's betise, She's still when you cry. So
I mean it was very well.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Done, Shannon. Did Rebecca ever do things like that for
you in your relationship?
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Early on? She was really amazing at like showing me
love and care. There was a lot of big gestures
I felt really loved and cared for. But afterwards, the
thing that came to my mind just now was my
birthday that year. She didn't even talk to me.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
In the early part before that one month after the
wedding talk. Would you do things like that gestures like
that for her as well?
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah? For her thirtieth birthday, I wanted her to see
how loved she was, and I got all the people
in her life to send birthday messages and then I
did like a scavenger hunt thirty things for your thirtieth
birthday throughout the day and ended with giving her the book.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Did she enjoy that? Was she moved by that? She
loved it?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
That's why it was such a blind sight for her
to come and see you don't do anything for me
because he has just one example.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
That is the voice that's in my head constantly still
is like, am I crazy?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I want to give this a little bit more nuance,
which is that there are probably ways that you did
not meet her niece.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Yeah, agreed, And.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
That's a real learning experience. The issue isn't whether you
met her niece. The issue is what happened between the
two of you when this finally got discussed and it
seemed like there wasn't a conversation around this that would
make it about the two of you as a couple.
I've been feeling this for a long time. I know
(36:01):
that you do some nice things for me, but in general,
I'm feeling neglected and here's why, And can we talk
about this and even not agreeing to go to couple's therapy, Well,
how do you deal with that as a couple and
talk about it so it's not so cut and dry,
and I think that's going to be more helpful for
(36:23):
you to be able to really examine, well, what are
the ways where there was truth to what she said? Yeah,
so I'm not debating necessarily the truth of what she
said because she felt that what was traumatic about it
was the way it was handled and the way that
there was no real viable way to repair this where
the two of you were working together as a team
(36:45):
in open dialogue around this.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
I think that resonates a lot with me, because I
would say that a lot, especially as my friends were
telling me this isn't okay. There would be times earlier on,
before I talk to people, she would just brate me,
and I look back and I wished I had just
walked away or said I don't want to engage, But
I just thought that, like I needed to stay and
(37:09):
prove to her that I could tolerate it.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
There's a difference between saying here's what the issue is
and for you to feel, yeah, I could do better there, right.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah, there were so many ways I could do better, right,
And that's a learning experience.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, but it sounds like the way that that was
communicated that there was an element of shaming you.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
One of the things that happened when you said shame
was she threatened me that she was going to tell
people about what I liked or didn't like in sex.
Because I was talking to people what was happening.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
I want to point out, Shennon, I think it's a
little worse than what you're presenting, because really the subtext
of what happened the month after the wedding was she
comes to you and she says you have failed me
so drastically that I am now revoking every right you
have in this marriage. So you've lost your rights. It's
not about you anymore. I don't owe you anything anymore.
(38:07):
I don't have to do anything that. All the burden
is on you. You have to prove it to me.
And if you start complaining, oh God forbid, crying or
having feelings about it, I'm not going to accept that
because I need you to prove to me that you
can take it. So not only I'm going to be
horribly emotionally abusive to you from now on. You don't
get to have a reaction because that will be a failure.
That was the messaging. It's very severe, and I'm not
(38:32):
sure even now you've fully wrapped your head around how
bad that is what happened.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I think I get it, but I question myself so
much still that it's like hard for me.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
I feel crazy sometimes still.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I think you're having trouble holding two things in your
mind at the same time. One is that there may
be worth things that you could have done differently, and
you were aware of them, and that was part of
the learning and the growth. The other thing is that
you weren't given the environment in which you could have
(39:09):
done something productive about it. And so when you say, well,
I think I'm crazy or I don't know who's at fault.
You both did things in the relationship, But I think
ultimately what you're left with is this obsessive rumination around
am I bad because she made you feel so bad
all the time about who you are as a person.
(39:31):
That's where the shame is. Shame. Is I am bad?
I am selfish, I'm not capable, I'm not strong enough.
That was the message.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
You are in a recovery process after being in an
abusive situation, and it takes time to recover because you
will feel guilty when you start thinking about what your
needs are. Is this reasonable that I want to spend
Christmas with my friends? Is it reasonable that I feel
this way? Am I allowed to cry now? Is that
a all of that? It takes time.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
I want to add the layer of COVID to this
as well, because we're in the middle of a global
pandemic where most people are having some version of your dilemma.
My family wants me to go home. I don't feel
like it's safe in a situation where the parents are divorced.
How much do I quarantine whose feelings are going to
get hurt? Because that's going to mean I need fourteen
(40:26):
days here in fourteen days there, and it's a lot
of heavy lifting, more so than a normal year. I
think that you need to be able to give yourself
a break and say I have these very big stressors
in my life right now around the holidays. There's my
history around the holidays. I don't have memories of it
being relaxed. I don't have memories of me getting to choose.
(40:51):
I've never had that experience. I don't know what that
would even look like if I got to choose how
to spend my holidays, even though I'm in my early
three days. And then there's this issue I just got
out of a marriage that broke up last holiday season.
So on anniversaries of things, we tend to feel things
more deeply because the time of year sometimes brings back
(41:12):
those memories in a sharper way. So you've got all
that going on and what we're saying to you, and
I'm going to ask you one more time, is if
you can articulate what you want to do this holiday season,
what would that be.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
I don't feel safe traveling, no matter how much that
is upsetting to anybody else.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
So we were thinking about your history with the holidays
and what you're going through now and how it's coinciding
with this time of year, and what we'd like you
to do is we'd like you to really think about
how you can get your needs met during the holidays
and also met other people's needs, because I think one
(42:02):
of the things that tripped you up in your relationship
and probably growing up too, was there was so much
focus on whether your needs were getting met or you
were meeting somebody else's needs. But I don't think that
you really learned how to balance those two. And here's
a great opportunity in your early thirties, as an adult
(42:23):
for the first time, to say what is it that
I want? And then how can I also be aware
of what other people want where I don't lose myself
in that. So we were thinking about Honkah since that
comes first this year, and we were thinking about how
there are eight nights, and we would like you to
(42:46):
have that balance of am I spending time with my
dad and maybe your brother if you also celebrated Hanakah
with him, and then my friends who mean so much
to me, and I think you called them your chosen family.
So what we'd like you to do is on the
first night of Hanukkah, we would like you to light
that candle on zoom with your dad, and we would
(43:11):
like you to come up with some kind of ritual
that you can do every year, something that makes you happy.
Maybe it's a song that you sing, maybe it's decorating
that you do something that you can do with your
dad on zoom you can light the candle, but maybe
there's something else too, and maybe there's something even without
your dad. Maybe it is part of the decorating. Whatever
it is, but it's going to be yours, so we
(43:32):
don't want to give you too many ideas when it
to come from you. And then that's the first night.
The second night, we want you to light a candle
on zoom with your brother and again have some kind
of sibling ritual with him, so that you're reframing the holidays,
you're recreating the holidays as an adult and you're claiming
them as yours. And you mentioned the excitement before, and
(43:54):
we want that excitement to transfer over into really owning.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Them from.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
And then you have six nights left, and with each
of those six nights, we want you to on zoom
to be safe with COVID. We want you to light
a candle, pick six friends, and each night you'll do
that with one of those six friends.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
You could do more than one. I mean, if you
want to do if there are some friends left over,
because it sounds like you might have leftovers that too much.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Do it however you want, but we want we want
to start with the family and go over into the
chosen family.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
Christmas has a similar vibe. Clearly, you would like to
be with your friends, and you should, but we would
like you on Christmas Day to do something with your
mom that you would do if you were there.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
You said you might take together or do things together,
but plant and ahead of time and logistics, but hang
out with her a.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Little bit, and a little bit is the key here.
We want you to gauge your comfort zone that you're
not there to take care of her, you're there to
celebrate with her. But it's not because she's so sad
and lonely or you're so sad and lonely, because that
doesn't feel like a holiday at all. We want you
to be able to have fun together. And that might
(45:10):
be because I think maybe the dynamic might be a
little bit different. That's been set up and you're nodding,
so yes, we want you to say, Hey, mom, what
can we do for an hour on zoom? That would
be really fun on Christmas. I'm not going to come
this year because I'm not comfortable with COVID, but I
still want to do something fun with you. What can
we do? Do you want to bake something together for
an hour? Do you want to watch a movie together
(45:32):
for an hour? What do we want to do for
about an hour that would be really fun? So we
can spend that time together.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
With an idea of turning it into a ritual that
you can do with her the next time you see her,
or you can do on zoom the next Christmas you're
not with her, but then you have this thing that
you guys do. Because what ritual does as it makes
it a exciting but it also really defines it as yours.
And we want you to own these holidays.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
And it also helps because no matter what else might
be going on in your life this year it's the
aftermath of a divorce and COVID, you still have these
rituals to depend on.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
Every year, I've spent so much time.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Focused on what the holidays mean relative to my family
or to my marriage and the divorce, and it honestly
is like I have been dreading this season, and just
when you guys were saying this, it made me more
excited about it because it feels like I can see
people that I love and have something new that Christmas
(46:38):
won't always or the holidays won't always remind me of
my divorce.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
A lot of people feel like when they haven't had
a good experience with the holidays in the past, they
don't realize that as an adult, they get to choose.
They get to make choices about what would feel good
for them on the holidays, and that doesn't mean abandoning
the people that you love at the same time time,
So everything that we're telling you is about you creating
(47:04):
rituals that feel good to you that also include the
people that you love.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Both, and it's both, and it's reclaiming because this is
what you're doing now in your own life. You're reclaiming
your sense of self, you're reclaiming your emotions, you're reclaiming Honakh,
and you're reclaiming Christmas. There is one other aspect that
we want to add. There's one person that is not
invited to Hanukah all Christmas, and that's Rebecca. Despite the
(47:32):
fact that she's not invited, she might show up in
your thoughts. She will not, she might. Here's what we
know when you ruminate about something, and this would be
a rumination if she pops into your thoughts, is that
if you spend two or three minutes at most focused cognitively,
but concentrated on another task, it kind of resets the
(47:55):
brain in a way that then when you go back,
you don't have that intrusive thought of Rebecca. And the
kinds of tasks at work, the ones that require concentration,
memory tasks like can I name the list of songs
in a playlist? Or do I remember the order of
pictures on your wall? Stuff like that, just it requires
concentration for two or three minutes. It can be a
cross word, but two or three minutes is enough to
get that impulse in it and so if Rebcca comes uninvited,
(48:20):
just refocus on the people who are invited. For Hanukah
and for Christmas. We want you to not talk about
her to the people you're around. It's a vacation for you,
it's a vacation for them. It is a refocusing on
the holidays and what that season has to bring.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
And this is different from Rebecca saying don't feel your feelings.
You're not allowed to have your feelings. What we're saying
to you is we want you to give yourself the
gift of a break from Rebecca on these holidays. And
we understand that Rebecca will show up, but we want
you to make sure that you keep giving yourself that
(48:55):
gift of Wait a minute, I am here with these
people that I love, who love me. This feels really good.
I don't want to ruin it for myself. How does
that all sound to you? It sounds great, all right, Well,
we look forward to doing that from you.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I think part of the challenge for Shannon is going
to be that she's still very much in a healing process,
and in that sense, it's such an opportunity because taking
control and creating this reality of a holiday in a
way that suits her could be therapeutic in a more
general way than just the holiday. Can really help her
start to get in touch with her needs, her priorities,
(49:40):
and having this balance of taking care of other people's
needs while not losing sight of her.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
So many times people forget that when they're adults, they
have choices. In her mind, it was very much either
I get my needs met or I meet somebody else's needs,
but there was no middle ground. And I think that
this will help her to rebalance that, and it's really
good practice for her for whatever happens in her next relationship,
and it's also really good practice for her for the
(50:06):
holidays going forward, no matter what situation she's in. Absolutely,
you're listening to Dear Therapist from My Heart Radio. We'll
be back after a quick break. So, after we gave
(50:34):
the advice to Shannon, we got an email from her
and Mike, our producer, is going to share it with
all of you. Hey, Mike, can you read the email
from Shannon?
Speaker 6 (50:47):
Thank you, Laurie, Yes, I can, Dear Laurie, and Guy,
thank you so so much for the time that you
spent with me. Guy, you said that you didn't think
I've fully come to understand the severity of what I
went through. I have struggled immensely with a massive amount
of doubt over the last year. The truth is, I
was really scared of her for a really long time.
(51:08):
Those few years after we got married got really bad.
She grabbed my arm while screaming at me. She told
me divorce is in my DNA, that I would be
incapable of taking care of a sick child, that she
hates everything about me, that she isn't attracted to me
at all anymore. She started sleeping with people and wouldn't
(51:28):
tell me where she was at night or who she
was with, And all the while she was drinking, smoking,
binging and purging, cutting herself and saying that she didn't
want to be alive. She was in massive amounts of
credit card debt, and I didn't have any of my
own savings anymore because we used it when she quit
her job and couldn't find another one for six months.
(51:50):
I was both terrified of her and terrified for her
all at the same time. Thank you both so so
much for helping me to start to see that I
need to face what happened more honestly, all the best
she had it.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
I'm not surprised by what Channon wrote, because it did
seem that things were worse and that she was idealizing
a little bit as if there were no problems whatsoever
before the marriage and then suddenly everything turned terrible right after.
It's usually not that sudden.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
Yeah, And I think it's common when people start to
really face the reality of how challenging a relationship was,
that because they're still grieving, there is still a loss
for them that they're not really ready to look at
how bad it was because they think, well, why would
I have stayed that long seven years? And so I
think there's some shame sometimes in really reckoning with Wow,
(52:39):
what was I doing in this relationship for so long?
And that's some work that I think she's going to
have to do. But let's hear what she had to say.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yes, that's going to be very interesting now to hear
her voicemail.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Hey, Laurie and Guy, I'm just calling to give you
a quick update. I have been working really hard to
set up all of my rituals and it's actually been
really fun. I set up for Hanukkah Zoom calls with
all of my family and friends, my dad, the first night,
my brother the second night, and then a lot of
my friends. Everybody wanted to join, so doing a lot
of zoom calls the other nights of Honika, and as
(53:13):
part of that in building a new ritual for myself,
I'm actually because of how much I love to host people,
I'm going to host a virtual holiday party where I'm
sending out in advanced little care packages to all of
my people, and then we're going to actually do some
fun activities together over zoom and in hopes that when
we are after this COVID time period, we'll be able
to do it all together in person. Every year. My
(53:36):
mom and I are going to be baking Christmas cookies
together on Christmas Day like we usually do, and she
was totally understanding and very supportive of me not coming
because of COVID this year, so I'm excited about that.
And then I've been working really hard to disinvite my
ex from my mind and give myself, like you said,
the gift of emotional space. It's been really challenging, but
(53:56):
really good. I think it's made me realize how much
those thoughts have really warmed their way into my brain
and how much I have power to actually focus on
something else and, like you said, reset my brain. I
also just want to say how grateful I feel because
I think you made me realize how much I need
to confront very honestly my experience and what I went through.
(54:16):
I think I've been really hesitant to confront the painful
parts of the abuse that happened in the marriage, and
it's made me really committed in therapy in particular to
going deeper into that and really processing what happened so
that I can move forward, and really, more importantly also
what it was that made me stay for so long,
and how I can build a stronger sense of myself
(54:38):
so that I can focus on my needs in future
relationships and not lose them to others. So thank you
so much. I'm so excited not just for the holidays,
but honestly for just living a healthier life that is
much more aligned to what I need and at the
same time being able to bring all of my people
into that in the future. So thank you again and
(55:01):
happy holidays.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
So often people like Shannon who are going through something
really difficult like this very difficult divorce dread the holidays
and what I loved about what happened with her was
that I heard so much joy and excitement and relief
and looking forward to the future in her voice. So
(55:26):
she went from this is going to be horrible. I
grew up with divorced parents. The holidays were always very stressful.
Now I'm going through my own divorce. It's very sad.
I'm grieving, And instead she ended up with I'm having
the most connected holiday season on my terms that I've
ever had in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
I completely agree. The joy in her voice was so
pronounced it warmed my heart. And such a switch from
how she was thinking about these holidays to how she
thinking about them now, truly one hundred and eighty degree
switch of empowerment, of taking control, of being proactive, of
doing it her way in a way that will make
(56:10):
her happy. And the only lament I have is that
eight days of Hanukah the are twelve days of Christmas.
She's organized so much she probably needs a few more
days because those might not be enough. But that's a
good problem to have.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
I really like too that she has come to a
place where she said, wait, I have to do some
work on myself, and I need to focus on that
so that I can have different kinds of relationships going forward,
because that is a really important piece of this too.
And I think that sense of being trapped, being trapped
as a child between the two houses, being trapped in
(56:43):
this relationship, that was a perception that she had as
an adult that wasn't true. She could have left any time,
and I think she felt trapped around the holidays too,
and now I'm going to have this horrible holiday season.
And then once we had this conversation with her, she
started to realize, maybe I'm not as trapped as I
think I am. And she sprung herself from jail, and
(57:04):
so she's doing this reckoning with herself. And I think
the holidays bring up a lot of reckoning for lots
of people, but I think it can be a really
positive reckoning like it was for Shannon. And I hope
that people listening to this will be able to take
something from it so that they can do something similar
to what Shannon did.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
She very clearly is setting up rituals, and she used
that word, and that's what makes a holiday feel like holiday,
the rituals. And that's something we can all do at
any point on any holiday, and in a ritual that's
meaningful to us that we would really enjoy continuing going forward, and.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
They weren't just rituals, but there were rituals of connection.
When people really put in the work to figure out
what those will be, they find that they can create
those in their own lives too.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
Hey, fellow travelers, if you've used any of our advice
from the podcast in your own life, send us quick
voice memo to Loriandguy at iHeartMedia dot com and tell
us about it. We may include it in a future show.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
And if you're enjoying our podcast each week, please help
support Dear Therapists. You can tell your friends about it,
and we'd be so grateful if you'd leave us a
five star review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help people
find the show. You can follow us both online. I'm
at Lorigottlieb dot com and you can follow me on
Twitter at Lorigottlieb one or on Instagram at Lorigottlieb Underscore Author.
Speaker 2 (58:30):
And I'm at Guywinch dot com. I'm on Twitter and
on Instagram at Guywinch. If you have a dilemma you'd
like to discuss with us, big or small, email us
at Lorianguy at iHeartMedia dot Com.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Our executive producers Christopher Hasiotis, were produced and edited by
Mike Johns. Special thanks to Samuel Benefield and to our
podcast Fairygodmother Katie Couric. Next Week, a young woman struggles
to find a balance between taking care of her own
needs and care for her husband, whose chronic illness is
taking a toll on their marriage.
Speaker 7 (59:04):
We got married, we were in this together. I'm definitely
scared that our marriage could fall apart. I just don't
know what to do without making it like this is
his problem.
Speaker 1 (59:14):
Dear Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio.
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