Safety and Protection » Stopping the Pain
When the Pain is too Great you may just need to stop the pain. You can bring each weeks painful argument to the Mediation Class. The Class can transform the argument into understanding and compassion for yourself and your partner while you learn Peace-Making skills. Or we can help by you work out a separation. Most of the pain stops at once. This is only momentary, because you are alone and either missing the kids or caring for them by yourself. If you want to have time to be sure divorce is right or to build build a new relationship with this spouse, temporary formal separation with mediation of the conflict and focus on learning new skills will transform your pain, your future and your family’s life.
Stopping that pain helps give you the relief that allows you to focus on learning Peace-Making skills without having to constantly defend yourself. With readiness and intense work, it can take as little as six months to learn Peace-Making skills. At a more common pace it can take a year or two to build these skills to the place where you have confidence in them and you trust this new relationship can continue when you live together. Separation also gives you the space to decide whether you can and want to have an intimate relationship with this person or just create a working partnership in parenting the children. See Caring For Children for information.
If the pain is too great, you have a fundamental question to ask yourself?
Do You Have Energy for This Relationship? Are you Feeling Hopeless? If you do not have energy for it, misery will continue until divorce follows. But be careful. There is a difference between having no energy for a relationship with this partner, having no energy for this relationship as it exists and feeling hopeless. Often all three are blended together. To make sound decisions, you need to carefully separate just what is true for you.
Subservience is difficult for most people. If this relationship asks one of you to be subservient, if it is a continuing competition to control the decision-making, or if it is about changing the other, the tension and drama over winning and losing, over making your own choices or over controlling and managing the other’s life will most likely, over time, end any love between you.
If you are exhausted, you probably feel some level of hopelessness. If you have tried everything you can think of, perhaps even tried counseling, and you no longer have any way of making this relationship what you have dreamed it could be, you need to take action and learn new skills to change course before you crash.
The key questions when you feel done or hopeless is: Do you want to create a new relationship with this partner? Does your partner have qualities that you admire, respect and want to share?
If the answer is no, then you probably have identified a lack of respect, maybe even contempt. You have probably forgotten why you were attracted, and you may no longer want association with your partner’s character or qualities. You probably need dissolution of the relationship.
If the answer to either question is yes, you may want to create a new relationship and end this one without going anywhere. You just need new skills to do that. If you need to stop the pain now, you probably need separation to give yourself the energy and focus to learn Peace-Making skills that connect instead of separate you. To learn the skills of Peace-Making click on Relationship Transformation.
To read through the Web Site as designed, see Self-Assessment: Divorce for more information.