Becoming the CEO of Your Divorce Is How You Can Survive It

There are many tips on how to survive divorce, but have you ever heard of the motivational triad? It’s a concept from psychology.

It is a powerful survival mechanism in humans that explains how our brains are HIGHLY motivated to do three things at all times: seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. Our survival instincts prioritize this triad over all long term goals that require discomfort in the present moment. This is why things like starting a fitness routine or reducing caffeine are challenging for us.

Now enter divorce. Divorce triggers ALL THREE points of the motivational triad: it’s painful, not pleasurable, and requires a lot of emotional and physical energy. Not knowing how to manage our own brains and nervous systems, we do our entire divorce in survival mode trying to seek pleasure, avoid the pain, and conserve energy.

It can feel like a tug of war between what we should do and what feels like relief in the moment.

For example, we:

• don’t get the paperwork back to our attorney because it’s painful to open the email
• say yes to our ex about a change in the holiday plan because saying no is uncomfortable even though it’s what we want most
• send an impulsive, angry email that adds to the conflict
• procrastinate on looking at our budget because we can’t face the fear

These are examples of survival and choosing what feels better in the moment (to avoid or react to what is emotionally uncomfortable). The cost of trying to survive divorce like this is enormous. It delays the process, creates conflict, costs more money, and we suffer unnecessarily.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way: there are more efficient ways on how to survive divorce.

Humans also have a prefrontal cortex. We can think about what we think about. We can plan for the future and set goals. I call this part of our brain our “inner CEO.” She is smarter and much more powerful than our survival instinct when we know how to harness her intentionally.

The quality of our divorce hinges on whether we keep choosing survival or decide to become the CEO of the process.

Being the CEO means we are willing to feel the intense emotional discomfort in the present moment in order to create the result we want most: to finalize the divorce.

It’s delayed gratification at its most intense. Imagine trying to detox from sugar while working in a bakery. Now multiply that discomfort by 10 and you get closer to the discomfort of CEO-ing our divorce.

As a divorce coach, my job is not to make my clients feel better. My job is to make them feel empowered by and connected to their inner CEO. I teach them how to manage the survival instincts instead of being at the mercy of them. Eventually, this becomes a way of being, a habit that we embody as we start the next chapter of our lives.

If this holiday season is challenging because you’re going through a divorce or it’s the first one after your divorce, remember that challenging isn’t a problem that needs to be solved.

Take 5 minutes and write down the answers to these questions:

• What result do I want to create most?
• If I could take one step that would get me closer to that result, what would it be?
• What feeling am I willing to feel to create this result?

Then go take action and don’t stop until you make it happen. Learning how to survive divorce in a healthy way, in a way that will allow you  to thrive later on is a long process, but it is one worth going through. Let it be hard and always come back to these questions to get clarity. The emotional discomfort is worth the payoff of living a life so good it doesn’t make sense.