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Table of Contents
GETTING THE MOST FROM MAKING DIVORCE WORK
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1 |
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A Divorce That Works
Creating your Divorce Mission Statement |
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1
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2 |
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Why Marriages End
- Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
- Turning
- Accepting Responsibility
- Unmet Needs
- Starting Your New Life
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11 |
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3 |
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The 8 Keys to Resolving Family Conflict
- Be Hard on the Problem, Not on the People
- Listening is not Obeying
- I Statements
- Benefit of the Doubt
- Awkward Conversations
- Life is a Dialogue
- Would I Rather be Happy or Right?
- Be Easy to Talk to
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39 |
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4 |
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The 8 Peace Practices
- Breathing Exercise
- Anchoring Technique
- De-Escalating Techniques
- Self Care
- Challenging a Thought
- Dismissing a Thought
- 10-10-10 Rule
- Your Divorce Story
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53 |
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5 |
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Set Your Emotional GPS to Goodness
- How to Set your GPS
- Overcoming Obstacles to Peace
- How to Stop Fighting
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75 |
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6 |
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What You Want Now
- Emotional Readiness
- Keeping it Real
- Creating your Vision
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99 |
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7 |
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Walk Your Talk
- Make a Bigger Pie
- Avoiding Drama & Distraction
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135 |
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8 |
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Grieving the Loss of Your Marriage
- Your Own Feelings about Divorce
- Dealing with the Stages of Grief
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165 |
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9 |
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Forgiveness and Acceptance
- The Blame Game
- A Gift You Give Yourself
- Gratitude
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189 |
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10 |
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Negotiating Your Settlement
- 3 Types of Divorce Disputes
- How to Decide What you Want
- How to Get What you Want
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205 |
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11 |
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New Beginnings
Your New Mission Statement |
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231 |
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RESOURCES |
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241 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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243 |
INDEX |
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245 |
Excerpt from Chapter 1
A Divorce That Works
You can create peace on earth, one family at a time.
—Diana Mercer and Katie Jane Wennechuk
What This Book Will Do for You
This book will change the way you
think about divorce. You can get divorced without ruining your life. We
know that sounds improbable, if not impossible, but we can show you
how to dissolve your marriage and move on without losing your shirt or
your sanity—and emerge a better person.
The divorce rate among recent first marriages is 67 percent.That is
two out of three couples! So isn’t it about time we stopped scorching
the earth using lawyers and courts as weapons and found a better way to
say good-bye?
Rather than see it as something that will destroy your family, your
divorce can be a way to redefine and rebuild your family and improve
your quality of life. Living in a bad marriage is horrible. Otherwise,
you wouldn’t have decided to divorce. And even if you didn’t initiate
your divorce, you know in your heart that you deserve to be married to
someone who wants to be married to you, not someone who’s staying
around because he feels guilty about leaving. We have all seen the dark
side of divorce, but it doesn’t have to be that way. By using what you
learn in this book, you can be part of the solution.
Peaceful divorce sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s a concept whose
time has come. People have started to figure out that divorce does not
have to be bitter, nasty, and punitive. Many couples are looking for
ways to end the “home wreckonomics” approach to divorcing. The legal
field is slowly rising to meet this demand with mediation and
collaborative law, but you can have a peaceful divorce that redefines
your family without relying on lawyers or the legal system to provide
the answers for you. Quality legal and financial advice can be useful,
but you don’t need a lawyer to teach you how to keep peace in your
family and resolve conflicts. If you have the will, this book will give
you many ways. You can look at conflict as an opportunity to fix
things that needed fixing and to change things that needed to be
changed, not as a negative experience to be avoided.
Divorce is one solution to living in an unhappy, unfulfilling
marriage. But your divorce doesn’t begin and end with the legal
process. It’s going to change your life, and you’re in control of how
it’s going to do that. The choices you make will define what your life
looks like afterward. Scary, yes. But it’s also okay to allow yourself
to look at this time in your life as a new adventure. If you are
divorcing so you can be happier, it’s okay to start being happy now and
find some bittersweet joy in your decision to let each other go. If
you’re divorcing because your spouse wants to get divorced, it’s
important to learn from what went wrong and to make the best of the
situation.
This book will teach you everything you need to know to renegotiate and
redefine your relationship with your spouse, put an end to
unproductive arguments and behaviors, negotiate a fair, win-win
settlement and move on from your marriage happy, healthy and whole.
You will learn:
- How to create a divorce mission statement
- Why marriages end and why yours ended
- 8 simple tools to resolve family conflict
- 8 ways to keep yourself sane no matter what
- How to set your personal GPS to goodness and keep it there
- How to figure out what you want and how to get it
- How to walk your talk all the time
- How to grieve the end of your marriage
- How to forgive yourself and your spouse and accept your divorce
- How to negotiate successfully to get what you want and what you need
- How to come out of your divorce a better person
You can do this. This isn’t rocket
science and it isn’t magic. A lot of it is simply common sense. The key
is you have to do it. No one is coming to save you—except for you.
The good news is that if you keep using what you
learn in this book throughout your divorce and in your new life
afterward, you will be happier than you are today. Your children will
be better off and may even tell you they understand why you divorced.
You will comprehend and be at peace with the money and property you
receive in your settlement. You won’t cling to long-standing grudges.
You will have insight and peacemaking skills that will prepare you to
be more successful in your next relationship. You will be ready to love
again.
At the end of your divorce, you will be proud of how
you handled it. You’ll be proud that you served as a role model for
your children and your community. You’ll have the satisfaction of
knowing that you’ve done the right thing, behaved in line with your
values and made the best of an unfortunate
situation . . . contrasted with others who instead
choose fighting for the sake of fighting, taking the low road, and then
realizing the price of all of that too late.
Together, we can change the course of how divorce is
handled in our culture. It’s time for peaceful divorce to be the new
status quo. If you help pave the way, everyone who divorces will have
an easier go of it. Imagine how much family grief could be eliminated
if dissolving a marriage meant keeping the peace and embracing the
change rather than tearing families apart.
The first step is to decide what you want at the end
of this process and to spell it out. You’ll need to set goals at the
outset so you’ll be able to stay on course when things aren’t going
your way. There will be temptation to behave badly during your divorce.
Your mission statement will keep you focused.
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