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A lot of Newcomers who arrive on this board seem to share a lot of traits. One of those traits, is that we are worriers and over-thinkers.
During divorce, when a WS or WAW decides to blow up everyone’s life, we often take the role of caretaker and peacekeeper. We (mistakenly) see our role as smoothing and fixing. One of the ways the human brain fixes things is to imagine different possibilities and how they may play out. We identify barriers or scenarios that may stop us from reaching our goal, and so we try to mitigate these - that’s part of the reason we come here, seeking advice.
In the sphere of separation and divorce, there can be extreme levels of grief and despair. Divorce Busting encourages us to think about how we act around our spouse, what we say, what we do and more importantly, what we DON’T say and DON’T do to get things fixed up.
Combine this with a fearful, peacekeeping mindset or personality - and we can disappear down a rabbit hole called “rumination”.
Rumination is like worrying, except it’s focused only on possible negative outcomes and excessive time wise. While the possibilities that are played out are indeed possible, there slowly becomes an unhealthy imbalance between the amount of time spent worrying about something and the chances that it would ever actually happen.
Consider the following possibility: When you drive to the supermarket, someone may crash into your car and kill you.
A healthy response to this, is generally to accept that the chances of that occurring are exceedingly rare and to continue to live your life, unconstrained by it.
An unhealthy response, would be to spend minutes or hours or days repeatedly thinking about it, to the point where you are too afraid to drive your car ever again.
Particularly in the early stages after bomb drop, rumination can become a real trap for the LBS. Ever increasing time is spent worrying about what one said or didn’t say, and then projecting how that may play out on the eventual success or failure or the relationship.
It becomes insidious. It is generally worse when tired, and at night. For a space of many months, I had very little sleep because after going to bed, I would sit in bed and think about my ex, what she had said, what she had done, what her lawyer’s letter said, upcoming court dates… it went around and around in my head.
Scenarios played out became more and more unrealistic and far fetched. If at the next court date she says “xyz”, and then the judge says “abc”, and then we get an adjournment, and then I could respond with a letter from lawyer that says “def”, she might think about that time when I …. and it would go on and on, and around and around in my head.
One problem with DBing is it causes us to be hyper focused on NOT doing the wrong thing and making things worse. You can see this all the time in people’s posts, where they’ve had some sort of in person or email/text communication, and they come to the board wanting validation for exactly the right words to say to prevent things from getting worse.
What eventually happens, is a focus away from self regulating and a flood of long time periods worrying and ruminating on things.
LBS become somewhat paralysed by fear. They continually play out thousands of possibilities in their brain in an attempt to understand what has happened and to fix things in the future. These unhealthy and excessive, fear driven thought patterns - that’s rumination.
We’ve all been there… sat down on the couch with the TV on, started thinking about our relationship woes… and then suddenly, you look at the clock and 2 hours have gone by.
Rumination is unhealthy. It’s emotion based, often comes from the more primitive and reactive part of our brains, and is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Consider the earlier fear paralysis of never driving your car again. People who unhealthily worry about it and stop driving, will start walking to the shops. And they won’t have a car crash… so over time, the fact that what they worried about (dying in a car crash) hasn’t happened … that will reinforce that not driving was the right thing to do.
Deep rumination can take over our lives after bomb drop. You may find yourself playing out relationship scenarios for hours at a time, thinking about your ex (what they’re currently doing or thinking or saying) for large chunks of time every day.
So how do we combat the rumination cycle?
One way is distraction. Here at DB, we often call it GAL. Going out of our way to place priority on our own lives and happiness reduces the amount of time and opportunity available to sit around ruminating about far fetched possibilities and over analysing everything our partner has ever said or done.
Another, very effective method is to consciously limit rumination time. This was really helpful for me.
The first step is recognising that rumination, generally, is not helpful to our situation or mental health. The second step is recognising that it’s not something that can simply be turned off.
So what you do, is allocate a fixed but short amount of time, every day, to unhelpful rumination. For me, I would drop my kids at school, drive home, have a coffee - and then plonk myself on the couch at 9am, set a 10 min alarm - and let my brain run wild.
I’d think about every word she had said and what it could possibly mean. I’d imagine ridiculous, fictitious scenarios, such as my ex had been cheating on me for our entire marriage. I’d draft imaginary responses to my ex’s lawyer, calling out her sh*t behaviour, her lying, her cheating and her immorality. I’d imagine standing in a court room, where an angry judge, having read my letter about her, rained down judgement on her, giving me full custody and exposing my ex to her family and friends for the person she was.
Then my alarm would go off.
I’d snap out of it, get up off the couch, and start my day. My thoughts and feelings had been laid out, all sorts of wacky possibilities about us divorcing or getting back together had been run through my head, and I was ready to shelve my rumination and return to the real world.
It was incredibly effective. And the main reason it’s effective, is because for the rest of that day, when my brain turned to her, or our divorce, or what we used to have - I knew that I’d done my ruminating. What she was doing right now would briefly pop into my head, and my brain would say “Ugh, not this again. You’ve already done your thinking about that, and nothing got fixed. You can think more about that at 9am tomorrow.”
And I’d get on with my day. My days and nights sitting, thinking and worrying about her became hours. Then it became minutes. And eventually, this fixed, limited ruminating time allowed me to snap out of this fear paralysis and start being normal again.
So here’s the rub - if you find yourself in a deep hole, thinking about your ex 24/7, paralysed by fear over what to say/how to behave, not sleeping at night… you’re probably stuck in the rumination trap.
And it’s completely normal!
The way out, is to focus on your GAL activities and to assign a short, fixed time every day to worrying about your relationship/divorce/legal proceedings and imagining all sorts of crazy scenarios and possibilities. Do it, and then get on with your life and day.
Eventually, it will help you realise that very little of what you say/do/don’t say/don’t do will be responsible for the success or failure of your relationship. One day, you’ll have the self respect and confidence to not respond to your ex through fear.
