Trust the Process – Episode 297 of the Divorce University Online Podcast. Trusting the process can be very difficult, especially when you have a negative outcome in your first interaction with the Court. Many times, our own emotional patterns work against us in trusting the process. There are reasons that the Court does things in particular order and in a particular way. Understanding that will help you feel less anxious and more confident in presenting your case. To learn more about how I can support you in achieving success in your custody matter, please schedule a free strategy session at www.divorceuniversityonline.com/vip-coaching. Thanks for listening!
Divorce University Online
Trust the Process
>> Hello, you are listening to the Divorce University online podcast with your host, Tammy Ferreira. >> Hey, guys, Tammy here, and today we're going to talk about the need to trust the process. And when I talk about the process, I'm, of course, talking about the court process or experts and all that kind of thing. This is something that I say to clients a lot. It's a very hard thing to do, especially if you've been through a situation where maybe the process has kind of failed you or not gotten it right in your opinion, but this is a real important concept for you to learn how to trust the process. So before we talk about this topic, let me just remind you, please hit like and subscribe if you're watching me on YouTube so that you get notified when new videos are released. If you're listening to the podcast, don't forget to rate and review me and also subscribe so you get notified when new episodes are released. Now one of the things that happens with the process is early on in the process, we know so little, right? I mean, I have so many clients that have said to me over the years, wow, I wish I'd found you sooner, wow, I wish I'd known sooner, I wish I'd understood all these things sooner. I actually had somebody say that to me this morning, you know, the day I'm recording this. So it's funny because our knowledge of the process comes along as it's happening. And this is why I personally feel like the coaching is so important because if you can get ahead of it and increase your knowledge faster, that's when you'll really start to gain an advantage. And in the very beginning, what happens is it kind of takes the court time to figure out your case. You know, Thomas used to describe it as, you know, you know, the entirety of your whole situation, your whole life, all the events, everything that's happened. And maybe you go in and you see an attorney, you know, and you go and they learn like a small chunk of that, right? But then we're standing in front of the court, if your attorney files a motion, and now the judge has an even smaller sliver, right, of your story and a smaller sliver of the other person's view and they have a very limited amount of time as we've talked about a lot with motions 20 to 40 minutes, most of the time is about what they have to make this decision. So they have this little sliver of your life that's presented by you or your attorney. They have a little sliver of the other person that's presented by them or their attorney. They've got to take those two things, put them together in 20 to 40 minutes and figure out what's going on. Now a lot of times I will tell you that it's hard to figure out what the real dynamic that quickly. And that's why we have the judicial process so that the court can get to the bottom of what's going on, understand all the moving parts. So I say that because if you feel frustrated in the very beginning because they got something wrong, that does not mean that all hope is lost, right? That means that, you know, sometimes it means the court decided to exercise an abundance of caution, as we say, on custody, I see them do this a lot or on DVs. A lot of times that initial, and that means domestic violence, if any of you don't know what DV is, but a lot of times that initial thing, they'll kind of take a very conservative approach because they're kind of not sure what's going on yet. So it's sort of like, okay, let me just kind of temporarily put these things in place so that I can kind of get the lay of the land and figure out what's going on and then, you know, make the permanent orders later. And same is true on custody. Even if you don't have domestic violence involved, you go in on custody and a lot of times they'll make what we call temporary orders, right, on what the parenting plan should be. But that parenting plan can be adjusted down the road. Now do I find a lot of times that parenting plan sticks? A lot of times it does, but not always. A lot of times things are uncovered, safety issues, you know, different concerns that cause the court to adjust it and do something different. Okay. So again, they have to have time to kind of get familiar with the file, the people, the dynamics, you know, the children, all the different things going on so that they can make the correct orders. Now what happens in the meantime is we've had this experience where they got it wrong, right? And so now we have this terrible fear and anxiety and stress that they're going to get it wrong from here on in that the entire case is going to go this way and that they're going to find against us or not in our favor, right, for everything that happens. And that isn't true. That is your fear talking, but the problem is, is when you start to get into that cycle of fear, if that cycle of fear continues in your brain, you will continue to behave according to those fears, those fears will influence your feeling, which will influence your actions, which will result in you behaving in ways that don't work positively for you in your case. And so, you know, it kind of becomes this snowball effect of where you've had this bad experience in court and then you almost have like a self fulfilling thing where you continue to facilitate that bad outcome through your own negative actions. And so none of that is conscious for most people, right, that fear and the way we react and all those things, it's perfectly normal and in this situation, right? I'm not saying that it's abnormal for you to react that way, but I'm saying that you have to recognize that it is a fear response and recognize that that fear response isn't going to serve you well in this process. It's kind of like, you know, if you read books about or watch information online about relationships and that type of thing, you know, the big thing right now that a lot of people are talking about is like anxious attachment style, right, versus avoidant and, you know, all this kind of thing. And this attachment style essentially means someone ignores you. And this is kind of common in a narcissistic codependent relationship, but I think this will relate to the fear that you have in the process if you can kind of understand this. So a lot of times a narcissistic person will, in the beginning, you know, they're love bombing and doing all those things. And then they start to maybe kind of pull back and you're not hearing from them as much and all that, and as a codependent, which I am a recovering recovered, I don't know if we're ever fully recovered, but it's a something I struggled with a lot more when I was younger was codependent tendencies. And so as we, as that person ignores us, instead of us kind of going, okay, that person's ignoring me. I like I'm all done. I deserve better than that. I deserve to be treated better than that. And if you don't want my time and attention, there's somebody that does. So, you know, move on with yourself. That's not what happens in a codependent brain. We tend to go, Oh, I must have done something wrong. I must have said something wrong. I must have upset this person. I must not be good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not pretty enough. I'm not this enough. I'm not that enough. Like whatever it is, we're going through in our mind how we are not enough. And so that's kind of what happens in this fear process around the court, too. And again, if you're dealing with a narcissistic person on the other side, you probably have at least some of these codependency tendencies. And so these are going to carry through not just in the interaction with the other person, but also in this court process. So that fear starts to overtake us and we think, Oh my goodness, I said something wrong in front of the judge. I didn't give them the right information. I didn't do this. I didn't do that. I need to try to correct this. I need to try to show them. I need to provide them more information. I need to write like we get on this like anxiety driven process where we're trying to fix it. And again, that's something that as a codependent we do in a narcissistic relationship. So you really have to take a step back from this and understand that as you're healing on this journey from being in this dysfunctional relationship, those patterns are not exclusive to romantic relationships. It doesn't mean that every relationship in your life is narcissistic. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that you have to understand that your reactions to people are going to tend to be based on that perspective of having those codependent tendencies, particularly if you haven't done the healing work and taken the time to heal those parts of yourself that have that reaction or feel unworthy or feel not good enough. And so as we start trying to push that information out to the court and show the court that, hey, this is really what's happening. That's really what's happening. What happens is we start to come across as the unstable one, because the court's kind of like, okay, I made a temporary order to get everything kind of solid for the moment so that we can go on down the road, figure everything out, put all the pieces together, figure out where this needs to land, and now this person is having this huge reaction, throwing all this information at me, trying to, people try to appeal. They try to do a motion to overturn. They try to like, I get questions like that all day, every day about undoing what the court did in some fashion, and frankly, if you do research on that, the percentage of times that you actually get an overturn of a bad outcome are so low. I mean, they're so low. Like I think Thomas used to say like less than five to 10% of the time that you actually succeed at getting something undone in that way. And so what really needs to happen is when the court makes an order that we don't like that or that we feel is like not the right outcome for us or the child, then what really is going to turn the tide on that is for you to conduct yourself in a calm, stable, you know, strategic manner so that you can kind of expose the issues around the other person as opposed to having a very anxiety ridden approach to trying to get the court to understand. Now again, I want to go back to the relationship example, because I think this is something that we tend to be more aware of, right, because if you've come out of this sort of narcissistic codependent relationship, usually it's caused enough pain where we start to try to figure that out, but we don't always see the parallels in these patterns. And so if we go back over to the narcissistic codependent interaction, you know, in the very beginning, if the narcissist is love bombing and doing all those things, and then eventually they start ignoring us or gaslighting or or engaging in those types of negative behaviors. Why, you know, why would we not at that point say, okay, I'm done, I don't do this. This is, you know, I'm worthy of more than this, you know, but like I said, we don't. We get anxious and we start trying to like fix the problem, whereas the dignified thing to do, right? And the thing that would make you appear most stable and most confident, right? And most worthy or high, high valuing yourself would be to simply say, you know, or, or, you know, ignore their responses at that point. If they're not treating you correctly or say, you know, I'm sorry, I, you know, I've heard from you in, in, in weeks and I'm not interested in this type of dynamic, you know, whatever, whatever our response to it is, but to opt out of the relationship or the potential relationship at that point. And when we don't and we say, oh, I haven't heard from you and is everything okay? Are you doing okay? Do you need to have the name? Do you, then what happens is that other person goes, oh, they're there, they're on the hook. You know, I don't need to worry and, and, but it lowers our, our value and our self-esteem and our all of those things to have that sort of anxiety begging kind of approach in the relationship as opposed to taking a step back and saying, you know what? I have voice, I have grace and I deserve more than what this person's giving me. So I'm going to move on. It's the same kind of impression that you leave the court with, right? Because if your thing to the court is I'm anxious, I'm stressed, I'm, you know, all of these things, again, it causes you to come across as more unstable, you know, lower self-esteem, you know, not valuing yourself as much as a parent, all of those things, whereas if you can kind of take that approach of like, look, you know, here's my side of it. Here's what my perspective is. I don't agree with the other person's side and I'm going to let the court or the expert or the evaluator or the attorney for the child or whoever figure out what's going on as opposed to trying to push my own agenda because I'm so fearful that they're not going to see that I'm a good parent, I'm a stable person, I'm all of these things and, you know, vast majority of my clients, vast majority of people that I talk to every day are all of those things. They're great parents, they're stable, they want what's best for their kids and yet that anxiety that is produced from the other person or from the court, maybe not getting things exactly right the first time causes us to go into that mode where we're almost trying to convince people that we are these things and if you just conduct yourself normally, you know, and you regard yourself as that kind of person, that will come through in your overall interactions and presentation. It's kind of like if two people walk into a room and I'm just, I'm going to use women as an example just because I'm a woman and that's a little easier for me to relate to but I think the same thing applies for guys, right? Let's say two women walk in and let's say they're equally as physically attractive, they are equally as well put together and, you know, dressed for the occasion and whatever and one person comes in and she's just very kind and graceful and high. How are you and she's social and interactive and all that kind of thing and the other person is sort of running around going kind of like, oh, hi, how are you, what are, what are, you know, what do you do? How many kids do you have, do you do and they're like, you know, oh, I do this and I do that and I have this too above and they're just sort of like got that and more nervous energy about them where they're like almost anxiously trying to learn about you, tell you about them, let's make this connection, let me, let me be social with people, let me, whereas the other person is just sort of like conducting herself from a place of grace and poise and not that she's not being kind and social and interactive and all those things. She just doesn't have this almost anxious need to prove herself to the room through the social interaction or connections. Does that make sense? I hope that I'm, I hope I'm getting the concept across. I'm, I'm trying to give you multiple examples so that you can kind of see because that whole demeanor is what we're trying to correct a lot of times in the coaching. A lot of times my clients have gotten into a cycle where they're presenting so anxiously and I think when you are presenting to experts, whether it's custody evaluators or courts or you know, particularly people related to child custody issues, I think are particularly sensitive to that type of thing. It's like you come in and you're so anxious and nervous and upset that it kind of gives that other person the impression that there's something about you that they need to be nervous and anxious and upset about, right? As opposed to coming in and just saying look like, you know, I have a great relationship with my kid, you know, I try my best to be a good parent. You know, I do all of these things and, and just presenting like a very calm focused picture around your strengths as a parent and also knowing that you don't have to be perfect. None of this is perfect. They're not going to expect you to be a perfect parent. You're not going to be able to be a perfect parent, but you want to show that you put all thoughtful effort into the way that you parent, okay? Because if you are an sort of anxious, absent-minded kind of presentation when you're interacting with that person because of your fear, then it's going to kind of get in their head that you parent in that same style, right, which, which doesn't help you. And so, you know, if you can take these concepts and just sort of, again, trust the process and know that the only thing you have control over is your part. And if you just do your, you know, part and conduct yourself accordingly and stay calm and let the process work, I find that the case will find its correct outcome in the end. And, you know, let me, let me say something else about the case process. Again, I think people get really stressed and worked up in the beginning. And particularly financial issues tend to be a piece that people are like, you know, I'm bleeding money, I'm bleeding money, I'm bleeding money because, of course, it takes a lot more to support to households than it took to support one. So just by nature of the fact that we're losing the economy of scale, we're going to create more expense. And, of course, you have things where people misuse the resources or, you know, run up debt or do different things like that. And, again, there are laws within all of these things where the court determines, okay, who spent which, you know, who spent what money during what time period is the other person responsible for any of that was the, was one person acting unilaterally, you know, all those different types of things, laws are a little different state to state on those issues. But eventually that will all come out in the wash. And you know, I had a client a few years ago who was going through a divorce from a professional athlete and obviously very high earner, the person that the athlete had been married once before. So this was their second marriage. And so there was some, you know, things that the athlete had owned prior to marriage, some things that were acquired during their marriage. And so it's kind of a lot of math problems, right, in this particular estate. And obviously they were used to a pretty high standard of living. And so the wife who was my client, kind of the first year, this is before I was working with her, the first year, I just kind of had this perspective of, well, you know, this will probably take about a year and, you know, I've got enough credit line where I can kind of fill the gap and survive until I get my portion of the estate and all that because most things were in, you know, husband's name because of the nature of the fact that, you know, he had been married before. And then he was the one that earned the income and made all that kind of stuff. So she didn't have access to a lot of the funds because things had to be divided and moved out of his name into hers and all that kind of stuff. And so she's like, well, you know, I've got enough to do me for a year, you know, everything will be done by then I'll get my stuff, I'll pay off my credit lines, and then I'll be good to go. Well, the thing is, is that because this estate had so much of stuff he had before, stuff during the marriage, you know, it was a pretty complex process and there was financial experts involved in both sides of the case. And so what ended up happening is this case ended up taking about two and a half years. So I started working with her about, I think about nine to 12 months in. And she was like, I don't know what to do. There's no end in sight. Like I don't, you know, I thought that we'd be done by a year. So I say that as like a cautionary tale, because one of the things that you want to do straight off the bat, even if you're used to a very high standard of living, pretty much for everyone across the board, regardless of their standard of living, there is going to be a cash crunch a lot of times because even if you have a high net worth, a lot of times it's invested in, you know, other vehicles and things that you don't necessarily have a lot of cash access. So for the vast majority of people, regardless of the level of income or standard of living, there is usually cash crunch. And so what I tell people right from the beginning is like, let's go into conservation mode. You know, let's put aside as much as you can, let's, you know, you know, pay the bills and do what you need to do, but try to conserve and save as much as you can in the meantime, because if this drags on and on and on, that might be the thing that really saves you. Instead of just going, oh, we always spend X amount of month, I'm going to continue to spend X amount of month. I'll just go into debt, do whatever, and then, you know, pay it off when I get my part of the estate. Well, who knows how long that'll be. And honestly, this person's took two and a half years. I've seen three, four, five, I mean, I've seen really extreme things. And so you can't count on it being done within a certain period of time. I would say vast majority of people a year to a year and a half is kind of average length of time for a divorce. But if you own businesses or you have investment income, you know, rental properties, any kind of thing like that that sort of complicates things, then financially that becomes much more complex. And a lot of times there are experts involved. And when you have experts involved like that, that additional time is needed in order to sort all of that out and perform all of those calculations. So, you know, just, I say all that to say kind of like, don't put the cart in the head of the horse, right? You need to plan and you need to start planning even before you leave a lot of times. And you know, I've had attorneys that'll tell people things like, oh, if you're the stay at home spouse, don't go get a job. Don't try to work. Don't try to because you're going to get more support. Well, I don't think that's a good strategy myself personally. I was a supported spouse at the time of my divorce. And honestly, especially if you're dealing with a narcissistic person, the fastest path out is self-sufficiency. And that may take you some time. You may be married to somebody that earns a lot and you've been a stay at home. That may take you some time. You know, you may not ever get there, I guess it's possible if you are married to a very high earner, but the more self-sufficient you are, the faster, the better, the less power and control that person has over your life. You know, when I first left, my ex has been when he first left me, whichever way, but he had affairs and opted out of the marriage. So when he left, I was working and had some income, but I literally couldn't pay my rent without his help. And so that first year was very stressful because there was a couple of times where he was like, well, I don't have the money. So you're going to have to figure it out, you know, and I had to borrow from friends or family or whatever. And you know, I didn't have a lot of resources of multiple people that could help me or people that could help me on an ongoing basis. You know, I had a couple of people fortunately that could kind of do a little one off and help me one time, one of those people was my mother, but she didn't have the resources to help me like that on an ongoing basis. So I had to very quickly do everything in my power to try to earn as quickly as I could. And again, it took me, you know, three, four years to get to that point where really his support coming in was kind of like if it came in fine and if it didn't fine. But that didn't happen overnight. But once it did, then his threats to me about not paying me or not doing this or not doing that didn't hit in the same way, right? He wasn't as able to control me emotionally because I knew that I was going to be able to eat and feed the kids and keep a roof over our head regardless of what he decided to do. Okay. So again, you know, you want to trust the process. There's a reason that things are done in the order that they're done and there's a reason that the court takes the approach that they take. But honestly, you have to also do what you can proactively for yourself from a very thoughtful and strategic process and remaining calm and not letting that get the better of you and cause your anxiety to make you do things that sort of takes your case off the rails, so to speak. All right. So I hope that's been helpful. If you'd like to learn more about my coaching services, please go to divorceuniversityonline.com/vip-coaching. There's a link on that page where you can book a time to talk to a member of my staff and learn more about my coaching services. I have a group program. I have one on one programs, so I would be happy to hear more about your situation and learn if it's something that I might be able to help you with. All right. So I will see you guys next time. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to the Divorce University Online podcast with your host, Tammy Ferrera. For more information, visit www.divorceuniversityonline.com.