So why the name? I guess I’m probably gonna end up getting some slack for this name. Right? Raise your hand if you knew anyone besides you that went through a divorce. A friend, a family member, a coworker. Is that person, okay. I would venture to say the answer is yes. So when I think about the thousands of people that I have helped through divorce, what I realized is that most end up okay and in many circumstances, they’re doing so much better than before the divorce.
It’s your amazing divorce. Amazing in the sense of you will grow and get to a better place.
What if I told you that your divorce could end up being one of the best things that could happen to you? I’m Doreen Yaa, marital and family lawyer and certified life coach. I’ve been coaching and consulting women for over 26 years. I’ve seen it all. Now I’m sharing my expertise and my own personal experiences to help you turn a difficult time into your amazing divorce.
Welcome to your amazing divorce. I know you want to move on to your amazing life, and because I know that you have what it takes, we’re gonna get going, we’re gonna get into it, and you are gonna start making changes today. I realize that you are on with me today because you are searching for something to get you through the divorce and onto your best life, and I have no doubt that if you stay with me on this journey, you will understand happiness and fulfillment and truly accomplish and have anything you want in your.
You see the power lies with you, and that is the beauty of all this. Your ex can’t control this on any level. You get that. You have the control, not him, not her, not your ex, just you, and you can accomplish anything you want. The tools that I will teach you will change your life, I promise. However, this is not a fast.
It’s hard work. It’s like anything in life worth it. This is going to be some hard work and I’m going to be pulling off the band-aids with you, having you roll up your sleeves, take responsibility and be accountable for your future. Do not leave it in the hands of your ex. You take control. Even though you went through this horrible circumstance in your life called divorce, my goal for you is to use it to learn from and create your amazing life moving forward.
So first, let me tell you my background and how I got here with you. I’ve been practicing exclusively as a lawyer in marital and family law for over 26 years here in sunny South Florida. I have spoken to assisted, represented, and coached thousands of people in the process of divorce and post divorce.
I’m also an entrepreneur as the founder of Yaha Family Law Group and your divorce law. I have lawyers that have worked with me for years exclusively in the area of family law. You know, mostly divorces, but also post-judgment work, prenups and things of that nature as well. Divorce is not a one size fits all.
That’s what you have to know from the onset. It affects everyone differently, and that includes you. So don’t beat yourself up. You’re okay and you’re gonna be. Whether you were the one that wanted the divorce, the one that did not want the divorce, or maybe your ex and you both wanted it, if you have children together or not.
Were married for a long time, or the marriage was short term and on. We all are affected by divorce, so I have been on all sides of it.
You see at five my parents divorce. My mom ran from her feelings and avoided. She moved my younger sister and I from New England to Florida, and I never saw my dad again. Well, maybe that’s not completely honest. I did see him at one time when I was 21, when I forced an encounter with. More about that another time.
But my mom removed him from my life, from my sister’s life, and that’s what it’s important to know, is that I was a child of divorce. You know, sadly, if my dad was to come through the door and sit right next to you, and I, I wouldn’t even recognize him. I’ve tried to find pictures, but you know, he’s probably in his eighties and so that was well before the days of the internet, so there’s little or anything on him.
I can’t even find out where he is if he’s still living. Really sad when you think about it. In fact, he has seven grandchildren he doesn’t even know about. He’s never associated. So you see divorce affected me, not only as a child, but it’s affected my children and my sister’s children. His grandchildren, because I never met him.
So let’s go to my first marriage. I met my first husband in law school and we were married shortly after we graduated. We have three amazing children together, and then after 11 years or so, we. It was tough stuff, stuff that you are dealing with at this very moment. So I’ve been there Where you are today?
Raw, sad, afraid, angry. Dealing with, or should I say, learning how to deal with so many emotions Today? I’ve moved on and I’m good friends with my ex. I learned and moved on to a great co-parenting relationship. Listen, it’s hard. I applied everything that I’m gonna share with you throughout these podcasts.
I’ve lived it. I’ve done it. I’m not preaching without doing it myself, so know that right off the bat, my goal is for you to be okay and in fact, better than, okay. I want you to use the divorce to grow from and learn from, and propel you forward to an amazing life. Hence your amazing.
Then what happened was I remarried, and that was a whirlwind as well. New family stepson and blending families together. That was over 11 years ago. I met my husband on July 3rd, and we got married November 21st. So if you can do the math, what is that? About four or five months. I never thought I would get remarried again, but look.
His name is Jeff. He’s the love of my life and we’ve been together for 11 years now. I’m an example of what is possible from divorce, and believe me, life is not over. I promise you. So many people that I have seen have grown from divorce. They’ve moved on. They’ve come out of the other side of it all for the better.
You just may not know that yet, and that’s okay. Just take some work, some thought, some motivation, and a direction. That’s why I am doing this podcast to help bring you along, to encourage you to give you the tools that I have learned throughout my many years of experience with divorce. So hold on tight because I am not going to give you a fast fix.
There is none, I promise. It will take rolling up your sleeves and working on yourself, but you got this and you know, everyone is different that goes through the divorce. So remember that while your friend or a family member may have gotten through it sooner or easier than what you are experiencing, others take longer.
It takes more work, it takes more getting past that sorrow and sadness and anger, but you’re gonna get.
More about me. I’m also a life coach, which I’ve been doing for I guess about three years now. And I got into life coaching because I saw that my clients going through divorce needed that coaching. And so now I’m here living my dream with you, helping people just like you get through the. Let’s go now to why I named the podcast Your Amazing Divorce.
I was at a Starbucks and I ran into a past client by the name of Jennifer. She seemed so great and really amazing. And so I asked her if I could buy her, you know, a cup of coffee. She said, sure. And why not? Long time, no C the skinny of it is eight years later. Jennifer is remarried to what she explained as the love of her life.
She’s got two children since then and was teaching yoga and she said she’s at peace with her divorce and with her ex. And when I explained that I was doing a podcast as a lawyer and as a life coach to help people after divorce move. I asked her what advice she would give to you sitting right there.
What would she say to you if she could just sit and have a coffee with you? And what she told me is that life can and will be amazing again. And when she said that, tears came to my eyes and I said, I’ve got the name of the podcast. It’s your amazing divorce. Amazing in the sense of you will grow and get to a better place.
So that’s the reason why I named the podcast. What I. Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. That’s what’s important. So let’s start today. On my first lesson,
what we are going to talk about today is how to feel about your divorce. I assume that sounds kind of strange to you because we should all know how to feel right, but most of us don’t. Most of you have no idea respect. How to actually feel your feelings after divorce and about your divorce, but this is really where you need to start.
When I suggest to my clients like you that they feel their feelings, they look at me with a blank stare many times, and I realize that many of my clients are afraid to ask me what I mean about feeling their feelings about divorce. Maybe to you it sounds strange, right? I don’t know how to feel about my.
And let me be clear that what I mean is feel the sensation in your body, not just a word in your mind that describes a feeling. It’s much different. So I’m gonna start by suggesting that there are four options when it comes to feeling your feeling about your divorce. There are four things that people do with their feelings.
The first thing we can do, and what most of us do is we resist feelings stemming from our divorce. When people say to me that they know what it is to experience loneliness and anger or experience sadness, what I tend to point out to them, and what I wanna point out to you is that they really don’t know what it is to experience that emotion.
What they do know is what it is like to push their emotions down, to resist them. And so that is the first thing that we can do with our emotions. It’s like trying to push open a door that someone else is on the other side holding against you. The goal is to not resist your feeling, but to push open the door and actually get through the door and feel the emotion.
So don’t resist. Most of my clients that have just finished their divorce spent a lot of time resisting their emotions surrounding the divorce. You may be afraid of feeling your emotion as well. You may have thoughts that you’ve just been through so much and that you’re unable to let yourself feel anything more that you feel numb and probably mentally drained and exhaust.
You have to understand that from a very young age, we’ve been taught not to feel our emotions. Things like, Johnny, don’t cry, don’t be sad, or Control your anger, Susie, go in timeout until you get it together. We are taught basically that we should avoid our feelings. Instead, I suggest that we should instead be teaching our children how to feel their emotions and how to process.
And most of us never had a great therapist or really great coach to teach us how to be present with our emotions. So if it’s okay with you, let’s start. There isn’t everything that we do for a feeling or to avoid a feeling. Your feelings run all over your motivation and goals. They fuel your lack of motivation and they fuel goal.
You can use your feelings and move forward to greatness, or you can let your feelings consume you and be stuck in an effort to hide or protect yourself or to avoid any negative emotion. It’s just gonna stunt your growth. And while I am focused on divorce here, this stuff and these tools that I will teach you, you can use them for anything that happens in your life.
Any emotion stemming from any situation or encounter that you may have, not just from divorce. These are life skills that I’m gonna teach you. So the second thing that you might do when you feel an emotion is you can choose to react. I see a lot of this representing clients in divorce and post divorce, and I spend a lot of time trying to teach my clients to stop reacting because the reaction is usually from a bad place and doesn’t help their case or serve you.
In fact, many times it hurts your case. For example, many people in divorce and maybe you’re one of them, feel such. And what happens is when you feel that anger, especially with your ex, you go into this autopilot reaction without even processing it. You might end up yelling at your ex and then your ex reacts, and then it goes around and around in circles.
Such a waste of energy in my book. So think about that. Are you resisting an emotion by pushing it down, pretending it’s not there? Or are you reacting without even thinking about. The third thing you can do when you have an emotion stemming from your divorce is distract yourself from it. So again, a recap.
When you have an emotion from your divorce, we end up doing one of the three things. Resist, react, or distract, and it’s so easy to distract yourself in today’s world. I personally have a lot of experience with this one. I love distracting myself when I feel emotions I don’t like or don’t want to deal with.
I’m great with over anything. Mostly overworking, but people distract themselves from their emotions by overeating over drinking, over surfing the net, over binge watching TV or series. You know what I’m speaking about, but truly over anything, if that’s a word, , to distract your emotions from the divorce or from any emotion is not permitting yourself to feel your feelings.
In fact, when you distract yourself, you can pick up some really bad habits, follow your divorce. So please, please be aware of that. So again, there are three options when you are dealing with an emotion from the divorce. First, resist it. Second, you might be reacting to it, and third, you might be distracting it.
That is what I wanted to start with in my first episode with you, because I know you’re probably struggling with your feelings and your emotions right now. I get that bend there, done that, as I say, right? So ask yourself, how do you resist your emotions? How do you react? How do you distract your. I am going to have you look at some options to consider and hopefully work on awareness as a starting point to the healing process.
So now onto what I do as a coach with my clients from divorce. First thing is I hold space for them. What that means is that I do not pass judgment. So they feel that they can come to me with any raw emotion that they are feeling and tell me anything, and they know when they do that they’re in a safe. , I want you to feel the same way.
I don’t judge my clients. I may, when I’m representing them as their lawyer in the middle of the divorce, ask them to please, please, please stop doing certain actions that are gonna hurt your case. But when I have my life coaching hat on, I rarely ask them to do or not do anything. I make suggestions, I explain why, and then I set them.
and I set you free and welcome you to always ask and come back and learn and grow. It’s a beautiful thing to see my client and hopefully see you who I know feels so beaten down to start to grow and blossom into this amazing new person that I know you can be. , you are stronger than you think. You just went through this divorce and you have the strength to do anything that you want in your life.
Remember, this is not a dress rehearsal. You get one life one day at a time. You get to live it the way you want. The choice is yours. Who do you want to be? The person that does nothing with their life or the person that does everything with their. Holding space without judgment is not easy for us humans.
It’s not natural. We have this mindset that we must have opinions about everything. This is bad, or he is good, and she did that and he shouldn’t do that. And on and on and on. To hold space requires not judging as judgment has no place in coaching and it has no place for you when it comes to your feelings and what you’re going through.
You know, I have a client that I spoke with earlier today who I’m working with post divorce. She is just so amazing. I’ve always thought that way. She’s worked so hard and she’s made such amazing progress, but this is irrelevant to helping. I have another client who I think is not giving us all, who says a lot of self-serving words without any substance.
My opinion of either of these clients is irrelevant and would not serve either of them as a coach. Judgment has no place in what I’m doing. The same is true for yourself, that when you have an emotion about your divorce, you end up doing one of the three things. Resist, react, or distract. For example, when I was confronting the emotions that I was dealing with after my first divorce, and believe me, there were so many like anger and fear and sadness.
I had to work so hard at not distracting in a way, with my busy buffering behaviors, believe me, to the outside world. They saw me as moving on, getting buried in my work. They were like, oh, look at Doreen. She’s doing great. She’s building her business. She’s taking this all on. They saw me just getting so over the divorce so quickly.
It took a lot of self-work for me to first know I was having an emotion and then to live or step into it and not distract away from it, to feel it in my body and open the locked door. The spectrum of emotions that you go through as a human is what distinguishes us from other animals. You know, emotions is what our life is made up of and the emotions continue day in and day out, and they never.
And yes, life is a mixture of good and not so good feelings. You’re feeling happy this moment and sad. The next is part of being a human. Life is a combo of good and bad. You can get away or escape from it, but if you start to understand it, you can start to open the door, unlock it, and start to heal from your.
So how do we do that now, if it gets a little woowoo, bear with me. Please just take it in for what it’s worth to you and your divorce and what emotions you are dealing with at this time. The way that I have learned to define an emotion is a vibration in my body. See, it starts with a thought in your brain that’s created by a circumstance, and the feeling transfers to a physical feeling in your.
So when you think about your divorce, your mind will create a thought, and then from that, a feeling and an emotion in your body. It is meant to be permitted and allowed and felt. If you resist and react and distracted away, you push down your ability to be human. You see, being human means having emotion.
That is how we are. My kids always laugh at me because I’m constantly reminding them that when one of their friends does something that they don’t agree with or they have an opinion, and I’m like, listen, she’s just the human. They look at me and they’re like, mom, like really? And I’m like, yeah, really?
We’re not perfect. We need to embrace our imperfectness. We’re all human and we’re all built with good and bad and imperfectness, so let’s dive in even deeper. Everything you do or you don’t do in life is because of a feeling that you anticipate will happen as a result of the action or the inaction you are taking.
Let me say it again because it’s that important. Everything you do in life or don’t do in your life is because of a feeling that you anticipate you will have. We don’t start a new career because we are afraid of the feeling of failure. We stay in a bad marriage because we fear the emotion of never finding someone and loneliness.
We go to college because we want to feel the emotion of accomplishment and success. We get married because we anticipate the feeling of belonging and family. We even make a nice meal for our loved ones because we anticipate the feeling of bringing them pleasure and having their bellies full and satisfied for that anticipated feeling of.
And on and on and on. So stop and think about this. So if everything that you do and you don’t do in life is because of an anticipated positive or negative feeling. Then I suggest that you start with understanding and processing the feeling of emotion, because that is what will determine what you do in your life, what you make of your life, and how you live your life after divorce.
Do you wanna live stunted and shut off from realizing your biggest? I suggest that the biggest disappointment of not permitting an emotion is not the lack of emotion, but what you could have achieved in your life that you didn’t achieve because you were so afraid of feeling some potential negative emotion.
And you know, that’s really sad. So for you, the first thing I ask you to do with your emotions stemming from your divorce is to. Give yourself a freaking break. Don’t judge yourself. Hold a safe space for yourself, just like I do with my clients. I mean, really. If you can’t hold space for yourself and not beat yourself up, who will?
second permit the feeling to come. Don’t resist it. Don’t react to it, don’t distract it. And I am sure you will say, but Doreen, really? So when my ex drops the kids off dirty and tired, or he yells at me for no apparent reason, you want me to permit my feeling of anger and just let it go? And the answer is yes, it truly is.
Yes. Start there before you resist or react to him. Just start. , I learned to breathe during my divorce and to meditate to help me not to react or distract. And I said to myself, listen, Dorian, you’ve got three choices here. You can resist it, you can react, or you can distract. Which one do I choose to do at this moment, I used to have these like constant conversations with myself, and I would work so hard at picking none of those choices that don’t move me forward to a better place.
Instead, I learned to be present in the emotion and to permit it. And once you do that, and it takes literally a split second to. Then you learn to see yourself and not react, and instead you become like the observer of what you can and cannot do with the emotion. Kind of like an out-of-body experience.
It’s really cool actually. Other times you will become in tune with your emotions and immediately start to react in one of the three ways, and you can then pull yourself back in and say, stop. Don’t do that. Don’t resist. Don’t react to him. You don’t need to go there. Just allow the feeling to be let it pass.
So once you start to notice the emotion and then not take action on it by not resisting, reacting, or distracting, then the next step is to describe the emotion to. Like if you were explaining it to a being from outer space that has no ability to understand what feelings are, how would you describe it?
Where does it feel in your body? For me, I used to feel anger in my throat, like I couldn’t breathe, and the angrier I got, the tighter the sensation was in my throat. It was like a choking feeling. Even now describing it to you, I’m almost having like a hard time breathing because I remember how that felt, that anger and that choking sens.
This is important to understand because so many of my clients are so worried about having a feeling and that somehow it will take over their bodies, like the body snatchers, and you will be stuck there. So maybe you are afraid that once you permit yourself to feel the anxiety or fear or the grief from your divorce, that you’ll be consumed by it and never get to the other side of that door.
But I promise you that won’t happen. It doesn’t happen. And once you are able to experience the emotion and describe it, then you can act as the compassionate observer and start to heal from your. , no one ever teaches us this in life. It is a skill that we have to learn and be the best version of ourselves moving forward.
And while it may be weird and uncomfortable, that is just because it’s foreign and new to you, it really is when you are describing that sensation in your body, stemming from the feeling. And just as I suggest, if you are explaining it to someone from outer space that has no understanding of emotion or no ability to feel emotion.
You have to be careful not to describe what you are thinking instead of the physical sensation in your body. So when you do this, what you realize is that it’s really not such a big deal. Physically. The worst emotion is just a vibration in your body. You can handle that, right? If you look at it from a very objective perspective, you can see that factually emotions are not a big freaking.
Sadness, anger, frustration, fear, anxiety about the divorce are just a sensation in your body. And what we do know is that the emotion that triggers that sensation won’t take us over. We won’t die from it. It will pass through you and then it’ll leave. We feel that we can’t tolerate it, but we. . And when we know this, we can move into the emotion because we understand that they aren’t such a big deal.
How many times have you actually let an emotion pass through your body? What do you think is gonna happen? It’s gonna go through your body in 5, 10, 15 minutes. Maybe less, maybe more. You’re gonna get over. You’re gonna move on to using your energy and not reacting to it in some way that is just purely not in your best interest.
Now, after you go through this and you don’t resist, react or distract, and then you permit the feeling and then you describe what it is and what it feels like, then name it, put a name to it. You can find a whole list of emotions on the internet. Find the list, look at all the emotions that are on there. I mean, just study me alone is super.
The more specific you can be. When you identify that feeling, the better. So for example, don’t say I feel down instead, see if you can break it down even deeper to something like, I feel disappointed, I feel frustrated, I feel lonely. Being able to name the emotion gets us to start understanding the different emotions you’re dealing with, and I suggest you journal all this.
I mean, you should be journaling every single day, getting all those thoughts outta your freaking brain onto a piece of. . So again, and I keep saying this, this is a lot to take in for our first episode together. I get that. I respect that. But I suggest that dealing with your emotions stemming from your divorce when they are raw is the best place to start to rebuild your life, getting strong, moving on, and planning the life you want.
What you want it to be, what you want it to look like, but don’t try to jump right from divorce to happiness. That’s what I tried to do in my divorce before I understood and studied and applied all these things that I’m teaching you. . I tried to find happiness and distract my negative feelings stemming from my divorce by being over busy thinking I was making progress, and maybe on paper into the world it probably looked pretty good, but not sustainable.
I promise you, you’re gonna crash and burn. You gotta really take your time with this. Come to a place of peace and then you can move on to. I describe it is that I could have both work together in sync, meaning that I could have this feeling of sadness or anger stemming from my divorce and kind of like tuck it in my pocket knowing it was there not doing anything with it, just letting it be there and at the same time I could start to grow and move past it.
I hope that makes sense to you and that you end up learning to carry your emotions with you. Not push ’em away, not react to them. Just live with them. I like to think of it as coexisting, but you may ask like a lot of my clients that if I coexist with it, how and when do I start to feel better? How and when do I get past all these negative emotion?
You know, many times when you let a feeling be there, you permit yourself to be present with it. It dissipates in minutes in divorce. I understand it may take longer because of the magnitude of it, and that’s okay. Understand that when you don’t permit the emotion, you can’t get over it. It just lingers.
It’ll resurface time and again, every little trigger will bring those feelings right back up again. on a. I’m constantly dealing with anxiety. It’s just one of those feelings that I live with on a daily basis, and now I kind of like embrace it. I welcome it. I say, hello, anxiety, how you doing today? I knew you were gonna come meet me at some point.
And then I kind of just breathe. I don’t do anything. I just live with it. And I’m telling you, it passes. It may come up again and I just let it pass. . When you are confronted with the emotions stemming from your thoughts about your divorce, your willingness to be present and feel the emotion in your body is directly correlated with your growth and your ability to move past the divorce to an amazing new life.
Master this and listen. The sky’s the. Putting yourself in challenging situations, being willing to be uncomfortable and overcome, whatever it is, the discomfort and being aware of it will propel you to success in your life that you never even dreamed of. That’s why I use the word amazing with divorce.
The word amazing per the Googles as a verb, means surprise someone greatly to fill with astonish. I know that you can astonish yourself from what you will learn when you permit yourself to do so. This podcast is yours to learn and to grow from, and to succeed from yours, to become stronger from, to not be stuck in woe is me and curled up in a little ball and let the world move on past you without contributing your greatness that is called you.
There is no emotion from your divorce that you can’t. I did it in my divorce and it made me stronger. It helped to propel me to things and places I never imagined. Like this first podcast with you today, I am so honored to be with you at this moment. I invite you to open your closed door against the resistance and walk through it to the other side, to the greatness that awaits yours for the.
I know this is a lot for the first episode, so download the transcript, get your journals out, listen to it again, share it with a friend who’s in the same place, or going through their own divorce. And until next time, love yourself. Be kind to yourself. Hold. For yourself without judgment and know that you are absolutely a hundred percent perfect and amazing just the way you are.
Thanks so much for listening. Get further information and some free secrets on how to make your life amazing after [email protected]. And remember my friends? Yes, you. Have an amazing life after divorce. See you there. Views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Yahoo Family Law Group or your divorce Law Center.
Their respective officers, directors, employees, agents, or representatives. The content of your amazing divorce is for entertainment and educational purposes only. None of the content on your amazing divorce should be considered legal advice, nor does anything here in create an attorney-client relationship.
As always, consult a lawyer for your legal questions.
