What if divorce doesn't have to look the way you think?
I come from a culture where divorce is not really an option.
It’s not said out loud exactly like that, but you feel it in everything. In the way marriages are celebrated like the biggest achievement of your life. In the way you are no longer invited to events. In the way problems stay inside the house and the women are shamed into being more dutiful if made public. In the way leaving is understood as giving up, as selfishness, as a broken promise made in front of everyone you love and God.
When I ended my marriage, I lost friends, people in my family stopped speaking to me, I was judged, I was gossiped about and I understood why. I wasn’t just making a decision about my life. I was disrupting something much bigger than me, a value system, a family story, an expectation that had been carried for generations.
I want to say that first, before I offer anything else, because if you come from a culture like mine, or a family like mine, you already know the weight I’m describing. And you deserve to have that weight acknowledged. I’m not writing this from a place of having it easy, or having an experience that I would in any way label as simple, or having support for what I felt was the smartest decision for me. I held my values in one hand and the cost of honoring them in the other, and I made the hardest decision of my life.
But here’s what I discovered through the pain divorce brought me: I didn’t have to choose between my family and my freedom. I could choose to put me first and decide what kind of family we still had the chance to be. And I could do it by choosing love.
That reframe took me a long time to find, but it changed everything about how I moved through what came next. Every decision I made, about the kids, about our living situation, about how we spoke to each other, about what I was willing to forgive, came back to that question. Not what do I deserve. Not what is fair. But what kind of family are we becoming, and does this choice move us toward that or away from it.
It is possible to put your family first and still leave. It is possible to keep your kids at the center of every decision and still choose yourself. It is possible to arrive somewhere on the other side that looks nothing like what you feared and everything like what you hoped.
I know because I’m living it. And I’m happy to share parts of it with people who would find it helpful, but I also don’t want to hear from people who are bitter/resentful/certain it could never work/already decided the other person is the problem, because people in this stage are usually defensive, guarded and don’t want to believe/hope/dream/commit to it being a possibility.
I don’t have a whole series written or anything like that. But it struck me after this weekend, where I got so many comments about how happy I look, that maybe I should be sharing more about how I got here. So give me a challenge. I’ll do my best to reframe it.
Bringing the Reframe to Your Team
Most teams right now are stuck in a frame that change is hard and they’re already behind. My job is to show you that’s a frame problem, not a team problem.
The 9-Minute Reframe is a 90-minute experience that turns a room full of people playing it safe into a team that thinks boldly together. By the end, they have a tool they can use anytime they want to move faster than the moment.