1) Manage your Emotions
Your emotions can easily run away with you during the divorce process. You may end up making decisions from an angry, fearful, vengeful, or frustrated place. These emotional decisions can have long-term impacts that you didn’t expect or that you didn’t bother to take the time to think about. Because of this, one of the best ways to make divorce easier is by managing your emotions. Seek out help from a counselor or a therapist because getting help from someone trained to teach you how to manage your emotions will make the divorce less costly for you and less harmful to your family, especially if you have children.
2) Respect the Other Person
As difficult as it can be during the divorce process, try to be respectful of your soon-to-be former spouse. You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to try to be their best friend. You don’t even have to like them anymore, but if you can manage to maintain respect for each other through the divorce process, that will lead to a better outcome.
3) Be Cooperative
If financial or other information needs to be exchanged between you and our spouse, be cooperative and proactive. Get everything collected and to the other person in a timely manner. Comply with requests and deadlines or at the very least let people know if there’s going to be a reason why you can’t get something done when you said you would.
4) Be Patient
Your soon-to-be former spouse may not be as organized as you and may need more time to get things done. They may not be trying to be difficult and cause delay, but you may interpret it that way. That’s where managing your emotions comes in again. You should also respect what the other person’s strengths and weaknesses might be, which you probably know well from being married. Give the person a little space if they’re not quite doing things as quickly as you would like.
5) Communicate
Silence often breeds mistrust and people imagine things. If you can just let people know, “Hey, I got slammed at work this week, I need another week before I give this back to you.” Most people will understand that. But if you’re just silent, they may think you’re trying to punish them for some reason and emotions can take over.
These tips can help puts you on a positive path to resolving your difference without all of the emotional baggage so that you can moving on with your life. It also helps to go to counseling, therapy, or by joining a divorced dads/moms’ groups, parents without partners groups, or other groups where you can connect with people who are going through the same experience and help you get onto that next phase of your life.
You can’t change the past. Whatever your grievances are about this person, you can’t change them. All you can do is change your future. If you can keep from being upset about the past, and keep your mind focused on whatever you want to make of your future, then you will have a more successful post-divorce phase of your life.
