One part of acceptance that’s really important for us to deal with too is it’s not just accepting that I was going to be a divorced woman. It was also accepting what happened in the past and not traveling mentally back into my past and rewriting things to be better than they actually were, which just compounded the grief that I was in.
No doubt. And um I really had to work hard on this. So I I just kept making mental notes. Like Lisa, don’t go back and romanticize the past and think like, wow, I just want to return to that, you know? And that’s a very biblical thing. Just like the children of Israel, they went out to the desert and they were delivered from Egypt.
God did this miraculous thing they’d been crying out to God to do. They get delivered. They’re out in the desert. And then what? And then they go, “Well, why are we here? Moses, did you bring us out here to die? Send us back to Egypt. We had meat and we had fish. We And I think Moses was probably about to lose his mind. There is a reason why he struck that rock eventually.
” And it’s cuz the people have have they have tricked him for the last time, Lisa. Like, it is just too much. And the the irony of it all is I think if I were Moses, I’d be like, “No, y’all are gaslighting.” Cuz you know who was eating all that good stuff? Me. I was eating it cuz I was in the palace. Y’all were slaves. You’re servants.
You were not eating all that good stuff. I was eating that good stuff. But to your point, I do think that there’s this way that we can go back and we can glorify and romanticize a past um that is honestly not even true of the situation. And we can, like I said, travel mentally back and maximize what was good, like little scraps of love.
There often is good stuff. People wipe it all out. Like we had a couple of moments at at Disney or on a vacation. And I tell people it takes sometimes years later but they can go or see a family album with your ex in it or whatever and say there were a few moments this myopic black and white stuff doesn’t work and go there were some moments along the way that were peaceful and that’s a good memory I think to go there early in a revisionist history of just searching for it not just shopping for pain we’ve talked
about but shopping for this pleasure that it can’t be all bad just give yourself time to sort through but after a while person says there are a few good moments Yeah. Yeah. And for me, there were years that that felt good, decades actually, you know, but you know, in the 10 years of trauma, I had such a temptation to maximize, you know, what was good, these little scraps of love, and minimize the real hurt and heartbreak and the experiences that I had until you didn’t.
Until I didn’t. And that was part of acceptance, too. And part of I think when it didn’t is when the things that you could no longer deny started to come crashing down, you know, and so in some sense it’s like we have a tendency to hang way too much hope on these um isolated moments. And my son Levi, he plays lacrosse and um you know those little 3M hanger things that you have that can only hold a certain amount of weight.
Well, he’s got them up to hold his hats in his room, but this kid decided to hang up all of his lacrosse stuff on it. And then he came down was so angry cuz all of them fell off. And we’re like, bro, those are not designed to hang all your lacrosse stuff on that. And so I think there is even a sense where like you’ve got these memories, but you’re trying to hang all of your hope on these memories that were honest and they were good for that moment, but we’re inflating them and now they come crashing down and you’re now left dealing with the chaos of it.
Yeah. I was having a conversation with a friend recently and she’s trying to survive an unwanted divorce. She’s she’s going through it. She’s in the thick of the hurt and the pain and all of that. And she called me one day and she was sitting in her car outside of her office sobbing. And she just said, “I got so triggered and caught off guard this morning because I opened up the bathroom cabinet and it used to be full of towels that were folded by my husband and he folds them in such a distinctive way. And as I
