Latest / Bent Not Broken: Starting Over After Divorce | Post Divorce Life / How to Rebuild Your Identity After Divorce | From Military Wife to Finding Her Voice with Heather Sweeney

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How to Rebuild Your Identity After Divorce | From Military Wife to Finding Her Voice with Heather Sweeney · Bent Not Broken: Starting Over After Divorce | Post Divorce Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to another episode of Bent Not Broken.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Heartbreak and trauma may feel like the end of your story, but here it's the beginning of a bold new chapter.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Coach Deborah Griffiths, and this is the space where women rise, rebuild, and rediscover their purpose.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Remember this truth.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: You are bent, not broken.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: What happens when the life you built your entire identity around suddenly disappears?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: For many women, especially those who spent years supporting a partner's career and putting their own needs aside, divorce doesn't just end a marriage, it forces them to rediscover who they are.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Today's guest knows that experience deeply.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Heather Sweeney spent years as a Navy wife and a stay-at-home mom building her identity around a good military spouse, supportive, adaptable, and always putting family first.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: But when her marriage ended, she found herself facing the challenge of rebuilding her identity, her financial independence, and confidence after decades of living in someone else's shadow.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Heather shares this journey in her memoir, Camouflage, How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Modern Love, The Washington Post, HubPost, Today, and Newsweek, where she speaks openly about divorce, identity, and reclaiming your voice.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Her story is a powerful reminder that sometimes life bends us, but it doesn't break us.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, welcome to Bent Not Broken.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me, Deborah.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to be here.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: You spent years as a Navy wife building your identity around supporting your spouse and your family.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: At what point did you begin to realize that you had slowly lost parts of yourself along the way?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it happened so gradually that it was hard for me to see in the moment until I was so lost that I couldn't even remember when I had been myself.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it really kind of hit me when my husband at the time told me for the first time that he wanted a divorce.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: We were living overseas in Japan.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: We had just had another baby, our second child.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: She was only about eight months old.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was a stay-at-home mom.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been a stay-at-home mom for years.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: He came home one day and said he was done.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I had been unhappy in the marriage as well.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't think I realized that he was as unhappy as I was.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But when he said, I'm done, I want a divorce, like I wasn't overwhelmed with sadness or heartbreak or oh my gosh, I can't live without this man.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: My first thoughts were, how am I going to support myself financially?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where am I going to live?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: How am I going to pay for childcare?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just all of the logistics.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it made me realize that I didn't even know, you know, and we didn't get divorced at that time.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: It took us years after that to actually go through with the divorce.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it did hit me in that moment that I wouldn't even know where to begin to start my life over without him as a single mom with no job.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that really hit me that I had let things really kind of fester for so long.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't talk to anybody about it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't go to counseling at the time.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I did realize I no longer have a voice and everything is about him and everything is about his Navy career.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And our kids were so young.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So everything was about the kids and being a mom.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so that really was, I think, the moment where it hit me and everything just kind of snowballed from there.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it took me a really long time to figure it out.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you didn't go through any kind of marriage counseling and stuff.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is that because he was in the military?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe he was away too much to have the counseling.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: We ended up having several, what I call divorce talks, just kind of saying, one of us said, I'm done.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to finally go through with this divorce.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't go to counseling in Japan because we were at a very small Navy base.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually socialized with the people who could have offered us some help.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this was early on before there was online therapy that you could go to and access.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: There was none of that online.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That was many years ago.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so we did eventually go to counseling.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: We thought we could do it on our own.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I read Dr.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Phil's Relationship Rescue and I did the workbook and all of this, these exercises.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that I could do it for both of us and apply it to our marriage because, as you said, he was hardly ever there.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so we couldn't go to counseling for years because I didn't have somebody to go with because he was constantly traveling.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we did get to a point where I was practically packing a suitcase and once one foot out the door.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, okay, let's do it.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go to counseling.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So he found a therapist who was employed by the military.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew from the very first session that her focus was on making sure that his mental health was where it needed to be and that I was not the priority in these sessions.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he was around for about a month.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think we went to several sessions a week, very long sessions, too, because I think the counselor knew that pretty soon his travel was going to start picking up again.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that first counselor was very much advocating for him and not so much our marriage.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I felt very much like she was gaslighting me.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like she was not listening to my needs.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And all of the work that we were doing at home, all of her advice was basically me making compromises to fix the issues that he was having, not so much vice versa.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was not really making a lot of compromises to fix the issues that I was having.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we went to counseling for about a month with this counselor.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was traveling all over the world.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was in Europe.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was gone for about six weeks.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when he came back, we were just completely at square one again.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe because we couldn't put into practice the exercises she was advising, or, you know, he came home and he was jet lagged and he was tired.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I had gotten into a routine with my children without him.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something in the military when you come back from deployments that it's called reintegration, where the entire family has to adjust again to being back together.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So he has to adjust to living with a wife and children.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: We have to adjust to him, you know, being pulling him back, coming back into our schedule.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And now I have to wait until he comes home from work to cook dinner where we were eating at 5:30.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're eating at 6:30.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Little adjustments like that, but they do end up being kind of big adjustments.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So at that point, he came back and I said, Well, I'm going to find us another counselor.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I am not going back to that other counselor.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I did, I found us another counselor, our second one.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we went probably about 10 times, and the counselor basically said, I don't think you two should stay married.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see any connection.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then we saw a third counselor who pretty much said the same thing, but I think at that point, the third counselor, we were both pretty much done.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we did do the counseling, but I think we waited way too long.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: You may know this.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Does someone in the military or the military families is there a higher rate of divorce than with civilians?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The latest statistics that I've heard is that the military, and please don't quote me on this, but from what I've heard, typically the divorce rates in the military are slightly higher than civilian divorces, but it's hard to really analyze those numbers because the marriage rate is higher for the military than civilians.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really, I've heard that it's very hard to compare those numbers, but it's not really significantly higher for I've heard a lot of different statistics.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the odd thing is, is that when I was getting divorced back in 2012, I didn't know a single other military couple that was getting divorced.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know a single military couple even talking about their marital problems because as a military spouse, it's an unspoken rule that you're not supposed to complain about the lifestyle.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to be resilient, you're supposed to be flexible, you're supposed to be adaptable, you're supposed to be taking care of the home front and not complaining about it.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't know anybody going to counseling, I didn't know anybody talking about any of their issues.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we talked about the surface level things, like, oh, he's his dirty laundry, you know, five feet away from the hamper again.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't remember ever really having serious conversations with I know I had a lot of military spouse friends.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: We just didn't go to those deeper levels of, hey, this is a really hard lifestyle, and I'm not really handling it very well.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm having a really hard time with this.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I never knew anyone who was going through divorce, even my civilian friends.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a lot of divorcing civilian friends, but way more than military.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's hard to gauge those numbers.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Makes sense.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you were just talking about all of those unspoken, unwritten rules about being resilient.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I think all of those skills probably helped you to prepare you for this next step.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: They certainly did.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I was used to doing a lot of things that I found familiar after the divorce.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I knew how to be lonely, I knew how to pack up my home and move.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I knew how to be alone, to solo parent, to be resilient, to do things on my own.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really was almost thankful to have those skills because it wasn't a total culture shock.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest thing, of course, was that I did move into an apartment with the kids, and that was an adjustment living by myself.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I'd spent probably the more majority of my marriage being alone.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew how to go to bed without a partner beside me, and I knew how to do everything.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: I knew how to be both parents because a lot of the marriage, even when we did have a lot of happy times, it wasn't all bad, but I knew how to do everything alone.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, it definitely those hardships turned around and helped me in the end.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, does the military offer any kind of classes or education for couples who are engaged and want to get married to help prepare them for married military life?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, those deployments, the long time between when you see your partner being a single mom, single dad while your spouse is deployed.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do they offer anything like that to help?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: At the time that we first started with military life, if they had those resources, I did not know about them.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if that's because my head was kind of in the sand and I wasn't, I was so unprepared and I was so unexpected for all of that.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe my husband's command was supposed to help with that.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they didn't realize how new we were.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: But at the time for me, I did not have any resources besides a book that my husband had bought me, and it was like the Navy's guide to being a military spouse or something like that.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I believe there are a lot more resources that I know of now.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, one resource when we were married, he came back from a deployment from the Middle East, and his command held a marriage retreat, and we went to it and they offered free child care, so we didn't have to worry about the children.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was at a local indoor water park.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the kids went and had a blast and spent some time with other kids, and it was actually wonderful.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about the five love languages, which I had never heard of before, and it was a wonderful retreat.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think it helped us a lot at the time, and it taught us a lot about the struggles of reintegration and just talking out our problems and going to therapy and things like that.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there are a lot of resources that I just didn't know about at the time.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm hoping that there are a lot of more resources now than there were, especially with the internet and being able to do a lot of things on Zoom, like therapy.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And even when he was getting deployed to the Middle East, we had Skype and things like that, but there wasn't a lot of means of communication.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think now I'm hoping that there are a lot more resources for military couples and for new military spouses.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I know when I moved to Japan too, I was required to take a course on indoctrination, just learning how to live in Japan, learning some key phrases, learning how to drive on the other side of the road.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was mandatory for me to attend those.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I was so thankful that they had that because I didn't have any idea how to live in a foreign country.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I ended up loving it, and I was so thankful that the Navy offered those classes for me to take and learn and assimilate into the country that was hosting us.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great to hear.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Divorce doesn't just end a relationship, it often dismantles an entire life structure.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: What was the most shocking or unexpected part of starting over after your marriage ended?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like there were so many shocking things.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was sad that for a while I fell out of touch with his family.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was close with his parents, and we are now close again.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think we all needed kind of a little breather to figure things out.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're wonderful grandparents, and so I've always made sure to keep them in the kids' lives.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: My kids are now 18 and 22, so they keep in touch with all their grandparents.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents are actually still very close friends with my ex's parents.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: They still meet up for dinner, which is wonderful.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it is always an adjustment when you have friends kind of taking sides.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of friends we had, you know, some I'm like, okay, well, those are your friends, and I've got my friends.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a big adjustment when we each have new partners.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: He, I think a lot of men start dating very quickly.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: I stayed in therapy and worked on myself for a really long time after the divorce.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he dated, which was fine.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: In the state of Virginia where we lived, you have to be separated for an entire year if you have children before you can get divorced.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about dating and I, yes, let's do that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let's date, because a year is a really long time to be alone.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew that we weren't getting back together.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's always very jarring seeing the person you thought you would spend the rest of your life with with somebody else.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it was jarring for him as well once I started dating and had a partner.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, there are a lot of adjustments, a lot of baby steps.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think I suffered from a lot of anxiety, just getting used to those things.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And some days I had to tell myself, just take it hour by hour.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Some days taking it day by day was too much.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, take it day by day or hour by hour or minute by minute, if that's what you need.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think another big adjustment for me was not having time with my children when they were with their father.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the way our schedules worked, I was working from home.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so the kids were with me during the week, and then they would go spend time with him on the weekends before he ended up having a move.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I had never spent time away from my kids.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was the one spending time away from the kids.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so packing up their suitcases.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when we got divorced, they were about when we first split, they were about five and nine.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, I had to pack their suitcases and say, all right, you're gonna go to dad's house.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a huge adjustment.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then he ended up having to move, he got military orders to Hawaii while I was living in Virginia, and so we worked out a schedule where the kids would be with me during the school year and then spend the summers with him, which just broke my heart.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like I had lost a limb or something because I've never spent that much time away from them.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I sought an attorney to see if we could adjust that schedule legally.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, you will lose.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is a man who wants to spend time with his children.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we did it, and it ended up being wonderful.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: The kids, who doesn't want to spend the summer in Hawaii?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I at first I felt a little guilty about this, but I ended up having these wonderful summers that I could practice self-care.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: I went on a trip by myself to the Caribbean.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I really kind of spent some time with myself, with my friends, with my new boyfriend.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it really worked out for everybody, but that was a big adjustment is the time away from my children.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I had to go through something very similar.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: You feel like you've lost a limb or a big part of you, a big part of your heart, even.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned anxiety and those things.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: What were some of the steps that you took to help release that or refocus your mindset?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Did you journal?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Did you go out and take a walk?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: What were some of the things that you did to get you back to you?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Besides therapy, which was a huge help, I did journal like crazy, which is actually how I ended up writing my memoir because I had 20 years of journals because I'd always journaled.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was always a source of release and de stressor for me.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I did journal a lot, but also running for me.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I always enjoyed running.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I decided to make this divorce bucket list.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things on the bucket list was signing up for a full marathon.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I had already run several half marathons, but I decided to run the Marine Corps marathon.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of doubled as my exit from the military community, but also this goal where I joined a running club.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I needed to be social.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to get out of my apartment.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: I had these weekends where I didn't have my children.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're a single parent, you're everything is rushing around and do your homework while I'm cooking dinner and we need to get to Taekwondo and all of these things.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: But then you have the weekends and they're just oddly quiet.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you have all of this free time that you've never had before.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I needed to channel that into something healthy.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time I wasn't early on, I wasn't really dating.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, well, I'm going to join this running club.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I loved it.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was just me being social, doing something that I loved.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was training for this marathon.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so every Sunday morning I had a running partner who was also training for a marathon.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we would go out and run 16, 18, 20 miles.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just, it was the best thing I could have done for myself was to just find something I loved, something that was healthy and not, you know, sitting around drinking too much wine.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: It got me out the door.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: It got me out of bed sometimes.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it was something I started looking forward to.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it really, really helped me just to focus on a goal.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a great thing for me.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Many women who leave long-term marriages struggle with financial independence, especially if they spent years out of the workforce.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: What did rebuilding financial confidence look like for you in real life?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was a real struggle for me.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that I stayed in the marriage as long as I did because I knew that I would struggle to financially support myself.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: And at first, it really was uh living paycheck to paycheck.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had a stable job, but my credit score wasn't wonderful.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I did not have health insurance for several months because obviously I was off of his military health insurance.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was at a job where I was a contractor, but I knew that I had a promotion coming up where I was going to start to get benefits.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so for a few months I didn't have any health insurance.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have some chronic medical issues where I needed daily medication that I was no longer able to fill.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started rationing my thyroid medication.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I was eating the leftover chicken nuggets and craft macaroni and cheese off my kids' plates that they didn't eat for dinner because my budget was so tight that my grocery bills just had to be as small as possible.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And because I was really trying to pay off my credit card debt.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had a lot of credit card debt when we got divorced.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just slowly but surely chipping away at the debt, getting my credit score back up, trying really hard to save some money, being very, very frugal.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: I clipped a lot of coupons, but it took some time, but it was worth it.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't had credit card debt in years.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: My credit score is the best now it's ever been.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it does take time, it does take some vigilance.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And looking at the receipts.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I did sit down and write down all of my bills, how much I was expecting to pay each month.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if something veered off of that path, well, I can't buy this this month.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have to wait until next month.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to keep asking my parents for money.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was a tough journey, but I was determined to really get back on my feet.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it took a couple of years to get to where I wanted to be, but it was worth it.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: You've written openly about emotional invalidation and chronic self-abandonment.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: For listeners who might be experiencing that, but can't quite name it yet.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: What are some of those subtle signs?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's you asked great questions.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that sometimes it's a gut feeling.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's recognizing those red flags.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: I ignored so many red flags, even on my wedding day when I had some doubts that maybe this wasn't really the person that I want to be spending the rest of my life with.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was young, I was 23 when we got engaged, I was 24 when we got married.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that I really trusted my gut, even though I remember writing in my journal, I'm not quite sure I'm ready to get married.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had just come out of another long-term relationship.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you are starting to have these gut feelings that something is off, or that you'd really like to pursue something, but you're scared to say something because I wanted to write for so long.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And even when I did start writing and I started blogging, and my husband at the time said, I want you to write it anonymously.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started getting some really cool gigs, like the New York Times.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: These editors were coming to me saying, Do you want to write for us?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was so excited.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And my husband at the time was saying, Well, you need to write under your maiden name.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I really didn't push back, knowing like this is such a passion for me.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to do this and I want some recognition for this hard work that I'm putting in.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I just didn't speak up.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it turned into huge resentment that became a big stressor in our marriage.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you just have to be true to yourself.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if a passion, speak up.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: If your partner doesn't support you and that becomes a huge problem, go to counseling, talk things out, find a way to compromise.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't compromise, you know, maybe it's something worth talking more about or realizing that it's a deal breaker.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it ended up being a deal breaker.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be a writer.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't supporting me in the way that I wanted to support him, especially given how much I had supported his career.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that was another big red flag for me where I kept looking into the future and saying, I don't want to keep supporting him fully.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: No questions asked 100% when he is not offering me the same in return.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think you just have to be true to yourself and follow your passion.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I maybe go to counseling is the best.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I'm not pushing people into divorce.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I love marriage.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a great thing.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, to be true to yourself and maybe understand that maybe you're not with the right person if they're not willing to support you.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like a hard lesson you learned.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I hope that others can learn from that.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I learned you shouldn't stay in an unhappy marriage if, you know, I was staying in this unhappy marriage because I was so afraid of the other side of divorce.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was also a really bad communicator.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think that falls on me as well.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: We had horrible communication skills in our marriage, and part of that falls on me.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he couldn't read my mind just as I couldn't read his.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so you you really need to communicate, you know, if he's scared to tell your partner, hey, I have a passion about this.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to start a business or I'd like to start painting or something like that.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe your partner's going to be your biggest supporter and you're scared.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: You just speak up, communicate.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a huge key in any partnership is communication.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: When you started talking about red flags and trusting your gut, I smiled because you're not the first person that I've heard say that, number one.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: And number two, I can totally relate to it because when I entered the church the day I got married, my stomach did a 180.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I grabbed onto my dad kind of hard because he was getting ready to walk me down the aisle.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, you know, you don't have to go through with this.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I attributed that to wedding day jitters.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: But so often what we think is wedding day jitters is our body trying to tell us, warning, warning, warning, and we don't listen.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like I got a lot of those warning signs throughout my marriage that I ignored.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then you think, oh, well, I'm too far into this.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: We've had one child.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm pregnant with our second child, and I don't want to, you know, my kids to be children of divorce.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that I ignored so many red flags because, you know, like we were married for 13 years, we were together for 15.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's a long time to be with another person.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I just thought, oh, we'll smooth things out.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, it was also, well, things will be better when he gets back from Iraq.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Things will be better when we leave Japan and we settled back down.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Things will be better when I have a career and I'm starting to make my own money.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started realizing I'd spent my entire marriage like wishing time away, thinking that things will be better when, and they just never were.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wasn't listening to myself.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Good point.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Co-parenting after divorce can be especially complicated after a military marriage with deployments and relocations.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: How did you learn to advocate for yourself and your children in this new dynamic?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was a tough one because he couldn't help that he wouldn't be around sometimes.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I knew that I had to remain flexible.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, we were in Virginia and we had finally nailed down the custody schedule where the kids were going to his place Friday nights and coming back Sunday nights.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then he got orders for Washington, DC for a year.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so we kind of had to shift the schedule to the kids would go to his house Saturday mornings through Monday mornings.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound like a huge shift, but it meant that he was having to get the kids to school on Monday mornings, which was a huge adjustment for both of us because he had never done that before.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this kid's school was by my apartment, which was 20 minutes away from his house.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he's fighting morning, rush hour traffic.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes my son's sneakers weren't in his suitcase.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then during my work from home hours, he would have to come to my house after dropping the kids off from school to give me their suitcases because they couldn't bring them to school.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I just had to be very flexible.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thankfully, I worked from home.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was home to get the kids on and off the school bus.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was home for emergencies.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, then he a year after he was in DC, that's when he got orders to Hawaii.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to be very flexible.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: He was in Hawaii for three years.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then he came back here.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: A few months later, he got deployed again, gone for a year.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing I could do about that.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the military giving him orders.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so the kids and I just had to be flexible.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I just had to realize I was the one providing the stability.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we just had to go with the flow.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, he is my ex-husband is retired from the Navy now.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: The kids are both in college.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we're long past those custody issues.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it was very hard to advocate for myself and my schedule when he would say, Oh, by the way, I'm leaving for a year.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's just nothing you could do about that.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Good luck.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'll send you pictures of the kids.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'll let you know what's going on in their lives.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then at some point, the kids were old enough to text him and FaceTime with him, where I didn't have to so much be involved in that.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's very difficult.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's very challenging for military families.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if that's why I don't hear about a lot of military divorces, because some spouses might just stay in the marriage.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because what do you do?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And another thing with military life, it's so hard for a military spouse to maintain a career.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason I wasn't working is, well, what kind of job am I going to get in Japan?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Or at this small Navy base, I had a baby overseas.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't even a Navy hospital.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I had to have my daughter in a Japanese clinic.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: I could have taught, I applied to be a substitute teacher at the Department of Defense School on the base, but there was such a long waiting list.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time my name had gotten up to the top of the list to work, I didn't have any child care because the list for childcare was much longer than the list to substitute teach.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, well, I can't take this job because I don't have any childcare.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another issue that military spouses face is we just we can't even hold down careers.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who's going to hire somebody?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Who's going to leave?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in a few years, they're going to hire a civilian.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of challenges that military families face, and it's very difficult to do anything other than say, I'm going to go with the flow, try my best.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: How have your kids adjusted with, I want to say, the not so normal visitation schedules?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, normally with civilian life, you usually, you know, one parent has the kids every other weekend, maybe one night during the week, maybe some weeks during the summer, you know, whatever the two couples work out.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: But military life, it's different with all the deployments.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then you get divorced.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: How did your kids adjust?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: How have they adjusted to all of that?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: My kids are rock stars.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: They are, you know, they call military kids military brats.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they, you know, I think they were so used to their father going on trips and just not being there.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was more odd for them to not be around me.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: The summers that they spent in Hawaii were very difficult.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was a tough transition.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of tears at the airport.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of FaceTime calls.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Mom, I miss you.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I think they adjusted very, very well given the circumstances.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I think it was just kind of ingrained in them since they were born that mom's around.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna live with mom because they've always lived with me.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Their home main address was always with me.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they were just used to, well, dad's gone again.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sad to say that, but that's just the way they always grew up.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know anything different.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: Dating in midlife can feel intimidating, especially after years of shrinking your needs to keep the peace.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: What did it take for you to begin showing up as your full authentic self again?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it was learning a lot about myself, which therapy helped with.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think I kind of in therapy, again, kind of worked out what my role in the demise of my marriage was.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Namely, one of them was communication.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I worked really hard to figure out who I wanted to be.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I really made sure that I came full circle back to myself before I started jumping into the dating pool because I kind of thought, well, if I don't know who I am, how am I going to let somebody else get to know me?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of felt my confident new Heather when I was ready to start dating.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a little dating guru, it was a friend of mine in the apartment, and she was doing the online dating.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: She was divorced as well.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: She was around my age.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I just kept going back to her and saying, What do I do now?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: She helped me make my dating profiles and she really taught me.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: She said, you know what, in this day and age, if you don't have a good first date, don't go on a second one.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: You have no obligation to this person.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Don't waste your time and don't wait.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so she taught me a lot and I learned how to kind of be assertive.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody asked me for a second date and I just really wasn't into the first date, I just texted back and said, I don't think we're a match.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was nice to meet you.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for lunch.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was really refreshing because, of course, I hadn't dated since the 90s.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the internet was hardly even around the last time I'd been dating.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I just made sure that I was pretty confident.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you know, if the rejection is hard.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I kind of like messaged someone on match.com who I thought had potential and, you know, he never messaged me back.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I got used to that kind of rejection.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it was, I learned how to have fun with it at first.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just I really didn't like it.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: I got off match a couple of times, but always went back.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it was an adjustment, but I learned how to have fun with it.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I did kind of make a mental list of the traits that I didn't like about my ex-husband.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of made this mental list.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't want to be with another man who has this trait or who treats me in this manner.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: If I see any of those, I'm running far, far away.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I also started making a list of traits that I really did want.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: I remember one time I was at the YMCA at a spin class, and I walked into this class and saw this man standing there, and he was attractive and he smiled at me.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: And my first thought was, This man has really kind eyes.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: I I want to be with someone who has kindness in his eyes.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that was very poor to me.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds very insignificant, but you know, you can see that shining through in somebody, and uh kindness was a very important trait for me to look for in a partner.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it was just kind of figuring out what I wanted and what I didn't want.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Your story perfectly reflects the message of the show being bent but not broken.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Looking back now, what would you say to the woman who is still in that place of uncertainty and wondering if life can truly get better after divorce?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: I would say give yourself a lot of grace and hope.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: I just had to keep hopeful that life would be the life that I wanted it to be.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I try not to sugarcoat it.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Divorce is hard.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Someone had once said to me, the first year after divorce will be the hardest of your life.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways, it was.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: I remember sitting on my deck of my apartment and I was swirling a glass of my favorite wine, and I was looking out over like this little pond that my apartment complex had.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the one-year anniversary of my divorce.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the kids were with their father, so I was alone and I was kind of reflecting, and I'm like, this is where I wanted to be.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: I love my place in life.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it took a lot of hard work and tears and blood and sweat and all of that to get here.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm so glad that I made that jump because if I had stayed in that unhappy marriage the rest of my life, I would have been unhappy.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went on this pursuit of happiness and I realized it will truly was the best thing I could have done for myself and my children was to leave this marriage.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want my children to think that that's what a partnership was.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want them to think that's how people should treat each other.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it took a lot of baby steps, it took a lot of self-care.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: It took a lot of learning how to not beat myself up and not blame myself for everything.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the marriage is what it was.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't regret getting married.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't regret staying as long as I did.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: All of the time I spent in that marriage taught me very important life lessons that I've taken with me after divorce.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been, you know, divorced for almost 13 years now.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so much happier and I'm so glad that I made that jump.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if anybody out there is contemplating this big life move, just have hope that life can be better.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: And don't stay in an unhappy marriage just because you fear life on the other side.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can make a whole new life for yourself no matter what stage of life you're in, no matter how old you are, you can do it and you can create a new life for yourself.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well said.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, you have a new book out called Camouflage.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can our listeners get the book?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a website?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about it.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: So my website is Heatherlsweeney.com, and my book is available to purchase pretty much wherever books are sold online.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I did the audiobook as well.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's an audiobook that I narrated.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know a lot of people really love listening to their books these days.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you could get the audiobook and hear me narrate it.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's an ebook.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you could pretty much just Google me and I'm pretty much everywhere.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: I am on all the social media platforms.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think my favorite is Instagram.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So anyone can find me on Instagram.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: I try to respond to every DM on social media and every email that comes in from my website.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, anyone has a question, they're welcome to reach out.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have all of that information in the show notes.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, thank you so much.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed this conversation and wish you the best.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: I love this conversation.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Bent Not Broken.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I hope that this episode reminded you that even through life's toughest moments, you are bent not broken.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: If this message inspired you, please share, rate, review, and subscribe, as it helps us reach more women who are ready to rise and rebuild.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: And until next time, keep living bold and walking in your purpose.