Latest / The Conscious Divorce / The Ghosts of Marriage Past: How to Let Go After Divorce
Transcript
- Justin Milrad: It's 1147 on a Tuesday night. The kids are asleep. The dishwasher just finished its cycle. And the house has gone quiet in a very specific way. A house gets when quiet after a divorce. Not peaceful quiet, echo quiet. And this is the exact moment your brain decides to say, Hey, remember that thing your ex said in the kitchen back in March of 2019? Let's watch it again. And this time, let's add the comeback you should have used. So now you're lying in bed losing an argument that ended six years ago to a person who isn't in the room about a marriage that legally doesn't exist anymore. Apparently your subconscious never got a copy of the divorce decree. Sound familiar? It's Halloween. The one time of year people pay good money to be haunted. Hay rides, haunted houses, A teenager in a rubber mask jumping out of a cornfield with a bloody plastic knife. If you've been through a divorce, you don't need a hayride. You already have ghosts, and they work for free. But I want to tell you something that surprised me when I started doing this work. Most people think the thing's haunting them is their ex. Usually it isn't. Usually it's a story, the future you were supposed to have, the apology you never got. The version of yourself you left behind inside that marriage. And unlike your ex, a story is something you actually have some say over. So here's one thing you can use tonight. When the 1147 replay starts, name it. Out loud if you have to. it's that one again. You're not trying to win the argument. You're just noticing that a rerun is playing. That small step, moving from being inside the memory to looking at it, is where every other tool in this episode starts. Welcome back to the Conscious Divorce Podcast, where we help people navigate divorce with greater clarity, confidence, and intention. I'm your host, Justin Millrad, certified divorce coach and founder of Reclaim and Reboot Transformational Coaching, as well as the author of U 2.0. And for Halloween, I went all out on my costume this year. I came out as a guy who went through a divorce and lived to talk about it. Very scary, truly terrifying. The show exists because divorce doesn't have to destroy your finances, your family, or your future. But it does have a way of following you home. So today's episode is called The Ghosts of Marriage Past. Just because the marriage ended doesn't mean the haunting stopped. A quick note before we go into that haunted house, this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It isn't legal, financial, medical, or mental health advice. Every divorce and family situation is different, so please talk to a qualified professional about your specific circumstances. I'm a divorce coach, not a therapist or an attorney. Coaching can work alongside therapy and legal counseling, but it doesn't replace either one. So here's where we're going today. I'm going to walk you through the six ghosts I see most often after Mirror Jens. The ghost of the future that never happened, the ghost of the person you thought you married, the ghost of the conversation you never got to have, the ghost of who you used to be, and the ghost of your own regrets. And for the parents listening, the ghost that still has your phone number. Then at the end, we'll do an exorcism, a practical one. No priests, no pea soup. No spinning heads. Five things you can actually do this week. Before we start, I want to reframe something. In the movies, the goal is always to get rid of the ghost. Call the experts, burn some sage, sell the house. but I don't think most of the ghosts from a marriage are enemies. Some of them are unfinished grief. Some of them are lessons that haven't been fully learned yet. Some of them are just memories that are sitting in the wrong room of your life. Right in the middle of the living room, where they belong in a closet, you can open and close when you choose to. So some of the ghosts need boundaries, some need understanding, and some need to be released. The goal today isn't to erase your marriage or pretend it didn't matter. The goal is to stop letting the past make decisions about your future. So let's turn on that flashlight. The ghost of the future that never happened. Let me tell you about a man I'll call James. James is a composite, built from patterns I see over and over. Not one actual client. James is 53. He's the one who finally said the words. After years of living like roommates who split the Costco bill, he told his wife he wanted a divorce. And he was right. Both of them, in their more honest moments, would tell you that it needed to end. About eight months after the divorce was final, James is cleaning out a drawer in his new kitchen and he finds a brochure. Alaska, a cruise, glaciers, whales, the whole thing. They'd planned it for their 25th anniversary. They'd even circled the cabin they wanted. And James, the guy who ended the marriage, the guy who knows it was the right call, sits down on the kitchen floor and starts crying for 20 minutes. Then he gets angry at himself for crying, because what is this about? He doesn't want her back. He's sure of that. So why does the brochure take him out at the knees? Here's what I would tell James. He isn't grieving his marriage. He's grieving his future. That brochure wasn't about a boat. It was about a picture he'd been carrying in his head for 20 years. The two of them at 60, on a deck in matching fleeces, laughing at something. The grandkids at Thanksgiving. The house where the kids would come for the holidays. The whole second half of the movie. The marriage ended, but no one told the picture. There's a name for this kind of grief. Dr. Pauline Boss, a family therapist and researcher at the University of Minnesota, coined the term ambiguous loss back in the 1970s. It describes loss that doesn't come with clarity. Someone is physically gone but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically gone. And she pointed to divorce as one of the most common examples. Think about how strange divorce is as a loss. When someone dies, there's a funeral. People show up, someone brings a lasagna. There's a ritual that says something big happened and you're allowed to fall apart for a while. When a marriage dies, you sign a settlement agreement, you go back to work Monday, and no one brings you a lasagna. Not one single lasagna. And on top of that, the person you lost is still alive, still posting, still showing up at soccer games. Maybe still on your car insurance for now. So your brain has no clean ending to work with. Boss has a phrase I She calls closure a myth. Her point is that closure is a great word for closing a real estate deal or closing a road after a flood. It's a harmful word for human relationships because when you've been attached to someone, that attachment doesn't just shut like a door. Which means if you've been waiting to feel closure before you move forward. You may be waiting for that bus that doesn't run on this route. What Boss recommends instead is what she calls both and thinking, not either or both and. I'm glad I left, and I'm sad about what I hoped for. I know the marriage needed to end, and I missed the family dinners. I'm building a new life, and part of me still wanted the old one to work. Both can be true. You don't have to pick one to be healthy. In fact, trying to pick one is often what keeps people stuck. Now I want to slow down here because this is a question I think is worth the price of admission today. Are you missing your ex or are you mourning the future you thought you were gonna have? Sit with that for a second because those are two very different problems. If you're missing the actual person, the specific human being with their actual habits and actual behavior, that's one kind of grief and it deserves real attention. but a lot of the time when people tell me they miss their ex and we dig into it, what they miss is a role, a Sunday routine, someone to text when the flight lands, being one of the two names on a holiday card, the picture of the deck and the fleeces. And here's why that distinction matters so much. If you think you miss that person, you might make decisions to get closer to that person. The late night text, that maybe we should try again conversation that you both already know the ending to. But if what you're actually mourning is the future, that person isn't the solution. That future is the thing that needs rebuilding. You can't get that person back and also can't get the future back. Most of the time, that future wasn't available with that person, anyways. That's part of why the marriage ended. I touched on grieving the future in our episode called the two degree shift, and I'm linking it below. Today I want to add one practical question. What future are you still mourning? And what part of the future could you create in a different form? Not the exact same form. I want to be honest about that. Some dreams don't come back. If you pictured both of you holding your first grandchild together in the same hospital room, that picture may change, and that's a real loss. You're allowed to name it and be sad about it. But a lot of dreams have a core you can keep. For James, the core wasn't a cruise with my ex-wife. When we dug into it, the core was adventure, slowing down and seeing something massive and beautiful before he got too old to enjoy it. So James books Alaska with his brother, different cabin. Does it fix everything? No. he'd tell me if he were real, that that first night on the ship he felt a pang of sadness. And then the second morning, he saw a humpback whale breach about a hundred yards off the deck and forgot to be sad for a while. That's how it works. Not one big moment of closure, a lot of small moments where the past gets a little quieter and the present gets a little louder. The ghost of the person you thought you married. The next ghost lives in the photo album. You know the one. Maybe it's a real album in a box in the garage. Maybe it's a folder on your phone. Maybe it's your phone's memories feature, which seems to have an evil sense of timing. You're having a perfectly good Thursday and your phone goes, Here's a fun video from eight years ago. Remember Cabo? Thank you, phone. Very helpful. I will now be emotionally unavailable until Saturday. So you open the album, and there you are, both on vacation. Tan, smiling, holding drinks, holding each other, and a voice in your head goes, We were so happy. What happened? Here's what the photo doesn't show you. The fight in the rental car about who forgot the phone charger, the two days before the trip where you didn't speak, the fact that you were both smiling partly because the photographer said cheese, and partly because you'd both had two of those umbrella drinks. Nobody frames a picture of the argument in the airport parking garage. A photo album is basically your marriage's highlight reel, and the human brain is a surprisingly unreliable film editor. Memory doesn't work like a video file, you just pulled up and played back. Every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it, and what you're feeling right now can shape how it gets rebuilt. That's why after a divorce, people's memories tend to drift towards one of two extremes. Some people go full highlight reel. Everything was wonderful, and they can't figure out why it fell apart. They remember the proposal and forgot the six years of silence at dinner. other people go full horror movie. Everything was terrible. It was always terrible. And they were a fool for not seeing it on the first date. They erase every genuinely good thing that happened. Both versions are edits. Neither one is the whole movie. And a lot of people are haunted by the question that sits underneath us all. Was I in love with them? Was I in love with who they were? Or with who I believe they could become? That's a fair question, and it's a painful one, because many of us fall in love with potential. We marry the version of someone we see on their best day and quietly assume the best day is the real them and the other days are temporary. Then 20 years go by and it turns out the other days were the real them too, and all of the days were the real them. That doesn't make you naive, it makes you human. Hope is part of how people commit to each other in the first place. But it does help explain why letting go is so hard. You're letting go of a person and also a version of that person who may have only existed in your hopes. There's some interesting thinking on this from bereavement research. For a long time, the standard idea about grief was that the healthy mourning meant detaching. Cut the cord, move on. That view is shifted towards what researchers call continuing bonds. The idea is that we keep some kind of inner relationship with people we've lost. And in 2024, Ruben and colleagues, writing in Omega, a journal focused on death and dying, put three kinds of spousal bonds side by side. A living marriage, a spouse who has died, and a marriage that ended in divorce. Their argument in plain English is that the bond after divorce doesn't simply vanish. It changes shape. So if you're thinking, I don't want them back, so why do I still feel connected? That may not be a sign something is wrong with you. Feeling some connections to a person you spent years building a life with is normal. The question isn't whether there's a bond. The question is what kind. A healthy bond sounds like we had some good years, I learned a lot, and I'm grateful for our kids. An unhealthy bond sounds like checking their location at 1 a.m. or reading every review of their new partner's dental practice or spending your Saturday trying to decode a photo of them at a brewery like it's the Bruder film. One is remembering, the other one is moving back in. There's a difference between visiting a memory and moving back into it. So here's an exercise. I call it the whole movie, not just the highlight reel. Take a sheet of paper and make three columns. In the first column, Write what was genuinely good, Not what was supposed to be good, what actually was, the way they were with your kids when they were babies, the road trip where you laugh for six hours straight. Write it down. In the second column, write what was genuinely painful, the patterns, not just the incidents, the things you kept hoping would change that never did. In the third column, write what you know now that you didn't know then. Then look at all three columns together. The point is to hold the versions of that person at the same time. Two things can be true. The love was real, the problems were real. Seeing both is what lets you stop arguing with yourself about which one was the real marriage. It was all the real marriage. One important caution if your marriage involved abuse, control, or fear, this exercise needs a different approach. In those relationships, the good moments were sometimes part of what kept you there. You don't owe those memories equal airtime, and you shouldn't do this kind of work alone. Do it with a therapist who understands those dynamics. Okay, we've looked at the future in the photo album. Now we're going to go into the courtroom. And this courtroom is in session every single night. The ghost of the conversation that never happened. Let me describe a courtroom. You've probably been in it. It's in session in the shower, in the car on the way to work, while you're walking the dog, and especially at 1147 at night. You're the prosecutor, and let me say you're brilliant. Your opening statement is airtight. You've got exhibits. You've got the text from 2021. you've got the thing they said at your sister's wedding. Your closing statement would make a Hollywood screenwriter weep. You're also the judge and the jury. The bailiff is your dog who honestly looks a little concerned. There's only one problem with this courtroom. The defendant never shows up. So you deliver the closing argument perfectly again and again, and the jury goes out to deliberate, and it never ever comes back with a verdict. You've been in trial for three years. The only good news is that no one's billing you by the L. Now let's talk about why we keep showing up to this trial. Most people in this courtroom are waiting for something. An apology, an explanation, an admission. You were right. I'm sorry I did that. Here's why I left. Yes, it started before you think it did. Some acknowledgement that the things you gave up actually counted. There's a story I want to tell you, and again, this is a composite of patterns, not a single client. Let's call her Elena. Elena's husband left after she discovered an affair. He moved out within a month, and he never really admitted to anything beyond what she'd already found. No timeline, no explanation, no apology that sounded like an apology. For two years, Elena wrote letters. She had 14 drafts of a letter she never sent. She rehearsed conversations. She had a list on her phone titled, and I'm not making this up, Questions for Him. It had 31 questions on it. She added to it when she was stopped at a stoplight. And finally, at their son's graduation, there's a moment. They're both refilling drinks at the same table. And she says quietly, I just need to know why. And he says, I'm sorry you feel that way. That's the moment a lot of people discover the hard truth. When your recovery depends on someone else's cooperation, you've handed them the keys to your own front door. And some people will never use it. Not because you didn't ask the right way, because they can't, or they won't, or they don't even know the answers themselves. Pauline Boss has an insight here that I think is really useful. She says that what people want after a loss usually isn't closure, it's certainty. We want to know what happened, and not knowing that ambiguity itself can freeze the grief in place. People wait, sometimes for years. Elena wasn't stuck because she was weak. She was stuck because she was waiting for information that was never coming. I want to make an important distinction because this is where people sometimes take advice like this too far. Some information you have a real right to, and you should pursue it. Financial disclosures in your divorce. Where the money went. Information that affects your kids' safety or your health. If there are things that affect your settlement, your custody arrangement, or your legal safety, don't drop those in the name of letting go. That's what your attorney and legal process are for. What I'm talking about is something different. It's repeatedly going back to the same person for emotional validation. They've already shown you they won't give. Asking the same question a 15th time, hoping for a different answer. That's not information gathering. That's the courtroom. And as many know, also the definition for insanity. So here's a framework to work with to help you get out of it. Three columns again, because apparently I love columns. What I know for Lena, he had an affair, he left, the marriage is over, I was hurt badly, I didn't deserve to be treated that way. What I may never know when it really started, whether he ever loved me the way I loved him, why he chose that instead of taking me. What I can choose anyway. I can stop rereading old texts. I can delete the list or at least stop adding to it. I can finish the certification I put on hold. I can let my son have a good relationship with his dad without making him my instigator. The third column is where the power is. Because notice nothing in the third column requires anything from him. Not one thing. And I want to be honest about how this went for Elena, because I don't believe in tidy movie endings. She didn't delete the list in one dramatic moment. She just stopped opening it. Some nights of trial still convenes, but it went from every night to a few times a week to more like a rerun of a show you used to watch. You recognize it. You don't need to watch the whole episode anymore. Moving forward doesn't require having every question answered. It requires deciding that your life doesn't have to wait for the answers. We're about halfway through this haunted house. Before we go into the next room, I want to take a quick break. If you're listening to this and recognizing a few ghosts of your own, I want you to know you don't have to do this work all by yourself. This is exactly the kind of thing I help people with at Reclaim and Reboot. Divorce coaching and strategy helps you make clear decisions when emotions are running high. Prepare for hard conversations, organize your financial and practical priorities, and build a healthier co-parenting approach, as well as avoid the expensive, reactive decisions people make at 11:47 at night. And lastly, rebuild your life with intention and joy. If you'd like to talk, Go to www.reclaimandreboot.me and book a free thirty minute consultation. No pressure, Just a conversation about where you are and what would help. and if you want to go deeper on your own, my books are there for you too. U 2.0, Divorce a Better Way Forward, the U 2.0 workbook, and the Co-Parenting Playbook, which I wrote with Joel Kaufman. If this episode is hitting home, take a second to follow or subscribe to the Conscious Divorce podcast. And if you know someone who's still living in their own haunted house, send this to them. Maybe don't send it to your ex. Probably not the move. And if you have a minute, a five-star rating or a short review really does help other people find this show when they need it most. Okay, now grab your flashlight again. Next room. The ghost of who you used to be. This next ghost is a little sneaky because it doesn't look like your ex, it looks like you. A lot of people aren't only grieving their spouse, they're grieving the person they were inside the marriage. Think about how many roles a marriage hands you husband, wife, partner, the one who handles the money, the one who plans the holidays, the one who knows where the passports are, half of a couple at dinner parties, a name on a joint account, Mr. and Mrs. on a mailing account. Then the divorce happens and a lot of those roles just disappear, sometimes overnight. Some friends pick sides, some couples used to see quietly stop calling, not out of malice, but because they don't know how to invite one of you without being weird. Your financial picture changes, your parenting time gets cut in half, And for many people, especially those who spent years putting everyone else first, there's this terrifying moment of looking in the mirror and thinking, I don't actually know who I am when I'm not taking care of someone. The little things are what get you. I've heard people say they didn't know what kind of cereal they liked because they've been buying the family cereal for 19 years. And then there are the discoveries. The first time you realize the thermostat is now a democracy of one. You can set it to 68 and no one will say a word. Power like that can go to a person's head. Then there's dating. I'm not going to tell you that you need to date to prove you're healed. You don't. Some people date six months after the divorce. Some people wait five years, some people date right away, and some people decide they're done and all of that can be healthy. But if you do try it, the dating apps will ask you to describe yourself in three hundred characters, Which is a lot to ask of someone who has spent twenty years being described as someone else's plus one. Underneath the humor, there's something important. When identity was built around a relationship, the end of the relationship can feel like the end of you. Researchers who study breakups and divorce talk about self-concept clarity, basically how clear and stable your sense of who you are feels. After a long relationship ends, that clarity often takes a hit. People say things like, I don't feel like myself anymore. That's a common experience, not a personal failing. Here's a distinction I want you to hold on to. Divorce is something that happened in your life. It doesn't have to become your identity. I went through a divorce is an experience. I am a divorced person, and that's the main thing about me is an identity. And it's a pretty small house to live in. Let me tell you about another composite. A man I'll call Tom. Tom played trumpet in his college jazz band. He was actually pretty good. Then came the career, the marriage, three kids, two mortgages. And somewhere in year six, he sold the trumpet at a garage sale to make room for a treadmill. A treadmill that, for the record, became a very expensive coat rack. I'm sure we can all relate. After his divorce, Tom found himself standing in a music store, holding a used trumpet, feeling ridiculous. Fifty one years old. What's he doing? He bought it anyways, and for about two months he sounded like a goose in distress. His neighbors, they had questions. But then he joined a community band that rehearses on Tuesday nights. And something happened that he didn't expect. He was getting back a piece of himself that had nothing to do with being someone's husband, a piece that existed before the marriage and survived it. That's what identity reconstruction actually looks like most of the time. It's not a dramatic reinvention. It's going back into the attic of your life and finding something you put away and forgot you loved. So here are three questions to take with you. One, who was I before this relationship? What did I love? What was I curious about? And what made me lose track of time? Two, who did I become inside it? Some of that is worth keeping. Maybe we became more patient, a better parent, more responsible with money. Not everything from the marriage has to go into the dumpster. And three, who do I want to become now? Not who are you at 25? Not who are you at 45? Who do you want to become from here? This is really the heart of what I call U 2.0. Reclaim the parts of you that you lost. Reboot the systems and habits that run your life now. And become the person you actually want to be next. Not a copy of the old you, an upgraded version. Now we're going to talk about the ghost of your own regrets. The next ghost is one person I don't like to talk about. It's not your excess time, it's the stuff you did. Maybe you avoided every hard conversation for a decade because peace felt easier than honesty. Maybe you buried yourself in work and called it providing. Maybe you stayed too long. Maybe you left in a way that you're not proud of. Maybe you said things during the divorce in an email, in a text, or in front of the kids that you would give a lot to take back. If you're honest, you probably have a list. And if you're the kind of person who listens to the shows like The Conscious Divorce, there's a decent chance you're already pretty hard on yourself. So let me say a few things clearly. First, taking responsibility for your part is a sign of maturity. It's one of the healthiest things you can do after a divorce. Second, Responsibility is not always split down the middle. If you are in a relationship with abuse, control, or intimidation, you're not responsible for someone else's harmful behavior. looking honestly at your own patterns is not the same as accepting blame for what was done to you. If that's your situation, please hear me. That part was never yours to carry. Third, there's a big difference between I made mistakes and I am a mistake. Brene Brown, who has spent years researching shame, put it simply. Guilt is I did something bad, and shame is I am bad. I covered that distinction in the two-degree shift episode. So I won't repeat the whole thing, but I want to add a research finding I think is pretty remarkable. A team at the University of Arizona led by David Sabara studied 109 adults going through divorce. Each person spoke for about four minutes about their separation, and trained judges rated how much self-compassion they showed. Basically, were they kind to themselves? Did they see their pain as part of the human experience rather than proof they were uniquely broken? Could they let hard feelings come and go without getting swept away? The people who showed more self-compassion at the start had fewer intrusive, unwanted thoughts about the divorce intruding on daily life. And that difference was still showing up as much as nine months later. The researchers also pointed out to self-compassion that can be learned. It isn't a fixed personality trait. Now I want to be clear about what self-compassion is not. It isn't letting yourself off the hook. It isn't saying, whatever it was, it's their fault. It's more like the voice you would use with your best friend if they came to you with the same regret. You wouldn't tell your best friend they're a disaster who ruined everything. You'd say, Yeah, that was a mistake. It makes sense how you got there. What do you want to do differently? Regret used well as information. It's your values telling you where your behavior didn't match them. That's useful. What's not useful is turning that information into a life sentence. You can take responsibility for the person you were without sentencing the person you're becoming to a lifetime of punishment. So here's the exercise. I call it the lesson without the life sentence. Pick one regret, just one, not the whole list. Write it in one sentence, plainly, without a lot of commentary. I stopped telling my wife what I actually needed, and I let resentment build instead. Next, write the lesson. What does this regret teach you? When I avoid conflict, I don't avoid the problem. I just postpone it and I make it bigger. Then write one different action. Something concrete you'll do differently in your current life, starting now. When something bothers me, I'll bring it up within a week, calmly instead of waiting for it to explode. That might apply to a co-parent and a new partner, a coworker, or your teenager. Regret, lesson, action. That's the whole thing. The regret goes on the page. The lesson goes in your head and the action goes into your calendar. One honest note, self-forgiveness usually isn't a single moment. It's more like a muscle. Some days the old voices will show up and start reading the charges again. When it does, you don't have to argue with it. You can just say, I know, I've already learned that one. Here's what I'm doing about it. When the ghost still has your phone number. If you have kids with your ex, you may be thinking, Justin, this is all lovely, but my ghost texts me about pickup times. There, this one's for you. Here's the last composite. A dad, I'll call Rob. Rob's been divorced for two years. He's doing well, working out again, dating a little. Feels like he's finally moved on. Then on a Wednesday afternoon, his phone buzzes. It's his ex. The message says, Can you bring me his cleat Saturday? She said they're at your place. 11 words. Completely reasonable. But Rob doesn't read 11 words. Rob reads, you're disorganized, always, like you were our entire marriage. You never could keep track of anything. None of this is in the text. His heart rate goes up, and 20 minutes later, he has a three paragraph draft explaining that the cleats were in her trunk. Actually, and also that time in 2018 when she forgot the passports. The text was about cleats. The reaction was about the marriage. This is what happens when the former spouse is still in your life. An ordinary logistics message hits an old bruise and suddenly you're not talking about soccer. You're back in the courtroom, except now the defendant is texting you. The distinction that helps here is simple to say and hard to practice. Your former spouse is no longer your romantic partner, but they may still be your parenting partner. Those are two completely different jobs. You can be done with one and still have to show up for the other. We went deep on the communication side of things, including the BIFF model in our episode, why co-parenting conflicts escalate and how to stop them. I'll link it below. Here's your short version for today. Respond to the present issue, not the history attached to it. The cleats are the issue. Sure, I'll bring them Saturday. Done. Keep it clear and focused on your kid. If it isn't about the children or the schedule, it probably doesn't belong in that thread. Pause before you answer when you feel that spike. Draft it if you need to. Don't send it for an hour. Set boundaries that actually protect you, one communication channel in reasonable response times. A boundary is different from avoiding everything. Avoidance means you don't deal with it. A boundary means you deal with it on terms that keep you steady. And please don't use your kids as messengers or an audience. Mia doesn't need to carry the cleat conversation or the passport conversation between two houses. One more thing. If your situation involves abuse, harassment, threats, or someone who uses every contact to control you, the advice changes. Structured or limited communication, a co-parenting app, parallel parenting, or communication that runs through professionals or the court may be the right move. Forgiveness doesn't require access and co-parenting doesn't require emotional closeness. Work with your attorney and a qualified professional on what's safe for you. The exorcism, the fun part. All right, we've walked through the whole house. Now let's do the exorcism. Five ways to stop letting your past haunt your future. One, name the ghost. Be specific. I'm haunted by my divorce. Is too big to work with. I keep replaying that night she told me she was leaving. I'm grieving the retirement we planned. I can't let go of not getting an apology. When you can name it, you can work with it. When it stays vague, it just floats around the house moving furniture. Number two, separate the memory from the meaning. Something happened. That's a memory. There's the conclusion you drew from it. I'm unlovable. I wasted 20 years. I'll never trust anyone again. That's the meaning. The memory may be fixed. The meaning isn't. Ask yourself, is this the only possible way to read what happened? Usually it isn't. Number three. Stop feeding the haunting. Ghosts need energy. Look at what you're doing that keeps feeding them. Checking their social media, rereading old texts, reopening the same argument, rehearsing the courtroom speech. And here's a finding that surprised a lot of people, including me. in a 2013 study, also from David Sparrow's team. 90 recently separated adults were assigned to one of the three writing tasks over three days. Two groups wrote deeply about their emotions and their story of their separation. A third group just wrote plainly and without emotion about how they spent their time. For the people who are already deep in trying to figure out what happened, the emotional writing actually went worse. They reported more distress months later than the people who had wrote about how they spent their days. And in that pain writing group, The people who had been searching hardest for meaning ended up doing best by the final follow-up. Now that is not journaling is bad. For lots of people and lots of situations, writing helps. The point is if you're already stuck in the why loop, more digging may not be what you need. Sometimes what helps is turning your attention towards rebuilding your actual days. Visiting a memory is fine, moving back into it is the problem. Four, reclaim the rooms in your life. Divorce leaves rooms in your life that still look like the marriage. The side of the bed, Friday nights, the holiday table, the playlist. Start redecorating literally and figuratively. A new routine, a new Friday tradition, one friend you haven't called in years, the trumpet in the attic. You don't have to change everything at once. Pick one room. Number five, make peace with an unfinished story. You may never get every answer. You may never get an apology. The other person may never see it the way you do. You can still take meaningful steps forward. An unfinished story is still a story you get to keep writing. Now it's Halloween, so give yourself a ritual, a safe one. Take a piece of paper, write down one ghost you want to stop giving so much power to. Just one sentence, not a 14-page letter. Remember the research, one sentence. Underneath it, write one action you're going to take in the next seven days, small and specific. Mute their Instagram. Call my brother about Alaska. Sign up for the Tuesday night class. Delete the question list. Then put the paper somewhere you'll see it. The fridge, the bathroom mirror, the car visor. You don't need to burn anything. You don't need to call your ex. You definitely don't need a dramatic confrontation in a parking lot. Just one sentence and one action. And to be clear, none of this is a cure for trauma or a substitute for therapy. If the haunting is constant, if it's affecting your sleep, your work, and your kids for a long stretch, that's a sign to bring in a licensed professional. Getting help isn't failure. It's strategy. And now the final ghost. It's 11:47 on a Tuesday night. Same house, same quiet. And the memory still shows up. Maybe it always will, now and then. The kitchen, the argument, the photograph from Cabo. But something's changed. You notice it, you name it. that one again. And you don't have to get up and argue. You don't have to reopen the case. You don't have to treat every memory like an order. Every regret like a verdict, and every unfinished conversation like a debt you still owe. The marriage was real, the love may have been real, the pain was real, the lessons are real, and the future is still unwritten. Maybe the goal was never to live in the house without ghosts. Maybe the goal is to remember who holds the keys. You do, you live here now. Thanks for spending part of your Halloween with me and the Conscious Divorce podcast. If this episode helped, follow or subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Leave a rating or review and share it with someone who's still living with a few ghosts of their own. If you want help with your own next chapter, go to www.reclaimandoreboot.me. You'll find coaching resources, a free 30-minute consultation, and my books U 2.0, the U 2.0 workbook, and the Co-Parenting Playbook. Divorce may be part of your story, but it doesn't have to define your future. Until next time, stay conscious, sit stay intentional, and keep moving forward and dodge those ghosts.