Latest / The Conscious Divorce / How to Stay Sober During Divorce (And Be There for Your Kids)
Transcript
- Justin Milrad: If you got sober before your marriage ended, no one warned you that the divorce could take your routine with it. The meetings you never missed, the bedtimes that happened at the same hour every night, the Sunday grocery run, the person who was in the house when you got home. All of that was doing the work you couldn't see, and now a lot of it is gone, or at least has changed. So what's at stake? Recovery feels harder than it did a year ago, and you're wondering what's wrong with you. Probably nothing is wrong with you. Something is missing from your day. And that same missing piece is what your kids are feeling from the other side of it. And here's what I want you to walk away with. The thing your children need most from you right now is the same thing your sobriety needs. You don't have to build two systems. You have to build one, and it's smaller than you think. So start here. Write down the three to five things that should happen almost every single day, no matter what your schedule looks like, no matter what your ex does, no matter what mood you wake up in. Not goals, not a wellness plan, three to five events, wake time, a recovery check-in, some kind of moment. Dinner with your kids when you have them, a bedtime that doesn't drift. That short list is an anchor list. Everything else today is how to build it, how to keep it when guilt comes for it, and what to do on the day when it isn't enough. Welcome to the Conscious Divorce Podcast. I'm Justin Millrad, certified divorce coach, financial planner, MBA, and founder of Reclaim and Reboot Transformational Coaching. I spent five years as a CEO of an outpatient mental health and addiction treatment program that I co-founded. So I've watched a lot of people try to hold a recovery together while their personal life was coming apart at the same time. And I went through my own divorce, which taught me something narrower but useful, which is how fast your day stops belonging to you. One quick boundary before we go further. I'm a coach. I'm not a physician, a therapist, or an addiction counselor. And this is for education, not treatment or legal advice. If you're in early recovery, your clinical team and your sponsor know your situation, and I don't. Take what's useful and run the rest by them. So today we're covering four things. First, why divorce makes recovery harder and why that's a structural problem more than a character problem. Second, how to build the anchor list in detail so that you're not guessing. Third, the mistake I see almost every parent in recovery make, which is dismantling their own structure out of guilt. And fourth, the bad day plan. What you write down now while you're steady so you're not improvising later. And I'll close with a short word for the other parent, if that's who's actually listening. Part one, the scaffolding you didn't know you had. Let's start why this is harder than it was, because I don't want you carrying it as a personal failure. Recovery usually gets described as an internal thing: willpower, honesty, working the steps, doing the emotional labor. All of that is real, and all of that is super important. But a large part of what keeps a person sober on an ordinary Tuesday isn't intention at all. It's environmental. It's the fact that Tuesday looked like Monday looked. You woke up at the same time. You ate at roughly the same hours. There was a meeting at seven. Someone expected you at dinner. The house had a rhythm and you were inside of it, and there were other people around you. that rhythm was doing the quiet work. It cut down the number of decisions you had to make in a day. It filled the hours that would otherwise be empty. It kept your sleep inside a narrow band. And it put you in front of other people on a schedule instead of leaving it up to how you felt that night. Now count what divorce takes out of that. Your housing changes, or your ex's does. Your kids are there half the week and gone the other half. So your evenings have two completely different shapes. Your income and expenses change, and the small logistics of your life change with them. You're managing lawyers, documents, and conversations that sometimes go badly. You're sleeping worse. And on the nights your kids are at the other house, the place is quiet in a way that it's never been quiet before. The pain is real. It's not a mood problem. That's a removal of scaffolding. And here's why it matters more in your situation than it would for someone else. Stress, poor sleep, isolation, and unpredictability are among the most consistently identified conditions. In which a return to use becomes more likely. Divorce delivers all four at once, and it delivers them for months. Not one bad weekend for a long stretch. Stress as a common trigger for return to use, is well established. Eliminate that problem. There's a second piece worth naming because it explains the timing. Sleep loss and sustained stress both degrade the front of the brain. The part that handles impulse control, patience, and thinking past the next 10 minutes. So divorce doesn't only add pressure, it quietly takes away some of the equipment you'd normally use to handle that pressure. You end up carrying more with less, and then you blame yourself for the gap. I'm not telling this to frighten you. I'm telling you this because most people in your position burn a lot of energy. On a useless question, which is why I'm struggling more than I was. The answer is usually not that your recovery got weaker. It's that the structure holding it up got removed and no one replaced it. Hence the removal of the scaffolding. Structures can be rebuilt. That's a solvable problem. Character is a much harder thing to argue with at eleven at night. Now hold that through and walk across the hall. Your children just lost the same thing. They lost the certainty of which parent is downstairs in the morning. They lost knowing where they'll sleep on any given Thursday. They lost the assumption that the schedule they had their whole life is a schedule they'll have next month. The specifics are different. The experience is identical to yours. The day stopped behaving the same way twice. You and your kids are having the same problem in different bodies at the same address with different support. Which means you're not choosing between your recovery and your parenting. That's a false choice this whole episode is built to take away from you. The routine that protects your sobriety is a routine that makes your home feel safe. Build it once and it does both jobs. Now let me put a face on it. This is a composite, so no one's private story is in here. Picture a father eighteen months sober when the marriage ends. Before the separation, his week ran itself. Meeting on Tuesday and Thursday, gym at six in the morning because his wife handled school drop off. Dinner at six thirty and bed by ten thirty. After the separation, he has his kids Wednesday through Saturday. So Tuesday's meeting is now the night he's frantically prepping the house for the kids. The gym is gone because he's the only one doing drop offs. Dinner is whenever pickup ends. Sometimes 8 15, sometimes later. And on the nights the kids are with their mom, he stops cooking at all because cooking for one feels ridiculous. So he eats standing up and goes to bed at one in the morning, scrolling through his life on his phone. Nothing dramatic has happened. He hasn't had a drink. There's been no crisis, but look at what came out of the week. The meetings, the movement, the meals, and the sleep. Four of the five things he had. He never decided to stop doing them. The schedule ate them one at a time, and the guilt made him feel like objecting would be selfish. And that's the real risk. Not one catastrophic night, a slow removal of every reliable thing, patterns, until there's nothing left in the day but obligation and adrenaline. So the work is to put a floor back under it, deliberately, in writing, and smaller than you'd expect. Let's talk about building the anchor list. Here's what I need you to understand about how this gets built. The most common mistake is going too big. Someone hears this and designs a beautiful full day system with journaling, meditation, meal prep, a workout program, and a gratitude practice. It lasts nine days, then it collapses, and the collapse becomes evidence that they can't hold anything together, which leaves them worse off as if they never started. So we're going small on purpose. Three to five anchors, not more. Things that happen almost every day that you can do in your worst week and in the best one. If it only works when the co-parenting is going smoothly, this isn't an anchor, it's just a nice idea. And one rule that governs all of them: your schedule, the behavior, not the motivation, you will not feel like doing most of these on the days you need the most. That's expected, and it isn't a reason to skip. The whole point of an anchor is that it doesn't ask you permission. are the categories to pull from. You're choosing three to five total, not all of them. number one, a consistent wake up time and consistent sleep time. People skip this because it sounds too basic to matter. It's probably the highest value item on the list. Sleep drives mood, patience, impulse control, and judgment, all of which you need more of during a divorce than you've ever needed before. Pick a wake up time you can hold on both kinds of nights. The kid nights and the empty ones. The empty nights are the ones that drift. Number two, a recovery contract that happens on a schedule, a meeting, a call with your sponsor, a therapy session, a group, whatever your version is, on a schedule, not on demand. I want to be direct about this one, because it's where the whole thing usually breaks. Do not wait until you feel unstable to use your recovery tools. That's the instinct, and it's backwards. If you only call your sponsor when you're in trouble, you've turned your support system into an emergency service, and emergency service gets called late. You want that contact to be routine so that when a hard night comes, you're calling someone you already spoke to on Sunday, not someone you've been avoiding for six weeks. Number three, movement. Not a training plan, movement. A walk counts, 20 minutes counts. This one does double duty because it's one of the few anchors that reliably discharges the physical residue of a bad legal conversation. Your body holds that conversation long after your calendar is moved on. Four, regular meals at roughly regular hours. Skipping food destabilizes mood and makes everything you're managing feel more urgent than it actually is. Hungry, angry, lonely, and tired are on every relapse prevention list ever written for a reason. And three of the four gets worse automatically during divorce. Meals are the one you can fix this week. Number five, a short evening check-in with yourself. Five minutes, not a journey ritual. Three questions. What was hard today? What did I handle well? What am I walking into tomorrow? The point is to catch a bad stretch while it's still small instead of discovering on day eleven that you've been white knuckling since day one. Now pick your three to five and write them down somewhere physical, not in your head. In your head, they're intentions. On paper, they're commitments. And there's a real difference on Wednesday when you're tired. Then do the part almost no one does. Put them on the calendar as events with times, the same way you schedule a work meeting. Anchors that live in the abstract lose to anchors that live at 645. And where you can, attach a new anchor to something that already happens. The checking goes right after you brush your teeth. The walk goes right after you drop off. You're not relying on willpower to remember. You're letting a thing you already do pull the new things along behind it. Now here's where it starts paying your kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises separated parents to keep children's routines, school, life, friendship, and everyday expectations as stable as possible during divorce and to keep children out of adult conflict. That guidance shows up across a lot of the work we do on the show. About AAP guidance. What that looks like from a kid's height is very specific. It isn't a philosophy of parenting. It's five or six concrete questions they want answered without having to ask. When am I seeing each parent? Who's picking me up? What happens after school? What time is bedtime? What are the rules in this house? That's most of it. Answer those consistently, and a child's nervous system starts to settle, even while their adults are still in the middle of something painful. A child living with an unpredictable schedule stays braced, and staying braced is expensive. Predictability is what lets them put it down. And notice how much overlap there is with your own list. Your consistent wake time creates their consistent morning. Your regular meals create a dinner they can't count on. Your bedtime discipline creates theirs. You aren't doing recovery over here and parenting over there. You're doing one thing and it happens to serve both. The line I'd hold on this is. Your kids don't need the divorce to be over. They need the day-to-day to behave the same way twice. That you can deliver starting this week without your ex's cooperation and without waiting on a judge. Part three the guilt trap. Now let's talk about the thing that will come for this structure because it will, and it doesn't arrive looking like a threat. It arrives looking like love. Here's the pattern. A parent in recovery going through a divorce is usually carrying a debt. They feel they owe their children. Maybe there were years the kids lost. Maybe there were nights they saw something they shouldn't have. Maybe the addiction was part of why the marriage ended and the parent knows it. Whatever the specifics, there's a ledger running in the background and the parent is trying to pay it down. So the parenting becomes compensatory. Saying yes to everything. Never be the one who disappoints them. Be the funhouse. Be endlessly available. Never enforce a bedtime that might start a fight. Because you've already caused enough trouble. And the first thing that gets spent to fund all of this is your own structure. The meeting gets skipped because someone wants to ride to a friend's house. Bedtime gets waived because they're having a good night and you don't want to attend. Dinner slides to nine because you're not going to be the parent who says no. Your recovery commitments become the flexible item in the budget because they're the only item without a person attached who might be upset with you. I want to say the next sentence slowly and carefully. Taking care of your recovery is not competing with taking care of your children. It's part of taking care of your children. It's not the selfish item on your list. It's the one that makes everything else on the list possible. A parent who skips their meeting to drive their kids somewhere has traded a reliable parent in three months for a convenient parent tonight. Your kids can't see that trade. You have to see it for them. Find a meeting at another time if you can't move things around. And here's the part that actually settles the guilt if you let it. What repairs a relationship with a child after a hard few years is not indulgence, it's predictability. Saying yes to everything doesn't restore trust. Being where you said you'd be over and over is what restores trust. The apology your kids are waiting for is mostly made up of showing up on time. There's a second version of this trap, and it's harder to spot, and it involves your co-parents. If your ex is angry or unpredictable or unwilling to use your history against you, there's an enormous pull to let that emotional weather set your schedule. The text at nine at night and you're up until midnight drafting a response. they change the pickup time and your whole week reshuffles around it. They imply your meetings are an excuse and you start apologizing for them. You cannot control what the other household does. You can control whether your day gets rebuilt every time your phone lights up, Which is a good moment to point you sideways for a second. We did an episode with divorce and co-parenting coach Lisa Lisser called for marriage to co-parenting, redefining your partnership after divorce. And her core distinction is that more communication is not the same as better communication. Structured beats reactive. If your ex is currently setting your calendar by text message, that episode is a practical fix and we'll link it below. What matters for today is narrower. Your anchors are not up for negotiation with someone who isn't upset with you. So let's make the anchors harder to take away. This is where you turn a routine into non-negotiables. A non-negotiable is a thing that happens even when there's a good reason it shouldn't, especially then. Write your three to five through that filter and see which one survives. Recovery check-in, especially on a hard week. Movement, even when the schedule is bad. Dinner with the kids when you have them, even when everyone is tired. A bedtime that holds even on a night that's going well. No alcohol in your house and no environment that puts you in proximity to it, regardless of who invited you. Phone down at a set hour, so a text at eleven doesn't get to ruin your night. A practical note, because I don't want you to hear non negotiables as perfect. You will miss things. A kid gets sick, a court date runs long, a flight is delayed. Missing one is a normal week. Missing the same one three times in a row is a signal, and it's worth saying out loud to your sponsor or your therapist before it becomes a pattern that you have to explain later. The difference between a slip in the schedule and a slide is whether anyone notices it in time. That's a large part of what the evening check-in is for. And here's the last piece because guilt doesn't respond well to logic. Your children will not remember whether you said yes to every report. They'll remember whether you are reliably there. Reliability is what you're buying with this structure, and it's worth more to them than any single yes you're agonizing over tonight. Part four: the bad day plan. Now, the part I want you to actually do this week: make this a non-negotiable because it's the piece almost no one has and everyone needs. I've seen it work well time and time again. Structure handles ordinary days, and ordinary days are most of them. But there will be a day that that isn't ordinary. A hearing that goes badly, a conversation with your ex that turns ugly, a holiday where your kids are at the other house and the quiet is unbearable. An anniversary you forgot was coming until it arrived. There's an old line in emergency medicine. In a crisis you don't rise to the occasion. You fall back to your preparation. What that means here is simple. A plan written on a calm afternoon is worth far more than the best thinking you can do on a bad night. Because on a bad night, your thinking is exactly the thing that's compromised. So write the plan now. Five questions, answer them on paper with names and numbers, not with categories. Number one, who do I call? Not my support system, a name, then a second name, because the first person won't always pick up. Ask them in advance so they know they're on your list. That conversation is far easier to have on a good day than at 1030 on a Friday night when things are going south. Number two, where can my kids safely go if I need help? Identify those adults now while everyone's calm. Make sure your kids know who they are and that they're allowed to call them and go to them. You're not planning for failure by doing this. It's the same reason you teach kids to cross the street at a light. Number three. What are my warning signs? Yours specifically, not a general list. And I want you to look earlier than you think. Most people write down cravings. Cravings are late. The useful signs are the ones that show up weeks before. Some people stop returning texts. Some people stop sleeping. Some get very busy and very productive right before things fall apart. Some start rehearsing arguments with their ex in the shower. Some quietly drop one anchor and don't mention it to anyone. Write down the two or three things that are actually yours. If you can't name them, ask someone who has watched you closely, because other people usually see the drift before you do. Number four, what situations do I avoid? Be concrete. Specific places, specific events, specific people, specific hours of the day. And build the substitute into the plan. Because avoid it with nothing in its place is just a gap in the evening waiting to be filled. Number five, what do I do if I feel close to return to use? This is a one people leave blank. Because writing it down feels like admitting something. Write it anyways: the immediate call, the person who comes over, your clinician's number, And know that in the United States, the nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline covers mental health and substance crises. And the SAMHSA National Helpline can connect you with treatment support immediately. Print it. Put it somewhere, you'll physically run into it. A plan on your phone is a plan you have to go looking for. And on the night you need it, you might not look. Two more things about bad days. The first is that your anchors matter more on those days, not less. The instinct is to cancel everything and get through it alone. That's backwards. The bad day is exactly when the meeting, the walk, and the ordinary dinner are doing the most work. When you can't do all of them, do the smallest version. Ten minutes outside, one phone call, cereal at the table with your kids at the normal hour. Small and on time beats, ambitious and skipped. The second is about what your kids see. You don't owe your children the adult details and they shouldn't be carrying any of them. But you can model something valuable, which is an adult who walk who notices that you're struggling and asks for help out loud. I've had a hard day. So I'm gonna take a walk and then I'll make dinner is a completely appropriate sentence to say to a nine-year-old. What they take from that isn't worry. It's a template. Adults handle hard days by doing something about them. Part five, if you're the other parent. I want to spend two minutes here because some of you listening are not the parent in recovery. You're the one co parenting with them, and you're trying to work out how much of this you're supposed to hold. The short answer is that you can support consistency without becoming responsible for another adult's sobriety. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is yours. Practically, that means keeping your boundaries clear and stated in advance instead of improvised in the moment. It means keeping your children out of adult details entirely, never putting them in a position of monitoring, reporting, or reassuring. It means having backup plans that exist before you need them. And it means watching behavior and consistency over time rather than reacting to promises, because a promise made sincerely and a plan that actually holds are two different objects. We went deep on all of that in the full episode on co-parenting when your co-parenting is struggling with addiction. Boundaries, safety planning, documentation, how to talk to your kids, and how trust gets rebuilt when recovery is real. If that's your situation, start there. There'll be a link in the notes. And one thing for both parents: what children of a parent in recovery actually needs is not a perfect parent. It's reliability, honesty. scaled to their age, calm routines, follow through, and adults who ask for help when they need it. Notice that perfection isn't on that list. Neither is a finished recovery. It's all consistency. So let me bring it all back together. Divorce didn't make your recovery weaker. It removed the structure that was quietly holding it up and your kids lost the same structure at the same time. So you rebuild one thing that serves both three to five anchors on the calendar with times attached. A consistent wake up and sleep time, a recovery contract that happens on schedule and not only in an emergency, movement, meals, a short evening check-in. You protect those anchors from guilt because guilt will tell you that skipping your meeting for your kids is love, and it isn't. It's a trade you're making on their behalf without telling them the price. And you write the bad day plan now. On a calm afternoon, who you call, where your kids can go, your warning signs, what you avoid, what you do if you feel close to the edge. Print it and put it where you'll see it. you can't control every stressful event, every conflict with your ex, or every craving. You can control whether your day behaves the same way twice. That's what protects your sobriety. And it's the exact thing your kids need most while the adults are figuring out everything else. Thank you for spending time with me today on the Conscious Divorce podcast. Here's your one step. Before the end of this week, write down your three to five anchors and your five bad day answers on paper. That's it. That single page is more protective than anything else you could do in the next seven days. And if you want help building the structure around your divorce, that's the work I do. You'll find me at www.reclaimandreboot.me, along with my books You 2.0, Divorce a Better Way Forward, the You 2.0 Workbook, and the Co-Parenting Playbook. I also offer a free 30-minute consultation. No pitch, just a real conversation about where you are and what needs to get built first. Until next time, this is Justin Molrad, reminding you that divorce isn't the end of your story. It's the moment you start writing a better one. Take care of yourself and take care of those kids.