Latest / The Conscious Divorce / Grief, Divorce… and the Moment That Brought Me Clarity
Transcript
- Justin: I wanna start this episode a little different than I normally do. No big setup, no stats, no welcome back right off the top. Just this. My mother passed away last week. Her name was Elaine and she was really someone incredible. Warm, funny, the kind of woman who made everyone in the room feel like they were her favorite person. And losing her, even when you know it's coming, even when you've had the time to prepare. It still knocks the breath right out of you. I still miss her terribly. In the days that followed, I was surrounded by family, by friends, by people who loved me, and I was grateful for all of it. My fiance was extraordinary during that week. She was a person by my side, holding things together and helping coordinate logistics, making sure my two eldest kids could be at the funeral in Toronto. She did it with grace without hesitation. And I would not have gotten through that week the way I did without her. But there was also something that happened from a direction I genuinely wasn't sure about. It came from my ex-wife. And today, I wanna talk about that. Not to put her up on a pedestal, not to rewrite our history, but because what she chose to do in that moment, choosing to step up when it mattered most is exactly the kind of thing I want to talk about on the show today. and I think there's something every person listening needs to hear. It reminded me of something about what it really means to be a co-parent. about what it looks like when two people, regardless of what went down between them, decided to put the kids in front of the history, and about what it means for those kids when they actually see that play out. So stay with me today. This one's personal, and I think it might be exactly what you need. Welcome to the Conscious Divorce Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Milrad, certified divorce coach, MBA, financial planner, and founder of Reclaim and Reboot Transformational Divorce Coaching. And someone who's been in the trenches of this work long enough to know that divorce is never just a legal event, it's a human one. The show exists for one reason, to help you get through one of the hardest things a person can go through with more clarity, more self-awareness, and a whole lot less unnecessary damage. We talk about the emotional stuff, the co-parenting stuff, the identity stuff, the parts of divorce that no one gives you a roadmap for. If you're new here, welcome. I'm glad you found us. If you've been listening for a while, you know this is a space where we go deep and we tell the truth. Today is no exception. Before we get into it, a quick word. Everything I share on this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. I'm a divorce coach, not a therapist, not a lawyer, not a licensed mental health professional. Nothing in this episode is a substitute for professional, legal, financial, or mental health advice. That said, I do believe that the kind of honest human conversations we have here can be genuinely valuable. So take what resonates, leave what doesn't, and please reach out to qualified professionals for anything that requires it. All right, let's get into it. So my mom died last week. I don't know fully how to say that out loud yet without feeling strange because she's been part of every version of my life I've ever known. She was there when I was growing up in Toronto. She was there through all the chapters, the good ones and the hard ones. And she was someone who even when she disagreed with my choices, you always knew her love was just underneath the surface and ready. When you lose a parent, something inside you shifts. It's not just grief, it's a kind of reckoning. Like a part of the scaffolding you didn't even know was holding you up, just quietly disappears. And you have to figure out how to stand without it. I have kids and my kids lost their grandmother. And in the middle of all that, there were things that needed to happen. School pickups and drop-offs, activities, travel logistics for the funeral. My youngest wasn't going to be at the service in Toronto, which meant someone needed to be with her. There were calls to make, people to inform about a hundred small things that felt enormous. And my ex-wife stepped into all of it. She coordinated the kids' schedules. She helped manage the communication around who needed to know what. She was there for my daughter when she didn't come to the funeral. She helped make the travel piece work when it could have genuinely been chaotic. And here's the thing, our divorce was not simple. It was not easy. There was real deep pain in that relationship and in how it ended. There is history there. And I think anyone who's been through a difficult divorce knows exactly what I mean when I say that the scar tissue of a bad ending does not just disappear. It stays. It changes the dynamic. It shapes how you interact for years afterwards. She did not have to show up the way she showed up, but she did. And I wanna be clear about what that actually meant. Practically it meant I could be fully present with my family during the hardest part. I didn't have to divide my attention between grief and logistics. I could be a son, a brother, a father without also running point on everything else. That mattered more than I can explain easily. And beyond the logistics, there was something else. Our kids got to witness their mom stepping up for their dad during this hard week. They didn't need it to explain to them. They just saw it. That's co-parenting, not the scheduling app, not the shared calendar, the actual thing in real life when it counts. I thought about this a lot over the past few days and why her showing up hit me as hard as it did. And I think it's because at some level after a complicated divorce, you stop expecting that. You get used to operating in parallel. You get used to a world where your co-parent is someone you coordinate with, not someone who has your back. And when suddenly they have your back, when you weren't braced for it, it cracks something open in a good way. what does this actually teach us? I've turning this question over for days and a few things have become clearer to me. The first is this. There's a version of co-parenting that is technically functional, and there's a version of co-parenting that is genuinely humane. They are not the same thing. You can do all the logistics right. You can have a solid custody schedule. You can show up on time. You can be polite, and you can still be operating at a level that is fundamentally transactional, where the co-parent is basically just a business partner you happen to share children with. That's fine. It works. It's miles better than active conflict. but there is level. And it's the level where you recognize that a person you once loved, the person you built a family with is still a human being. and when that human being loses their mother or gets sick or goes through something devastating, you have a choice. You can stay in the transactional lane where you can cross the line briefly, gently into something more human. What my ex-wife did was cross that line. And the most important signal it sent wasn't to me, it was to our kids. It showed them that this is what we do when things get hard. The second thing this brought up for me is about ego. Because I want to be honest here. Showing up for an ex, especially after a painful divorce, requires you to do something really hard. It requires you to set your own ego down for a moment. Ego says, why would I help them? Ego says, They don't deserve my energy. Ego says, that's not my problem anymore. And look, I understand those thoughts. They are real. They come from real wounds. But ego, in this context, does not serve you. It doesn't serve your kids, and it doesn't build a kind of long-term co-parenting foundation that actually makes life better for everyone involved. The third thing is simpler. People remember how you showed up at the hardest moments. Full stop. My kids are going to grow up knowing that their mother was there when their dad lost his mom. That is going to live in them. That's part of the story of who their parents are. And that story either builds their sense of security and trust in the world or it chips away at it. What happened last week built something. I felt it. Now I want to step back from the personal story for a few minutes and look at what the research actually tells us about this. because what my ex-wife did was not just a nice thing. It was, as it turns out, deeply consistent with what behavioral scientists and psychologists have been telling us for years about post-divorce relationships and child development. Let's start with co-parenting quality and child outcomes, because this is the big one. There's a mountain of research showing that how two parents relate to each other after divorce is one of the strongest predictors of how well children do academically, emotionally, and socially. We're not talking about whether parents are present. We're talking about the quality of the relationship between the parents. Even if the children are physically with both parents, if those parents are in ongoing conflict or coldness or emotional hostility, kids feel it. They absorb it. affects their nervous system, ⁓ sense of safety, ⁓ ability to form healthy relationships later in life. Conversely, when divorced parents demonstrate cooperation, flexibility and basic human care for each other, children's stress hormones literally decrease. Their sense of security goes up. They're less likely to carry their emotional weight of their parents' divorce into their adult lives. So this is not just about being a good person. This is about what the sign says is protective for your kids. The next piece of the puzzle is pro-social behavior and what happens to it under stress. Psychologists use the term pro-social behavior to describe actions that benefit others, helping, comforting, cooperating without a direct reward for that person doing it. And one of the most consistent findings in social psychology is that pro-social behavior is contagious. When we witness or experience someone acting with genuine care, it activates something in us. It raises what researchers call moral elevation, which is basically the emotional state of being inspired by another person's goodness. moral evaluation study after study has shown increases the likelihood that we ourselves will act with greater generosity and kindness. In other words, when your ex does something genuinely kind, it changes the whole emotional weather of your co-parenting relationship. It makes it more likely that you will respond in kind. that the next interaction will be slightly warmer and the one after that. This is the ripple effect and it is real and documented. Now let's talk about empathy and emotional maturity in post-divorce relationships. One of the most interesting areas of research in the past decade has been around what some psychologists call post-traumatic growth, which is the phenomenon where people are going through deeply painful experiences, actually develop greater capacity for empathy, perspective taking, and compassion, not despite the hardship, but partly because of it. Divorce handled with intention can be one of those experiences. I believe this in my bones. I've seen it happen with clients. I felt it in my own life. And the research on what they call co-parenting alliance is consistent. The divorced parents who developed the best long-term co-parenting relationships are almost always the ones who made a deliberate choice at some point to see each other as human beings first and as adversaries second, or not as adversaries at all. This is not naive. This is not pretending the pain didn't happen. This is a sophisticated emotional and psychological decision that pays compounding dividends over time. Finally, let's talk about what happens in our brains when we choose compassion over resentment, because this is fascinating. Neuroscientists who study emotional regulation have found that when we deliberately activate compassion, including compassion for people who have hurt us, it decreases activity in the areas of the brain associated with threat and defensiveness, and it increases activity in the areas associated with reward and connection. Basically, choosing to be compassionate feels neurologically like the opposite of being afraid. And that matters enormously when you're trying to navigate a difficult co-parenting relationship. Because so much of what goes wrong in those relationships is driven by threat response that becomes habitual. When you choose to show up for your ex during a hard moment, you are training your own brain towards a different pattern. You are literally building new neural pathways. My ex-wife, whether she knew the neuroscience or not, did exactly that last week. I want to spend a few minutes on the flip side because I think it's important to name it. What would have happened if she hadn't shown up the way she did? Let's be concrete. I would have had to divide my attention during one of the most emotionally demanding weeks of my life between grief and logistics. My kids would have picked up on that division. They would have sensed the lack of coordination. They would have felt the absence of that particular kind of security. and something else would have happened too, subtler, but maybe even more damaging. The story in my head about the co-parenting relationship would have calcified a little more. It would have confirmed whatever narrative I was already carrying. the hardened, resentment fed story would have made every future interaction harder, more loaded. I see this pattern constantly with clients. The co-parent who refuses to adjust a schedule for a special occasion. The co-parent who doesn't reach out when the other parent loses the job or goes through a health scare. The co-parent who, when given an opportunity to demonstrate basic human decency, chooses instead to stay firmly behind the wall of their grievances. And what happens is that that wall gets higher and the kids live in the shadow of that wall. I want to be clear, I'm not making a moral judgment here. I know how much pain can exist behind that wall. I know that for many people, protecting themselves from further hurt by keeping that wall up has felt absolutely necessary. And sometimes it is. I'm not saying everyone has to be best friends with their ex. I'm not saying you have to put yourself in harm's way emotionally, but there is a difference between healthy boundaries and bitterness. And bitterness is expensive. It costs you energy, your need for your own healing. It costs your kids a model of how adults navigate difficulty with grace. and it costs the co-parenting relationship something it may never fully recover from. The research is actually pretty sobering. Studies that track divorce families over 10 to 15 years constantly find that children who grew up in high conflict or high distance post-divorce households have significantly higher rates of anxiety, depression, and difficulty forming trusting relationships in their adult lives compared to children whose parents managed to build some degree of warmth and cooperation. That's not to scare you. That's to show you that this is not abstract. How you choose to show up or not show up with your co-parent during their hard moment is actively shaping your children's future every single time. OK, so here's where we get practical. Because I know some of you are sitting with this and thinking that all sounds great in theory, Justin, but you don't know my ex. You don't know what we've been through. You don't know how complicated this is. And you're right. I don't. But I do know that showing up for an ex during a hard moment does not require you to pretend that history didn't happen. it does not require you to feel warmth you don't feel. And it does not require you to abandon the boundaries that are keeping you healthy. Here's how I think about it. First, decide what kind of person you want to be independent of what your ex does. This is the foundation. The question isn't does my ex deserve my help? The question is who do I want to be in this situation? And when you frame it that way, the ego drops away a little bit because it's no longer about them. It's about you. It's about the character you're building. It's about the stories your kids are going to tell about who their parents were. Second, show up in proportion to the situation and within your own limits. there's a spectrum here. On one end, you have a quick text that says, I heard, I'm so sorry. Let me know if there's anything I can do with the kids this week. On the other end, you have what my ex-wife did, which was to actively step into the logistics and help carry the load. Both of those ⁓ are acts showing up. Neither requires you to reopen old wounds. You get to choose a level. The rule of thumb I give clients is to do this. ⁓ Do what you can from a place of genuine care without it costing you more than you have to give right now. Push to the edge of your capacity, but not past it, because showing up from a depleted, resentful place doesn't serve anyone. Showing up from a place of grounded compassion, even briefly, even imperfectly does. Third, separate the person from the story. This is hard. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. When you've been hurt by someone, it can feel almost impossible to see them in the moment, separate from everything else that came But a practice that I find genuinely useful. Try to see that person in front of you or the situation in front of you as if you were meeting them as a stranger, a stranger who's going through something hard. What would you naturally want to do for a stranger in that situation? Most of us, if we're honest, would want to help because at our core, human beings are wired for empathy. The hard work is clearing away the scar tissue long enough to let that empathy operate. Fourth, focus on what this does for your kids. When in doubt, go back to the kids. Your children are watching. They are always watching. And they don't need you to love your ex. They don't need you to be friends. They just need you to be decent, to be human, to show them that even in the aftermath of something painful, adults can still treat each other with basic dignity. That is one of the most important things you will ever teach them. Fifth, say something, even if it's small. Sometimes the showing up is just words, a text, an email, a voicemail. Something that says, I know you're going through something hard and I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice. The gesture doesn't have to be grand, it just has to be real. and the note on boundaries, because I know this question is going to come up. Yes, you can show up ⁓ and have boundaries. are not mutually exclusive. Showing up for an ex during a crisis does not mean opening the door to old patterns. It doesn't mean blurring lines that are important for both of you. It means making a specific, bounded, intentional gesture of human care and then returning to your own life. That's it. Clean in, clean out. I want to talk about something I think gets underestimated in these conversations, and that's the idea of precedent. In law, a precedent is a decision that sets a standard for how similar cases will be handled going forward. And I think this concept applies in an almost uncanny way to co-parenting relationships. Every significant interaction you have with your co-parent, for good or for bad, sets a precedent. It says something about what is possible in this relationship. It creates a reference point that both of you can carry forward consciously or not. When my ex-wife stepped up last week, she created a precedent, not a dramatic one, not a tear reconciliation. She just did what needed to be done and at the right moment without making it about anything other than the kids in the situation. And that becomes a new reference point. And that precedent matters. Not because it erases anything that came before, but because the next time there is a hard moment, both of us are going to have the memory of this one. We're going to know it is We're going to have a reference point that says, we can be better than the worst version of ourselves in this. This is how relationships, even complicated post-divorce co-parenting relationships, actually change over time. Not through grand gestures or big conversations, through small accumulated moments of choosing to be a little more human than you had to be. Moment by moment, choice by choice. That's how trust is rebuilt. That's how the dynamic shifts. That's how your kids end up with a story about their parents that they can actually be proud of. Think about it this way, every co-parenting relationship has a kind of emotional bank account. Every act of cooperation, every moment of grace, every time you set your own grievance aside and choose to show up goes into that account. And every time you have a chance to make a deposit and don't, a small withdrawal happens instead. Maybe it's invisible, maybe none of the review even notices in that moment, but it accumulates. What my ex-wife made last week was a significant deposit and I want her to know and I want everyone listening to know that those deposits compound. I'm going to close with something that I've been sitting with all week. My mom was not a complicated person about love. She just loved. She loved fully and she showed it. And she didn't make you earn it or wonder if it was real. It was just there. Reliable, warmly, completely there. One of the things I find myself thinking about is, what would you have made of all of this? Of the ways people hurt each other during divorce and have to figure out how to keep showing up anyways. of the scar tissues and the walls that the hurt feelings that make it so hard to just be human with each other. I think she would have kept it simple. She would have said, just be good to each other. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. And I know it's more complicated than that. I know there are people listening right now who are carrying wounds that make words, just be good to each other, feel almost laughable. I know how hard this is. I live in this world. But I also know this, the moments when we choose to be good to each other, even when it costs us something, even when it's inconvenient, even when we have every reason not to, those are the moments that define us. Those are the moments our children remember. Those are the moments that changed the story. My ex-wife did the right thing last week. Not because she had to, not because anyone was watching, because that's what this is supposed to look like. And I noticed, and our kids noticed, and that And you are in a co-parent situation right now, if your ex is going through something hard, if there is a moment in front of you to show up in some way, even a small way, I'm asking you to consider taking it. Not for them, not even for yourself, for your kids, For the story, you want all of you to be living in 10 years. That's what this week taught me. I miss my mom terribly. I'm carrying her with me. I think she'd be glad I'm telling you this story. Before I let you go today, here's a few things. If this episode landed with you, if it hits something real, please share it. Send it to someone who's going through a divorce. Send it to someone in a difficult co-parenting situation. Send it to someone who lost a parent and is figuring out how to hold all of it together. You never know who is sitting on the other side of that chair, quietly needing to hear exactly this. If you haven't already, please follow or subscribe to The Conscious Divorce wherever you listen. It takes about three seconds and it genuinely is one of the most meaningful things you can do to help this show reach more people who need it. Every follow tells the platform. Put this in front of someone else who is having a hard time navigating divorce. That matters, so thank you. I've also written two books that go deep on this work. The first is You 2.0 Divorce, A Better Way Forward, and the second is The You 2.0 Workbook. Both are available on Amazon. If you're in the middle of this jury and you want more than a podcast, something you can sit with, write in and actually work through those books were built for exactly that. If you want to work together directly, this is what I do. reclaim and reboot divorce coaching. I work with people who are ready to stop just surviving their divorce and start building something better on the other side of it. Whether that's co-parenting, identity, finances, clarity, whatever piece that's keeping you stuck, that's where we go. You can find everything at www.reclaimandreboot.me. You can also reach me directly at justin at reclaimandreboot.me. Come say hello. I'm Justin Milrad. Thanks for trusting me with your time today. And thank you for letting me share something very personal with you. Take good care of yourselves, take care of your kids, and I'll see you on the next one.