Look After Yourself During a Divorce
Have you ever flown on an airplane, and heard the flight attendant tell you that it’s critical that, should the oxygen masks drop down, you always fix your own mask to your face before you attempt to help your children do the same? Have you ever wondered how they could ever expect a parent to follow those instructions?
The answer is simple: when an airplane suffers a massive depressurization, it literally sucks the air out of your lungs. You can’t breathe, and you have maybe a dozen seconds before you pass out. That kind of emergency causes children to go absolutely berserk, and it’s almost impossible to get their masks on within those dozen seconds. The result: both parent and child pass out, and someone nearby has to rescue them.
But when the parent responds by attending to their own mask first, they’re no longer in danger. Once they can breathe, they’re much more likely to be able to calmly get their child’s mask on. In the worst case scenario, the child stops being frantic because they pass out — and the parent then slips the mask on their unconscious child, who begins breathing normally and is almost always unharmed. The parent and the child are both frightened — often enormously so — but both are safe.
Divorce Is Like That
While there are obvious ways in which the metaphor fails, the truth is that divorce is, in many ways, like an explosive decompression on an airplane. The sudden changes, the eruption of long-contained pressures, the exposure to sudden fear and uncertainty…there are a lot of similarities. Among them is the fact that a parent who neglects their own emotional and mental health in favor of trying to keep their children ‘safe’ are destined to end up failing to help their children and end up worse of themselves.
The reasons are much the same, too: children are going to act out during a divorce. There’s no force on Earth that can make your children act like everything is OK when it’s clearly not, and trying to make them is just going to exhaust you to no useful end. You’ve got enough on your plate dealing with your spouse and the court — focus on your own mental and emotional health first. Once you’re operating from a stable, balanced, competent place, you can help your children achieve the same kind of peace that you have; until then, you’re only going to make things worse by neglecting yourself.
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