Episode 120: One Divorce Story To Rule Them All

Welcome to the evolved caveman where men learn to be successful and happy with your host, Dr. John ER, as he shares the most impactful ideas and practices for you to get the most from your relationships, your work, and from your life. Now, here's Dr. John. Hey everybody. Welcome. This is Dr. John Schinnerer with the evolved caveman.

And today I wanted to share a part of my history that is really difficult for me to talk about my divorce. And after I share that story, I'm gonna share with you a new tool so that you can get through tough times a little bit more easily. I often feel that if I can't honestly share about my struggles in life, then who can I feel a responsibility to share some of these struggles in the hopes that you may learn from them and where possible avoid them.

I've written about my divorce before and it's always been a struggle. I don't wanna, I don't want to paint things in black and white, and yet I need to share my story, which necessarily involves others. There's a wise saying that you need to tell your stories after you've healed and not from the place of an open wound.

And after many years, I believe my story has healed enough to begin to share it more widely. So I will attempt to tell this story from as objective and factual place as possible. So let me set the context.

Back in 2000, I left my job as a school psychologist to take a rather large risk and start my own company with a brilliant colleague of mine from Cal.

We invented a method to test applicants online for Fortune 500 companies. Our approach worked quite well. With UPS, we helped reduce turnover by 33%. With that success, we began, we began expanding into other industries. For six years, we were crushing it until late 2007. Then the economy took a dive.

At that point, nobody needed pre-employment testing because no one was hiring. Everyone who had a job was highly motivated to hold onto that job, and almost overnight turnover was no longer a top problem for these companies, and our company crashed and burned. It was incredibly difficult for me to face the fact that I had to shutter the company, fire my employees, and tell family and friends their shares were now worthless.

In 2008, I became depressed and withdrew into my man cave. I felt like a failure. Perhaps you felt that anguish and embarrassment and self-judgment following a huge professional defeat.

Well, after a month or two of self-pity, frustration, and despair, I resolved to reinvent myself. I began reading studies on positive psychology.

At its simplest level, positive psych is the scientific study of happiness. On a broader level, it's the study of what makes life worth living. Ideas such as gratitude, forgiveness, self-compassion, mindfulness, healthy relationships, positive emotions, courage and meaning. And I began putting these tools into practice.

Slowly, I rediscovered my resiliency. Slowly, I began to rediscover my self-confidence, and gradually I found more contentment.

Then in 2010, my wife and I agreed to separate. She was my high school sweetheart. We had been together since the age of 17. We disagreed on a few things, how to parent our children.

We were arguing a lot, and I was frustrated over a lack of honesty with her business finances. So after unsuccessfully trying couples counseling for several years, I finally left our house with only my clothes and a laptop. Have you ever felt that deep sorrow with the accompanying thoughts of failure after a breakup?

I felt like a failure as a man, a failure as a husband, and a failure as a father. I felt them daily for half a year. After moving out, I lived with my parents for 12 months so I could share everything that I earned with my family, simply because I thought it was the right thing to do. After a year, I had to stop so I could afford a place to stay on my own.

My wife earned quite a bit more than me, so I figured giving her all I made for a year was kind and generous. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for her. She had an expectation, I believe, of getting paid. She began litigation as soon as I stopped paying her, and the litigation dragged on painfully for three and a half years.

It was hell. Not only did she serve papers on me, she served papers on my elderly parents and dragged them into litigation in an attempt to get at some of their money.

As they got their own lawyer, I remember thinking, I've never heard of such a thing. My parents had known her for over 25 years, and they had been nothing but kind to her and now they were heartbroken. The paperwork filed by her and entered into the courts was filled with falsehoods. She under reported her income by a hundred thousand dollars.

She inflated her business expenses by more than 50. She refused to acknowledge the voluntary support that I'd given her the first year. Have you ever felt that anger that follows on the heels of betrayal by a loved one and you wonder why I teach anger management because I needed the tools to date the litigation has cost more than $300,000 of money.

We didn't have. At one point she even tried to destroy key evidence by turning over her annual appointment book, floating in a Ziploc bag of liquid chemicals. She said she just found it there. Her lawyer and her left it sitting in this bag of liquid for three months. And as a result of such dishonesty, my ex-wife lost nearly every major legal point in court.

By the end of litigation, a female judge ordered her to pay one third of my legal fees. $50,000. The amount awarded was five times what my lawyer had ever seen in 20 years of practicing law. So I did feel some small sense of vindication. Unfortunately, relationships in the family were damaged, chronic stress negatively impacted everyone involved and our children suffered.

The contentious divorce affected my youngest son the most. In 2015, he was living with me after being kicked out by his mother. He had struggled on several levels, and in early 2015 on my youngest daughter's birthday, he came at me in sort of a drug fueled episode, drug related. Anyway, I was trying to take his phone away as a consequence.

He wanted his phone and he stuck his thumb in my right eye, resulting in a 90% tear of my right retina. I had to have emergency retinal surgery and two subsequent surgeries to save my eye. After each of the first two surgeries, I had to lie face down, looking at the floor for a week, even after the surgeries, my eye is permanently damaged and I will never regain full sight.

Shortly after this, my son returned to a 50 50 custody arrangement, spending half of his time at his mother's house. This continued for about three weeks, when all of a sudden I just lost track of him, he disappeared. I started emailing my ex-wife asking where he was, and she refused to answer for over two months.

It turns out she had sent him outta state to her parents' house. I had to file a police report just to find out where he was, and I hope that none of you ever have to endure parental abduction because it is a nightmare. Now, I share all this with you, not for pity, but as a reminder that every one of us suffers.

Life can be cruel, difficult, and yet we are bound together by our suffering. Anytime you are suffering, you can be confident that millions of other people in this world have suffered the same painful emotions, often for similar reasons. And the suffering brings us together. It binds us. It is our shared humanity.

It brings us closer and in our joint suffering, we are no longer alone because others suffer with us alongside us.

Over the past decade, I have taught over 10,000 people anger management skills. I needed every one of those tools that I teach in order to deal with these difficult circumstances. And by practicing these skills, I was able to remain mostly calm and focused, and it served me incredibly well.

So in contrast to these serious challenges which I've laid out here, I also was able to accomplish some things of which I'm quite proud. So let me share a few of these accomplishments with you to contrast with the struggles. So while dealing with the things I've just mentioned, I served as an expert consultant to Pixar on an Academy Award-winning film.

Inside out, I gave a psychiatric grand rounds presentation to Kaiser on positive psychology in clinical practice. I constructed a website, web anger management.com, to teach scientifically proven tools to people to turn down the volume on anger. I created an online anxiety management course. I created a positive psychology course to help people get more engaged in life and become happier.

I've spoken to more than 50 groups on topics such as positive psychology, anger management, the mindset for success, self-compassion, and more. I've supported hundreds of clients and their families through their challenges, and I've been featured in national media, including a documentary called Skewed.

Readers Digest, US News and World Report and Self Magazine. And perhaps most importantly, I found a woman who is the love of my life. We've been together for three and a half years. She's a therapist. She speaks my language, she feeds my soul. We have traveled together to Thailand, Chicago, Paris, Barcelona, and Cancun, and I gotta tell you, it's an amazing feeling to be accepted, encouraged, supported, and loved unconditionally.

So why am I proud? Because none of this was easy. I had to work claw and scratch for it. You see, I was able to accomplish these things while my personal life was in tatters, largely for reasons which were out of my control. Without the tools I teach to others, I would not have been able to produce and help others at these levels.

Hell, I wouldn't have been able to get outta bed. So I share my story with you to demonstrate that everyone suffers challenges in life. It's the nature of life that good and bad come to all of us at times. The trick is to learn to be resilient and bounce back from adversity that life places in front of us, to focus your mind on what's going right in your life rather than what's going wrong.

To remind yourself that despite the challenges around you, you can deal with them.

It's a startling testimony to the power of positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness that I was able to continue working at a high level for the past several years. And in this podcast, I'd like to share these tools with you because they are of immense benefit to everyone.

So the tool I'd like to share with you today is called Radical Acceptance.

And it's a tool that I leaned on the most heavily during litigation when I was hit by intense negative emotions such as anxiety, stress, and anger.

So improving your ability to tolerate intense negative emotions begins with altering your attitude. This exercise involves learning a new way of looking at the world, one which helps turn down the volume on intense anger and anxiety. When anger arises, it's highly uncomfortable. The more you fight against it, the worse your suffering becomes.

What's more, when you become angry, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to see things as they truly are. Negative emotions arise and fuel negative thoughts and interpretations. When you get angry and begin thinking about how a particular incident should not have happened, you missed the fact that it did happen.

Now you gotta find ways to move past it. Those self criticisms, the blame, the judgments, they just keep you from making constructive progress towards accepting the situation, making peace with it, and improving your life. Here's the key. Changing the past is impossible. The more you struggle against the past, the more you get stuck in it.

Let me repeat that. Changing the past. Impossible. The more you struggle against your past, the more you get stuck in it. So what are your options? Well, if staying stuck in anger doesn't change the past, what else is there? The alternative involves radical acceptance, which means allowing the present moment to be just as it is, without judgment, without criticism of the event.

Without criticism of your own action or inaction, rather, the goal is to accept that the current situation exists because of a long chain of decisions and events that reach far back into the past. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine was stuck in a low paying job. His anxiety was keeping him locked in the job as he was unable to perform well in job interviews.

In addition, he was angry about his inability to move jobs. He was even angry at his own anxiety. The anger and anxiety he felt was adversely impacting his relationships with his wife and kids, and they were negatively affecting his relationships at work. However, his job status was a result of many decisions and events that occurred over many years.

He took a low level sales job coming outta college because the economy was tight. Jobs were scarce, and he was anxious. He wouldn't be able to find another job at that time. In the beginning, he enjoyed working for this company after two years, however, there was no opportunity for advancement. Now the company's undergoing difficult financial times and layoffs are looming.

This causes great stress and anxiety for everyone in the company. So to deal with his stress and anxiety, he tried this exercise and was able to calm himself and eventually find a new job. Now, this chain of events happen regardless of how he feels about it. Denying the chain of events does not change the past, and being stuck in anger or anxiety doesn't help either.

Radical acceptance suggests looking at yourself and the events around you as they truly are. Radical acceptance does not mean you approve of what happened to you in the past. It does not mean you approve of the negative actions of others or even your own negative behaviors. Radical acceptance does mean that you stop trying to change the past and stop being paralyzed by anger and anxiety.

It means stop blaming others for where you are now and take radical responsibility for your lot in life. The goal is to focus your energies on what you can do now in the present moment to improve your life.

So here's the crux of the exercise. I'm going to read about 10 or 12 statements. You identify three or four that resonate with you, and then write 'em down on a three by five card and put that three by five card someplace that you'll see it routinely.

Your wallet, your purse, your bedroom wall, and then refer to it whenever you start to get overwhelmed by a negative emotion. Okay, here are the statements. This is just how it has to be right now. This is just how it has to be right now. All my decisions have led up to right now all my decisions have led up to right now.

There is no use fighting the past. There is no use. Fighting the past. Fighting the past only blinds me to the present. Fighting the past only blinds me to the present. This is one of my favorites. The present moment is perfect, just as it is. The present moment is perfect, just as it is. The present is the only moment over which I have control.

The present is the only moment over which I have control. It's a waste of time and energy to fight what's already happened. It's a waste of time and energy to fight what's already happened. And this was a, this is another favorite of mine. The present moment is fine, even if it's painful, and you can change that last word.

The present moment is fine, even if it's annoying, terrifying, hard, uncomfortable. The present moment is fine, even if it's painful, even if it sucks. The present moment is fine, even if it's sucks ass. Alright? I think you get the idea the moment. This moment is exactly the way it should be given what's taken place before it.

This moment is exactly the way it should be given what's taken place before it. The present moment is a result of millions of other tiny decisions. The present moment's, a result of millions of other tiny decisions. I can't change the past. I can't change the past. The best I can do is manage myself right here, right now.

The best I can do is manage myself right here, right now. This was another one that I wrote down. Breathe deeply. Focus on your exhale. Exhale out longer than you. Inhale, breathe deeply. Focus on the exhale. I can deal with this. I can handle this. I got this. I can deal with this. I can handle this. I got this.

The last one, this won't matter in five years. This is not a matter of life or death. This won't matter in five years. This is not a matter of life and life or death. And that one gives you perspective.

Alright, so that's it for this episode. So I went over my divorce story. I appreciate you listening to that.

That was a little bit tough to get through. And then I shared with you a new tool, radical Acceptance. So I hope this has been useful to you. Until next time, this is Dr. John at the evolved caveman signing off. Thank you for listening to the Evolved Caveman podcast. If you like what you've heard, support us by subscribing, leaving reviews, and sharing the podcast with friends and colleagues.

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