Reclaim your Identity

I believe that your identity is what makes you who you are — your sense of self, your continuity in personality. Your identity in divorce and in a child custody battle, though, is one of the most difficult things to maintain. How do you maintain your identity when your children are being literally ripped from your life? For starters, you don’t let them steal your life. It’s difficult to be yourself when you're afraid of losing your children and when everyone else is picking on everything you do and everything about you.

So how do you maintain your identity when there is so much at stake here, when you could lose your child at the whim of an evaluator and a judge? You continue to be you and make the decisions that are right for you. It’s tough to do that when you’re being told that your rights to your child depend on convincing someone else to like you. If you don’t continue to be you, your kids will no longer recognize you, and your friends won’t recognize you. I’ve seen people end up on disability, with terminal illnesses, and even lose their mind. Your identity is what makes you unique. I know it's tough to think about your identity when your relationship with the other parent has fallen apart. That’s tough to do when you are told that thinking about what’s right for you isn’t putting your child first.

You have to trust yourself. And we like to use this example: if you're on an airplane, you are told to put that oxygen mask on you first. Why? Because that way you don't pass out, and you are there to help your child. Well, divorce and child custody battles are very similar to that. You have to maintain your life in order to continue to help get it back in order — to help restore it to where you want it to be. So you are going to have to be true to yourself, or you not only become foreign to yourself but also to everyone else around you, including your children. And you have to start reminding yourself to be you.

When you maintain that identity, your resolve will stay strong, and your decisions will reflect this too. Sure, I was missing my children, and I'm sure you're missing yours too, but regardless, you have to get up every day, look in that mirror and smile, and say: "Today I am going to accomplish something." This doesn't mean you're going to get your way, because you don't always control it. In fact, most of the time you don't control it. But being unhappy and depressed isn't going to get you where you need to go.

I know that most people think that things start to go wrong when they fail to mold themselves to the standards that someone else laid out for them. But that’s not true. Trying to live up to other people's standards and expectations, I think most of you know, is never really a good idea and rarely ever turns out well. So unless you're someone that just really steered off on the wrong path in life — and that probably isn't most of you that are watching this. But even they turn their lives around, not necessarily because somebody else forced them to, but because they decided or they found their true identity. So it's not true that things are going bad because you didn't do it somebody else's way. Maybe it's going bad because you're not staying true to you. Things start to go terribly wrong when you try to adopt other people's ideas and expectations for you, when you try to live up to their standards.

You set yourself up for failure. First they attack you by getting you to worry about doing things wrong. Then in divorce and child custody, you hire people that tell you to change all sorts of things about you. They try to get you to portray an image of a perfect person so that nobody else sees your flaws. You end up spending all your time worrying about these flaws — some of the very things that made you unique to you, your friends, your family, and your child. You start questioning whether or not you should have this boyfriend or that boyfriend, or whether or not you should continue your education or work more or less, because they might not look too highly upon those decisions. You stop living. All that made you unique now is being squeezed out of you and you are being suffocated. You make excuses that they are stealing your children and you cannot live. You start putting tremendous pressure on yourself to get them to give in and give you back your children. Congratulations, you've now stressed yourself out. You get anxious. You get depressed. The whole cycle is downhill from there, where nobody knows who you are anymore... not even you.

How do you maintain your identity when your children are such a huge part of that identity and now they're being ripped from you? You don’t let disappointment stop you. When they threaten you or bully you, you don’t let that keep you down or paralyze you.

What does your identity do for you, you might ask? Well let me tell you: your identity helps you maintain continuity and security. You can let yourself feel the emotions, get through the shock and frustration, and get through it by reminding yourself that you're not always in control of all those things. Maintaining your identity keeps your kids secure too. Have you ever wondered what keeps families in poverty so tightly knit and they seem so happy even when they don’t have anything? You might recall the family in Scrooge with Tiny Tim and how happy they were even when they barely could feed the family, even when they knew that they couldn't afford the surgery to keep Tiny Tim alive. And the Waltons during the depression age — they always seemed to find a way to find something good. What kept them feeling secure when the world around them was falling apart was that the adults remained themselves — they remained true to their identity. When people don’t maintain this, you see everything fall apart temporarily maybe, maybe permanently. But everything starts to go terribly wrong until they find themselves again.

So what do you do when you are under the tremendous stress of a divorce? You do your best. You remind yourself that you are not going to leave the same tyranny or problems to your children. You are going to give them the most important thing in life, and that is freedom from abuse of power by not giving in and leaving that same legacy of these family courts that you are fighting now to them, and by not losing yourself. You continue to be proud of who you are no matter what you are going through. Remember to celebrate the little accomplishments — making it through a hearing can feel way more like a beating than a success. But after that hearing, you need to remind yourself that you made it through that hearing, and that's a huge accomplishment. It's so difficult to do to get past that fear and anxiety and make it through. So celebrate making it through that hearing. Reward yourself for doing your best and bravely fighting through the anxiety and the fear. Recognize the small accomplishments you make every day.

So who are you betraying when you lose your identity? Yourself and your child. This cycle of betrayal is counterintuitive to your identity. Your identity has to come out and it has to shine for this to work. We don’t live in a sterile world, and neither should you. When part of your identity is stripped away when they strip your children from you — you cannot allow yourself to lose your internal identity, your sense of self. It is this sense of self that will help you smile in the mirror the next day, and continue to be that strength and conviction you need to keep, and tell yourself you need to keep going. Remind yourself that they cannot tear you away from who you are. You will keep going. You will miss your children every day, but they will miss you more if you become a stranger to them.

You may not be able to control everything. But you can control how you respond to things. You can control whether you will feel helpless, hopeless, or empowered. When you’re going through divorce you get distracted a lot. It is scary and confusing. You have so many unknowns thrown at you. But when you understand this process more, you are less afraid. If you could spend less time wondering and wandering around trying to figure out what it is you need to know, you won’t lose major portions of your day worrying and distracted. You won't waste that energy. This won’t be as traumatic. You won’t lose your focus of who you are. You won't have to wonder where your decisions might take you. This will give you strength.

When you are made to feel helpless, you might not recognize yourself. I remember thinking, "I’ve never felt helpless in my life before. Oh my gosh, what is this?" Everything felt so out of control. But you cannot let yourself start dwelling on this or wondering: "How can they do this to me? How did this happen? Why are they doing this?" If you catch yourself constantly dwelling on those questions, the doubt creeps in and then a feeling of hopelessness. And even if you’ve never felt hopelessness before, you’ll recognize it. And before you know it, your entire days can become consumed with sadness and frustration. You get depressed and anxious. Some people never recover from this.

Being yourself maintains your continuity and security for not only you, but everyone else in your life around you as well. Start living like who you want to be today. Start living every day. And don’t let anyone take that away from you — not anyone. You can stop being confused with what to do by knowing what empowers you. By shining a light on what is happening, by knowing where you are going, by setting your mind that you can take anything. You have to. Your children and your love for them is that strong. You will be happy for this and you will find that no matter what happens you can get through it because you never lost who you are.

You will stay healthy, stay ambitious, and stay passionate. Your life may not be the exact picture you had in mind before your divorce or child custody battle, but you can make it better by reclaiming your identity.

Ask yourself: what have you done to reclaim your identity today?