Chapter 19

Purpose

“I Have Goals for the Future Now”

Recently separated people tend to live in the past and be very dependent upon others. After they have worked through the divorce process, they begin to live more in the present and be less dependent upon others. Now you can plan for your future as an independent person, with or without a new love relationship.

When I started this divorce seminar, I dreamed I was driving a car that went off a mountain road and I was balancing on the edge of a cliff, too scared to move. When I completed this divorce seminar, I dreamed I was in a big, dark pit with my car, but there was a cement ramp at the end of the pit where I could drive my car out.

—Harry

Take a look back down the trail. Hasn’t this been a rewarding climb? Your highest priority, back in the divorce pits at the bottom of the mountain, was to survive. You weren’t thinking about setting any goals for the future. You were getting along from hour to hour, day to day.

Things have changed a lot as we’ve “gained altitude,” haven’t they? It was hard work climbing the divorce process trail, but now that you’re almost at the top, you have some perspective. You can look back at your past to see how you got to where you are today. You can look at your present situation and recognize how much you have accomplished. You can look at your future and know that you can determine for yourself who you will become.

Looking at Your Past, Present, and Future Life

The trauma of divorce motivates us to take a good hard look at our lives. We tend to go back into the past and dwell a great deal upon the things that we would have done differently if we could live our lives over again. We tend to be so engrossed in the present scene that we are unable to think about the future.

It is time now for you to get out of some of the past thinking and the present pain and to start thinking about goals and decisions for the future.

People in a great deal of emotional pain cannot easily make plans and set goals for the future, and if you are still in a great deal of emotional pain, then you may find it difficult to read this chapter on setting goals. If you’ve read this book too fast and haven’t allowed all of the emotional learning to take place, then you may need to set aside this chapter for now, take some time to go back over the previous material, and do the emotional learning that you need to do.

As we discussed in chapter 11, Bruce’s research shows that people who have recently separated have very low scores on the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale. Other research using the Personality Orientation Inventory indicates that recently separated people, and especially dumpees, have a great deal of “living in the past” in their thinking and attitudes. People in the divorce pits have very little hope and goals for the future. They feel they have entered Dante’s Inferno, where the words above the gate read “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

But chances are, if you have worked your way carefully through each of the preceding chapters over a period of weeks or months, you are ready to get on with your life. In this chapter, you’ll be building on your successful climb up the mountain and doing some goal setting for your future.

Let’s get started!

Your Lifeline: An Exercise in Setting Goals

Here’s an experiential exercise that will help you to look at your past, your present, and your future life: we want you to draw your own lifeline. This lifeline is a graphic timeline, drawn across a sheet of paper from left to right, showing the ups and downs of your life. (See the illustration later in this chapter for an example of how the finished product might look.)

Keep in mind that this project is only for yourself—it’s not an art project, and you won’t be graded! (Although there will be questions on the “test” at the end of the chapter.) Erase or start over as you need to. Make the final product realistic and valuable for you. Here’s a step-by-step guide to the process:

  1. Find as big a piece of clean paper as you can. The bigger it is, the more freedom it gives you to draw your lifeline. A few feet of butcher paper is ideal.
  2. Think about your present age and then think about how long you expect to live. Most people, when they think about it, have a sense of how old they are going to be when they die. They may feel they are going to live to be very old, or they may feel they are going to die young. Get in touch with this feeling and see what kind of a life expectancy you have for yourself. Then think about your present age, what percentage of your life you’ve already lived, and what percentage of your life you’ve got left to live. For example, if you feel that you may live to be ninety and you are presently forty-five, you have lived 50 percent of your expected life.
  3. Draw a vertical line on your sheet of paper such that the amount of space to the left of it signifies how much life you’ve already lived and the amount of space to the right of it signifies how much you’ve got left to live. (If you’ve lived half of your life, the line would be smack in the middle. If you’ve lived a third of your life, the line would be a third of the way across the paper.) Think about how many years you’ve probably got left to live compared to how many years you’ve already lived. What are you going to do with the remaining years of your life?
  4. Think about whether your life has been basically happy or basically unhappy so far. Draw another line horizontally on the paper reflecting your basic level of happiness. If you have been basically unhappy all your life, draw the line lower down on the page.

Now you’re ready to start drawing your lifeline.

Your Lifeline: The Past

Start your lifeline by trying to remember the earliest childhood memory you have. Think about this early childhood memory for a little bit. It may tell you a great deal about yourself and about the rest of your life. Begin your lifeline so it reflects the happiness or unhappiness of this earliest memory. The more unhappy this earliest memory was, the lower you start on the page.

Next, think through the important things you can remember in your early childhood. Identify them in your mind and mark them on your lifeline. If there was an extremely happy event that you remember, mark that on your lifeline, putting it higher on the paper. If there were extremely unhappy things, such as the loss of somebody in your family through death, mark that as something more unhappy.

Keep working through your life as you enter grade school, junior high, and high school, and keep marking the important milestones that stand out in your memory. Think of creating this lifeline as though you were telling a story to a friend—a story about the important things that have happened to you in your life. Include your marriage and any children you may have.

Your Lifeline: The Present

Now think about your divorce and your present emotional situation. Many people who have recently separated will draw their lifelines with the divorce crisis as the lowest point in their lives. This kind of leaves you at a bad place in your lifeline, but remember that you still have the rest of your life left to work on it and to improve yourself to become the kind of person you would like to be. Draw your lifeline to show your level of happiness at the time of your divorce and since then.

Your Lifeline: The Near Future

You’ve now passed the present, and it’s time to start thinking about the future. Set some short-term goals for next month, the next three months, the next six months. Predict what you are going to be doing and how you are going to be feeling in your life. Do you think it is going to be a happier or less happy time than the present? Do you still have some pain to work through, such as the trauma of the final divorce proceedings, a property or custody settlement, or lots of bills to pay with very limited income? Draw the next few months on your lifeline as realistically as possible.

Your Lifeline: The Long-Term Future

Start making longer-term goals by answering these types of question: What do you want to be doing a year from now, five years from now? What are you going to be like in your old age? Will your face reflect the happiness you’ve known in your life, or will it reflect sadness, bitterness, anger, or negative feelings of some sort? How will retirement affect you? Will you be ready for it—able to handle the adjustment of not working anymore? Have you taken care of your financial needs for your old age? How do you feel about major illnesses possibly occurring in your future life? Have you developed a healthy lifestyle that can help prevent such illnesses? Is your life full of negative feelings that could turn into physical illness as you become older?

You have planted your life into a seedbed, and you’re going to grow and mature and harvest the crop. What kind of crop are you going to harvest with your life? Are you going to look back and say, “I’ve lived the type of life that I wanted to live, and I am ready to die”? Or are you going to look back and say, “Life has somehow passed me by. I’m not ready to die yet”?

What about the person you will be living with? Is it important for you to have another love relationship? To share your life with somebody else as you age? Or would you like to live as a single person and enjoy all of the freedom of being single?

What is important to you in your life? Is it important to make money, to become famous, to have good health, to be successful in your career, to have a happy family? And what does “success” mean to you? What would you do with your life to make it successful? Will you be comfortable with your answers to these two questions: “What contributions will I be remembered for?” and “Will I leave the world a better place?”

Are you becoming the type of person you’d like to be? When are you going to start changing and becoming that person? Today, next week, next month? Or are you never going to get around to being the person you want to be? Today would be a good time to start.

Kids Need Goals Too!

Children feel very confused when their parents are divorcing. While the parents are going through their own pain, the needs of the children are often overlooked. They have no idea where they are going, what’s going to happen to them, or how they’ll feel tomorrow. They often feel lost, without any goals or direction.

Children face their own stumbling blocks that they can change into rebuilding blocks (see appendix A). If they are given a chance to work through the process themselves, they can begin to develop goals for themselves and for their new family structure. If not, they’ll probably feel they are going nowhere.

A structured personal growth program—on either an individual or a group basis—can be very valuable for children at this time. Appendix A presents an outline parents can follow to guide their children through the divorce process, one rebuilding block at a time, just as you’ve done. Such experiences develop children’s skills for dealing with their parents’ pain and for meeting their own needs.

The lifeline exercise in this chapter can be adapted for children also, as well as tweens and teens. They don’t have the same perspective of time that you have as an adult, but it can be valuable for them to think about their future and to set some goals (typically shorter-term than yours) for themselves.

Divorce is an uncertain and unstable time for kids. It’s especially important that we help them to maintain hope for the future, and give them opportunities to develop their own goals.

How Are You Doing?

Now that you’ve thought about your life and your future as you completed your lifeline chart, take a few moments to assess your progress before you proceed to the mountaintop. It’s tempting to sprint to the top when you’re this close, but after all your work to get this far, it’s worth maintaining a steady pace. Answer these few questions, then go on to the top-of-the-mountain chapter: