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Browse published articles attributed to Karen Finn, with full-archive search.
I was at the funeral of a dear friend last week. He and his wife were and are the kind of friend that you choose to be family. In fact, I'm not sure who chose whom first. All I know is that when I heard that Bob had died, I cleared my calendar so I could be with Gloria and the rest of the family just as if they were blood relations.
In just 11 days Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise reached a divorce settlement. For most of us, the thought of reaching an agreement with our former spouse in just 11 days seems like a fantasy. How were they able to do it so quickly? From what I can tell there are two major factors that allowed the actors to reach such a rapid agreement.
My husband laughs at me a lot because he thinks I'm just not hip. The funny thing is I agree with him. I often use slang that is WAY out of date and when I try to use more current slang it just sounds funny coming out of my mouth.
For most people, divorce is made up of a bunch of unfamiliar events, requirements, emotions, and behaviors. It's usually a very confusing period of time. Because divorce is so confusing, unfamiliar and legal, it's in your best interest to have exactly the right experts to help you out. Hopefully, the first expert you found to guide you was an atto ey or mediator. The legalities of divorce can have repercussions for years and you deserve to have your interests attended to by an expert.
As human beings we have a remarkable capacity to adapt to our environment. Usually, we make adaptations because they help us feel better in some way. I like to think of the natural personalities we're born with as being like an amoeba - not well defined, kinda free-form and readily changeable to suit the environment. Changing and adapting our natural personalities is something that we all do during the course of growing up. It's part of learning about who we are, our place in the world, and what the world is like.
Whether you're a man or woman, the dumper or dumpee, one of the very first things you probably realized you needed to do to get divorced is that you need to hire an atto ey. If you're like most people, you probably asked a friend or family member who's been divorced who they used and then promptly hired that atto ey. It wasn't until after you'd already plunked down your retainer that you had any idea of what working with this atto ey would be like.
Pilar and Deion made a big mistake. Yeah, I know that's an obvious statement and you're probably of the opinion that they've made several big mistakes since they decided to divorce. But the mistake I'm talking about probably isn't all that obvious. In fact, many people probably thought it was a good idea because they have kids. The big mistake they made, that could have prevented many of the problems they've had and forced the networks to report on some other bits of news, is that they decided to continue living in the same house after deciding to divorce.
Isn't it easy to get caught up in everything that goes on around us? And then there's the divorce on top of it all. It just makes sense that sometimes you might want to stop the world for a moment and regroup. Well, stopping the world for just a moment is EXACTLY what I believe you should get in the habit of doing every day. Sounds like a dream, right? OK, so no one can truly stop the world, but you can certainly stop participating in everything for just a few minutes every day. My recommendation is that you take at least 5 minutes every day for "me time".
Loneliness is one of the first most painful emotions to appear when you get divorced. Even if you were lonely in your marriage, it's just somehow different when you are living alone. Yes, this is true even if you have children living with you.
Life changes a lot when you separate and divorce. Things that used to be a regular part of life just aren't anymore. And when things change in unexpected ways, we can get scared, frustrated and angry. When clients begin working with me, they're usually experiencing some combination of fear, frustration and anger. One of the first things we do is dive into what's behind or at the root of these emotions. What we usually discover on our deep dive are limits that have been disregarded in some way. The limits could be behaviors, expectations, thoughts, beliefs or even habits.
We all have hundreds of thousands of thoughts every day. Time to get up. I'm hungry. Who's calling? Why haven't they sent that email yet? I have so much to do. Do I look fat? How am I going to solve this problem? Why isn't my atto ey returning my call? If s/he would just reconsider, I know we could work it out. How could I be so stupid? Could this be cancer?
What do you do about special occasions like birthdays when you get divorced? Let's take a look at this question from a couple of different angles. First, let's see what you can expect to be different. Next, let's dig into the question of which ones you should still celebrate. Finally, let's talk about how you celebrate these occasions.
It's rare that someone sees their divorce as a success. Most people see divorce as a failure - their personal failure. The very sad fact is that it's not unusual for someone to interpret the failure of their marriage as their failure in life. This couldn't be further from the truth! As an individual, you deserve to be successful, to feel confident and be happy again. Although none of that will happen until you choose to believe that you deserve to be successful, confident and happy again. Where you are now:
Some decisions are really easy to make - What will I have for breakfast? What TV show do I want to watch? What time do I need to get up in the morning? Other decisions, like whether or not divorce is the correct path for you to take, can be agonizing. Let's begin by focusing on the person who is contemplating whether or not to divorce - the leaver.
Overwhelm is an expected consequence of divorce. I say that because WITHOUT EXCEPTION it's something I work on with every single one of my clients. It's also something I had to learn how to overcome when I went through my own divorce. What I'm going to share with you today is EXACTLY what I share with my clients as we pick through the pieces of what makes up their overwhelm. The result? They ALWAYS feel calmer and more in control of their situation. You will too, if you follow these 4 steps.
Time is one of those concepts that we all get, but is difficult to define. It's a marker that allows us to separate past, present, and future. Why bother discussing time? Because, I agree with Alan Lakein who is credited with saying, "Time = Life, therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life." When we go through divorce, it's so very, very, very easy to get caught up in either the past or the future instead of being here, now.
I love the Beatles. OK, it's more accurate to say I love the Beatles album 1. I consider it "happy music" and often put it on when I've got a long drive ahead of me or when I just need a pick-me-up. One of the songs on the album is Help! If you're not familiar with the lyrics of the song, you can find them on Metro Lyric's website. For me, the idea behind the song is that we learn how to be independent when we're young and as we grow and mature we yearn and search for interdependence.
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." -Shakespeare As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139-143