The Restorative Divorce Podcast — Season 4, Part 2: The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook
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Divorce requires people to make important decisions during one of the most emotionally difficult periods of their lives. You may be deciding where you are going to live, how you will divide your finances, what parenting arrangements will look like, and what your future will be after a relationship that may have lasted for decades. At the same time, you may be angry, frightened, grieving, exhausted, or simply overwhelmed. That combination can make it very easy to react to what is happening rather than stop and think about what you actually want to accomplish.
That is what I want to talk about today: reflection. Not reflection as an abstract concept, and not as a substitute for taking action when action is necessary. I mean something much more practical. I mean developing the ability to slow down your immediate reaction, regulate your emotions enough to think clearly, and give yourself a structure for making decisions during divorce.
Welcome back to The Restorative Divorce Podcast. I'm Erin Birt, a family law attorney, mediator, and creator of the Restorative Divorce® approach. Today we are beginning Part 2 of Season 4, which focuses on The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook. I created the workbook to give people a structured way to work through some of the emotional and practical challenges that accompany divorce. It is organized around eleven themes and final reflections, with readers encouraged to work through approximately one theme or guided activity each week over ninety days. Those themes include understanding emotions, recognizing and managing triggers, shifting mindsets, breaking negative patterns, co-parenting, establishing boundaries, identifying future goals, gratitude, self-care, and eventually creating personal affirmations.
For this first episode about the workbook, I want to concentrate on where it begins: emotions, reactions, and triggers. There is a reason those topics come before many of the other subjects in the workbook. Divorce presents enough difficult decisions without allowing every emotional reaction to become another problem that needs to be solved.
Understanding Your Emotions During Divorce
The first theme in the workbook is Understanding Your Emotions. Readers are asked to reflect on the emotions they have experienced throughout their divorce or separation, including sadness, anger, grief, hope, and everything in between. They are also asked to consider how those emotions have changed and how they may be affecting their overall well-being. One of the exercises includes a simple instruction that I think captures the purpose of reflection particularly well: “Try not to judge them—just observe.”
That is where slowing reactivity begins. If I am angry, I can recognize that I am angry without immediately doing something because I am angry. If I am frightened, I can acknowledge that fear without assuming the worst thing I can imagine is necessarily going to happen. If something my spouse says hurts me, I can recognize that hurt without deciding that I need to respond to it immediately. Reflection creates a small amount of space between the emotion and the action.
That space can be particularly important in divorce because communication happens so quickly now. An upsetting text arrives on your phone and you can respond within seconds. An email arrives while you are at work and you can forward it to your attorney before you have even finished reading it. Your spouse proposes something you dislike and your immediate response may be, “Absolutely not.” There is very little in modern communication that naturally forces us to stop and think before responding. Sometimes we have to create that pause ourselves.
Slowing down does not mean that the original issue is unimportant. It means giving yourself enough time to determine what the issue actually is. If your spouse sends an upsetting email about the house, for example, there may be a legitimate financial or legal question that needs to be addressed. But there may also be ten sentences in that email that make you angry and one sentence that actually requires a decision. If you respond to all ten emotional provocations, you may create a much larger conflict without getting any closer to resolving the one issue that matters.
Emotional Regulation: Recognizing How You React to Stress
The second piece of this is emotional regulation. The workbook includes an exercise called Mapping Emotions to Reactions, which asks readers to notice how emotions show up in their thoughts, actions, and bodies. One prompt begins, “When I feel stressed, I notice…” and then asks the reader to identify a positive way of responding to difficult emotions. The point is to begin noticing your own patterns.
Perhaps when you feel anxious, you want an answer immediately. If your spouse does not respond to a text, you send another one. When there is still no response, you become more anxious and send another. Perhaps when you feel criticized, you become defensive and begin explaining every detail of what happened. Perhaps when you feel that you are losing control, you become more rigid about things that ordinarily would not matter very much to you. Someone else may react to stress by avoiding difficult conversations entirely.
There is no benefit in judging yourself for those reactions. The benefit comes from recognizing them. Once you know what you tend to do when you are emotionally activated, you have a better chance of catching yourself before you automatically do it again.
Recognizing and Managing Divorce Triggers
That leads directly into the next theme in the workbook: Recognizing and Managing Triggers. Readers are asked to identify situations or interactions that produce strong emotional reactions during divorce, explore why those particular situations may be triggering, and consider strategies for managing those reactions more effectively.
A trigger might be a particular tone your spouse uses in an email. It might be a request to change the parenting schedule. It might be seeing money spent from a joint account. It might be hearing that your spouse has spoken with someone about the divorce. The important thing is recognizing that the trigger and the decision are not necessarily the same thing.
For example, imagine that your spouse asks to change a parenting weekend. That request may immediately trigger frustration because schedule changes were a source of conflict during your marriage. You may think, “Nothing has changed. They still think my time doesn't matter.” That feeling may be completely understandable based on your history together. But the actual decision in front of you is much narrower: does this particular schedule change work for you and your children?
Reflection allows you to separate those things. You can recognize that the request has brought up a much larger history without requiring the entire history to become part of your answer. You can decide whether the requested change makes sense based on what is happening now.
The same thing can happen financially. You see a transaction you do not recognize and immediately think your spouse is hiding money. Maybe there is a problem, and it needs to be investigated. But reflection allows you to begin with a question rather than a conclusion. What is this transaction? Do I have enough information to understand it? Is there documentation I need? Do I need professional advice? That is very different from beginning the conversation with an accusation and then trying to obtain information after both people are angry.
Using Structured Thinking to Make Better Divorce Decisions
This is where structured thinking becomes so valuable. Reflection does not mean sitting indefinitely with your feelings. Eventually, you need to decide what to do. Structured thinking helps you move from the emotional reaction to the actual problem. What happened? What am I feeling about what happened? What information do I have? What information am I missing? What decision actually needs to be made? What outcome am I trying to accomplish?
Those questions can completely change a conversation.
Instead of asking, “How do I stop my spouse from doing this?” you may realize the better question is, “Is this something I actually have control over?” Instead of immediately saying, “I will never agree to this,” you can ask what the proposal would actually mean, what concerns you about it, and whether there are alternatives. Instead of deciding that every disagreement needs to go to your attorney, you can determine whether the issue requires legal advice, additional information, a conversation, or simply no response at all.
This does not mean every problem can be solved through reflection. Some issues require attorneys. Some require court intervention. Some financial concerns need investigation. Some parenting concerns are serious and require immediate attention. The purpose of reflection is not to minimize those issues. It is to help you recognize them more clearly so that when professional or legal intervention is necessary, you are using it intentionally.
Breaking Patterns of Conflict During Divorce
There is research that supports the importance of focusing on behavior rather than simply expecting people going through a difficult separation to feel differently about one another. Research published in Family Court Review discusses parents who become caught in patterns of conflict during separation and divorce. Importantly, the researchers note that many of these parents are committed to their children and do not necessarily have an underlying mental health diagnosis; instead, they may have become “enmeshed in a pattern of conflict behavior.”
I think that is useful because it shifts the question from who someone is to what keeps happening. If you recognize a pattern, you can begin looking for the point where you can interrupt it. You may not be able to change what your former spouse says to you, but you can change whether you respond immediately. You may not be able to prevent a request that irritates you, but you can decide whether your response will address the request or revisit every similar disagreement you have had for the past ten years.
The same research discusses interventions that focus on helping parents understand how particular behaviors can positively or negatively affect their children rather than trying to change how the parents feel about one another. That is a practical distinction. You do not have to like your former spouse to communicate more effectively. You do not have to forgive everything that happened during your marriage before you can make a thoughtful parenting decision. You do not have to eliminate anger before you can decide not to send an angry email.
That is emotional regulation in a divorce context. It is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to experience the emotion without giving it control over every decision.
Why the Restorative Divorce® Workbook Uses a 90-Day Structure
The ninety-day structure of the workbook is important for that reason. These skills usually require practice. You may recognize a trigger today and still react to it tomorrow. The first time you work through an exercise, you may realize after an argument exactly what happened. The next time, perhaps you recognize the pattern during the argument. Eventually, you may recognize it before the argument begins and decide to respond differently.
The workbook encourages readers to focus on one theme or guided activity each week and take time to reflect on the prompts, practice the exercises, and apply them to their own circumstances. That gives you an opportunity to do more than understand an idea intellectually. You can actually begin noticing it in your own life.
This matters because divorce is filled with decisions, and not all of those decisions need to be made on the day the question first appears. Sometimes the most thoughtful response is, “I need to think about that.” Sometimes it is, “I need more information.” Sometimes it is, “I want to talk to my attorney before I respond.” Sometimes it is, “This bothered me, but it does not actually require a response.”
And sometimes reflection will tell you exactly the opposite. You may realize that you have been avoiding something important because dealing with it feels uncomfortable. Structured thinking may help you recognize that an issue does need attention and that postponing it is creating more uncertainty. Reflection is not always about slowing down. Sometimes it gives you the clarity to finally move forward.
How Reflection Can Improve the Divorce Process
That is one of the reasons I wanted to create The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook. As an attorney and mediator, I can explain the law. I can help people evaluate options. I can help negotiate agreements and resolve legal issues. But the decisions ultimately belong to the people whose lives will be affected by them. I wanted to create something that helps people think about those decisions outside the immediate pressure of the next email, the next meeting, or the next court date.
A divorce agreement may resolve the legal issues, but you are the person who has to live with the decisions afterward. That makes the quality of your decision-making important. If you can slow down enough to recognize what you are feeling, understand what is triggering you, and organize your thinking around the actual problem that needs to be solved, you are in a much better position to make decisions intentionally rather than simply reacting to whatever happened most recently.
Reflection also changes the way you use your professional team. When you have taken time to identify the actual question, your attorney can give you more focused legal advice. When you understand what concerns you about a proposal, your mediator can help you explore alternatives. When you have separated fear from missing financial information, a financial professional can help you determine what the numbers actually mean. Structured thinking helps you bring the right problem to the right professional.
That is very different from allowing the divorce to become a series of emergencies. When everything feels urgent, it becomes difficult to distinguish what truly requires immediate attention. Reflection helps restore that distinction. Some things are urgent. Some things are important but not urgent. Some things are emotionally painful but do not require legal action. And some things may not require any response at all.
Moving Through Divorce With Greater Awareness and Intention
As we move through Part 2 of this season, we will continue exploring the themes in The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook, including shifting mindsets, breaking negative patterns, co-parenting, boundaries, future goals, gratitude, and self-care. But I wanted to begin exactly where the workbook begins, because understanding your reactions creates a foundation for everything that comes afterward.
If you are going through divorce, you do not have to stop feeling angry, afraid, sad, frustrated, or overwhelmed before you can make good decisions. The goal is not emotional perfection. The goal is awareness. Notice what you are feeling. Notice what tends to trigger you. Notice what you tend to do next. Then give yourself enough space to decide whether that familiar reaction is actually going to help you accomplish what you want.
That is why reflection can change divorce outcomes. It slows reactivity. It helps regulate the emotions that can otherwise drive conflict. And it gives you a structure for thinking through decisions that may affect your finances, your children, and your future long after the divorce itself is over.
Legal Guidance and Divorce Mediation in Illinois
Thank you for joining me for Episode 7 of The Restorative Divorce Podcast. If you are considering divorce and want to approach the process with more structure, I work individually with people who need legal guidance, education, and a thoughtful plan for moving forward. I also work with couples together through mediation when both are ready to work toward resolution. You can visit BirtLaw.com to schedule a complimentary fifteen-minute introductory call to learn more about my services, or schedule a thirty-minute Planning Session if you want a more substantive conversation about your circumstances, your options, and what your next steps may look like.
Over the next several episodes, we are going to continue working through the ideas behind The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook. For today, however, I want to leave you with the simple instruction from the beginning of the workbook: “Try not to judge them—just observe.” Before you respond to the next difficult email, parenting request, financial concern, or upsetting conversation, notice what is happening inside you first. That moment of reflection may not change what happened, but it may change what happens next.
Frequently Asked Questions About Emotions and Decision-Making During Divorce
Why is it difficult to make decisions during divorce?
Divorce often requires important decisions about children, finances, property, and the future at the same time a person may be experiencing anger, fear, grief, stress, or exhaustion. Those emotions can make it easier to react to what is happening in the moment rather than step back and consider the decision that actually needs to be made. Reflection can create space between an emotional reaction and the action that follows.
How can I stop reacting emotionally to my spouse during divorce?
The goal is not to eliminate emotion. Instead, begin by noticing what you are feeling, what triggered the reaction, and what you typically do next. Slowing down before responding can help you determine whether the situation requires legal advice, more information, a conversation, or perhaps no response at all.
What are common emotional triggers during divorce?
Divorce triggers can include the tone of an email or text, a request to change parenting time, an unfamiliar financial transaction, or learning that a spouse has discussed the divorce with someone else. Recognizing a trigger can help you separate your emotional response from the actual decision or problem that needs to be addressed.
Should I respond immediately to an upsetting email or text from my spouse?
Not necessarily. Some situations require prompt attention, but others do not. Before responding, consider what actually happened, what information you have or need, what decision must be made, and what outcome you are trying to accomplish. An upsetting communication may contain many emotional provocations but only one issue that actually requires a response.
Can reflection help reduce conflict during divorce?
Reflection can help you recognize recurring patterns of conflict and identify where you may be able to interrupt your part of the pattern. You may not be able to control what your spouse says or does, but you can decide whether to respond immediately and whether your response addresses the current issue or brings past disagreements into the conversation.
Does reflection mean I should avoid taking legal action?
No. Some parenting, financial, and legal issues require professional advice or court intervention. Reflection is not intended to minimize serious concerns. It can help you distinguish between issues requiring legal action and situations that may instead require additional information, a conversation, or time to think.
How can structured thinking help me make better divorce decisions?
Structured thinking helps separate the emotional reaction from the problem that needs to be solved. Useful questions include: What happened? What am I feeling? What information do I have? What information am I missing? What decision actually needs to be made? What outcome am I trying to accomplish? This process can help you make decisions more intentionally rather than reacting to whatever happened most recently.
What is The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook?
The 90-Day Restorative Divorce® Workbook provides a structured way to work through emotional and practical challenges during divorce. Its themes include understanding emotions, recognizing and managing triggers, shifting mindsets, breaking negative patterns, co-parenting, boundaries, future goals, gratitude, self-care, and personal affirmations. The workbook is designed to be used over approximately ninety days so readers have time to reflect on and practice what they are learning.
