DEALING WITH STRESS

Sources of stress

Stress and worry can kill you. Yet it is normal at the time you are going through your separation, and probably for the next six months or so, to have a great deal of anxiety and concerns. You will naturally wonder about the future:

• Will you and your children be able to cope?
• Will you still be able to see them?
• Will you still be a good dad?

Money is probably very short which will cause further stress, let alone wondering what will happen in two years time if your circumstances change. Your relationships with other members of your family could be strained. Stress can be found in a hundred different areas of your life. It all adds up to a potentially deadly time.

There are two major sources of stress. Firstly there is the stress of dealing with the actual problems that you have in your life, and secondly there is stress from perceived or potential problems that you may face. Many divorced dads go through a period where they spend time imagining the worst possible scenarios; haunting images of despair grow in the middle of the night as you lay there mulling over the worst that can happen. These ideas need to be banished from your mind. As always, you need to remember that your relationship with your children is for you to determine.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The biggest source of stress and pressure in your life is the one that you place upon yourself. You need to recognise that this is potentially a killer, and banish the things that prey on your mind, not allowing ideas that haunt you to affect your life. That is not to say that at some point in your life things won’t go wrong, but many problems are bigger in imagination than in reality. Inventing problems and worrying about them will use up vital energy that you need to cope with the real changes that are happening in your life.

These are some typical things that may worry you and add to your stress:

• losing contact with you children;
• alienation by your children;
• not being a good dad now that you are not living at home;
• kids turning out to be drug addicts or worse now that you are not there;
• never finding love again;
• your children regarding another bloke as dad.

Lying awake at night, thinking about potential pitfalls and what you might do about them is only going to add to the stress that exists in your life already.

What to do about stress

All divorced dads have a degree of stress, and each dad handles it in a different manner. Dealing with stress is a subject that falls outside of the expertise of this book. If you need to know more about it, then you can look on the internet and review some websites which are specially designed to help people understand the subject.

If you are having problems dealing with the stress of your separation, and struggling to deal with the depression of not seeing your kids, for their sake (as they want you around for the long term) don’t bottle up the issues – go and speak to your GP and get treatment. Don’t be under the illusion that stress is something to be ashamed of; it can kill you if it gets out of control. You are no good to your kids dead or depressed.

Contemplating retribution

Something else you might lay awake and think about is retribution. If you and your ex-partner did not split up on equal terms, or if since the separation she has been obstructing your relationship with your children, then it is likely that while you are lying awake at night a hundred ways to kill your ex-wife will run through your mind.

However, retribution is not a solution. Now is the time to remember the old Chinese proverb, ‘When planning retribution, always plan two graves’. In other words, you might be burying yourself as well as your ex-partner. The bad news is that retribution serves no end, other than for you to play out destructive fantasies in your mind, and even this is a pretty lousy way to get rid of your anger.

Unfortunately, carrying out any kind of retribution, even a mild form of criminal damage, will create more problems than it is worth, even if you get yourself the cast-iron alibi that you were fishing that night with your best mate. You might be able to fool the police, but you won’t fool your ex, and she is likely to be less co-operative over your contact with the children. She herself may just decide to go ahead with some of the retribution that she has been planning – and you could end up the worse for it!

Your best course of action is to leave the past behind you. Whatever wrongs have been done to you, you should move on with your life. Of course the motivation to exact some form of revenge on an ex-partner who has wronged you is very strong. But certainly if there are kids involved then any form of retribution will probably have a knock-on effect on the kids. If you damage her car, for example, the cost of repair will mean money not spent on the kids.