Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane:  When you are separated, you often intuitively know that regular communication is important.  Generally, no one needs to tell you this.  It is just common sense. After all, how are you going to reconcile if you lose touch and have no idea what the other person is doing? How can you fix what is broken if you don’t talk it through?

For some couples though, that talking is painful, even if they know that they need to do it.  A wife might explain: “I still look forward to when my separated husband calls, but I don’t exactly know why.  I find our conversations to be painful, even when they are going well.  Because when we have a nice conversation, I’d like to continue it face to face, in our home.  But I can’t.  And when things go wrong, I just have to sit here alone and then wait for the next conversation in the hopes that things will go better.  I know that we have to talk.  I know that this is important. And I know that I can’t exactly tell my separated husband that I want to stop talking because it is painful.  But how can I make this process not so torturous? It hurts me every time that we talk.”

I absolutely understand this.  I suffered with the same thing early on in my separation, until I tweaked my thinking a little bit.  I think that we suffer the most when we focus on what we don’t have rather than on what we do have.  We get in trouble when we look to the future too much without being grateful for what we do have right here in the present.

In my own case, I was feeling the pain because I was trying to change the situation without letting it play out.  I was trying to rush the process and I wanted a guarantee when that was impossible at the time.  I also went into my separation without any sort of plan, at least at first.

Try To Separate Yourself From Any Immediate Expectations: In order to separate yourself from the pain, I believe, at least from my own experience, that you also have to separate yourself from your own expectations.  I know that this is difficult.  Of course you are heavily invested in how your marriage is going to turn out.  But when you allow that investment to be the driving force behind your every action, you cloud every interaction with your husband.

You can’t just relax and enjoy the conversation.  And this taints and damages the entire process.  In order to stop this, you really do have to change your mind set. You have to tell yourself that you’re just going to be grateful for these conversations and you are going to enjoy them without focusing on where they are going all of the time.  You don’t know what tomorrow brings.  So it doesn’t make sense to place your focus there.  But if you place your focus on the conversation that you are having at this very moment (and only that) then you will often find that it isn’t nearly as painful and it is easier to enjoy it.

Learning Not To Discuss The Hard Issues When Things Are Still Fragile: In my own case, I eventually took conversations about our marriage and about the separation off the table for a little while.  Because these topics almost always were just too much at the time.  I began to learn that if I brought them up, awkwardness or defensiveness would set in, and the whole conversation would turn sour.

Of course, you will have to discuss these things eventually. But I decided to wait until my marriage was stronger, we were more bonded, and our fragile union could withstand this.  I was worried that I wouldn’t know when to make this shift, but it was more obvious than I anticipated.

Why You Don’t Want To Suffer Twice: I know that it may be hard to wrap your mind around this when you’re scared and unsure.  But it helped me to look at it this way.  When I was holding on so tightly to everything, I was forcing myself to suffer twice.  I was suffering by overanalyzing everything.  And I was suffering during the conversations and meetings because I was tainting them by clinging.

However, as I began to attempt to live in the moment a little more, I eliminated the suffering I felt when I held too tightly to the outcome.  And because I did this, my conversations and interactions were much better so I lessened this suffering also.  After this switch, I cut my suffering down significantly.

I am not going to tell you that this is easy and that all you to do is declare you’re going to change and the transformation just magically happens.  You have to be determined and you have to be willing to constantly be aware of your behavior and thought process.  You often have to remind yourself of the new plan when you find yourself resorting to old behaviors.

But, at least for me, changing my outlook and loosening my grasp made a huge difference in my experience and in the outcome.

I can’t tell you that marital separations are not incredibly painful.  They are.  But sometimes, changing your expectations will cut down on the pain.  And changing your focus will allow you to see what is right in front of you without needing to rehash things all of the time.  These shifts will sometimes improve things with your husband.  This shift was the start of a reconciliation in my case because it made my husband much more receptive to me.   You can read more at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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