Surviving Divorce: David Sbarra at TEDxTucson 2012

to begin tonight by saying that most all of us know that marital separation and divorce can be absolutely gut-wrenching and incredibly painful experiences for some people I spent the last 15 years studying how adults grieve the end of their marriage and as a clinical psychologist and professor here at the University of Arizona I met with and interviewed hundreds of people who are struggling to come to terms with a divorce and tonight I want to share with you some of the lessons we've learned about how people heal and put their lives back together after these difficult experiences and to start telling the story of our research findings I want to start a bit more broadly by talking about what I've come to call what now moments for all of us life is full of these what now moments and essentially they're Forks in the road their major transitions they're turning points so when I was 19 years old for example I had a fairly major spine surgery and it required me to rest flat on my back more or less for the better part of three months I remember thinking so many times lying there sort of looking up this and what the hell am I going to do with my life now and surgery is tough of course but not as tough is a lot of other things superstorm sandy Hurricane Katrina January 8th these are what now moments cancer diagnosis retirement the death of a spouse a parent a friend and of course divorce now I've come to think of these experiences very much akin to the old Atari computer game Frogger ok so if you don't know Frogger well if you don't know Frogger that's really sad but if you don't know Frogger Frogger is simple you're the frog and your job is to navigate all these treacherous obstacles jump on a turtle's head and get over to the next level without becoming roadkill or maybe worse getting eaten by an alligator so you get the idea every what now moment presents goals and opportunities to get to the next level these experiences challenged us to redefine ourselves to think about where we've been where we're going to see the world at our place in the world in fundamentally different and new ways and many years after my spine surgery when I was deep into studying divorce it finally dawned on me my feverish interest in understanding how people put their lives back together after their marriage ends was rooted in how I dealt with my own what now moment of the surgery marital separation and divorce represent a profound and fundamental insults to our well-being the impact our mental health and even our physical health is quite substantially and what we do that is how we go about the business of healing kind of a profound effect on our own lives and the lives of many many people around us especially especially if children are involved so I'd like to spend the ring remainder of my time tonight trying to trying to solve and suggest an answer the what now question for divorce what can we do what should we do today to start this healing process and I want to begin by talking about something we just found out might be surprisingly bad and I'm going to classify this in the category of what not to do now okay this journal looks incredibly warm and inviting almost like it would receive our deepest and darkest thoughts with a warm hug or embrace but it turns out that for some people journaling or diary writing may be among the things we really don't want to do when our marriage ends and so we recently completed a large study in which we asked people to write about their separation experience and manner similar to the kind of diary or journal writing you do at home in which you really express and explore your deepest emotions and we found out we discovered that for people who have a tendency to brood that is for people with a tendency to get up in their head and to go over and over these things I can't see you but you know who you are out there for those people system emotional expression may be precisely the wrong thing to do in essence the journaling keeps these people stuck in their pain and their their distress and if in this circumstance we're making a difficult or bad situation even worse so in the remainder of my time now I'm going to talk about three positive things that are critical to healing these are the things to start doing today first get your sleep okay get your sleep many divorcing adults report considerable disturbances in their sleep and we recently found out that four people are struggling emotionally especially women the additional presence of sleep problems serves to predict increases in resting blood pressure over the coming months in other words compromised sleep can pose a serious health risk when our marriage ends now here's the rub we need to figure out a way to get our Z's without knocking ourselves unconscious through drugs and alcohol right so I put self medication in the category of what not to do now and none enough not many people emphasized the importance of sleep when we face health times but the first thing to do is figure out a way to get some really really satisfying rest we have to figure out a way to sleep like this baby okay the second idea is to cultivate self compassion now the phrase self compassion is rooted in Buddhism but I want to say you don't need to be a Buddhist to make use of this great idea and we defined the concept as providing compassion for yourself and and your own suffering that is looking at yourself as you look at a dear friend providing yourself some tenderness coming to accept your inadequacies and your failures without getting some deeper and deeper into your pain now psychological studies psychological research studies tell us that the idea or concept is really defined by three elements or three pillars when we are self compassionate we are kind to ourselves we give ourselves a break we stop beating on ourselves we forgive ourselves for things we may have done and things we may have not we didn't do second were mindful we allow our emotions to come up we experience our emotions and we let them pass without getting some deeper into our pain or wallowing in our own suffering finally we cultivate a sense of common humanity that is instead of screaming me me me all the time and really personalizing our pain we locate our experience as part of a larger more universal human experience so I'm not the first person to be divorced and I'm not going to be the last person or maybe something like into every life a little bit of rain must fall now the ultimate beauty here is that self compassion is a teachable concept we can learn how to be more self compassionate and we can use these techniques to help us get over a painful breakup finally pull yourself back together again and one of the reason divorce is so profoundly difficult is that it represent represents a tremendous insult to our self-concept we define who we are as people in large part by our relationships who are with divorce forces certain existential questions that many of us would just as soon avoid right Who am I who are my friends how should I spend my time what am I going to do with myself these are profound whatnow questions but unlike our man humpty-dumpty here we can put our self-concept back together and this involves help from people from other people especially our loved ones who know us well so a critical step in healing then is to reconnect to activities and with people who enhance our sense of self and we found out and we've seen a couple of times now that reorganizing our sense of self redefining who we are seems to be the engine that drives our overall emotional healing so if you or a loved one is facing the what now of divorce I sincerely hope the ideas that about tonight can be helpful if you have a tendency to get up in your head there's some real danger in emotional journaling sleep like this darling baby okay get your rest build self compassion be kind yourself experience your emotions locate your experience as part of the bigger experience and finally pull yourself back together again connect to people and activities that really enhance your sense of self these are the ingredients for healing and ultimately I hope for thriving and growing so thank you very much for having me

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 412,535

Rating: 4.6689944 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, ted talk, Marriage, tedx, Community, tedx talks, TEDx Tucson, Divorce, Stress, ted, Psychology, USA, English, ted x, ted talks, Culture

Id: vg92QEL4w4I

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2013