How to Create A Safe Exit Plan

As a High Conflict Divorce Strategist, I will be speaking directly to and about just that - the high conflict dynamic and how it is so very different from your typical divorce. All divorce has conflict and some more than others. High Conflict marriages and divorce are in a realm of their own. So let’s start at the beginning.

In the early stages, knowing on a deep intuitive level and being ready takes time.Being ready and yet not being able to take action makes sense. After living in chaos and conflict, boldly making complex decisions can feel impossible. This is normal. Before you can tell your spouse you’ve decided to leave the marriage, it is vital to develop a foundation of self trust, mental clarity and the ability to manage your emotional reaction. Then there are a lot of baby steps: what you say, when you say it, how you prepare to say it, what you do afterward, how you handle the kids and so on. This just scratches the surface. Which is why I have created Divorce 101, a smart start to enter your divorce on solid footing.

Journey Beyond Divorce Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Book a Free Rapid Relief Call
• Reclaim Your Mind: Evict Your Spouse from Your Mental Space
• Divorce 101: The Roadmap Your Need to Prepare for Your High Conflict Divorce

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Listen to the Podcast here

How to Create A Safe Exit Plan 

How To Safely Plan Your Exit Strategy

Welcome back to another episode of Karen Solos. I hope to be doing these on a very regular basis, and as a high conflict divorce strategist, I will be speaking directly to you, the individual who has been living in a high conflict marriage and is either heading toward in the beginning of, or in the midst of, or even post-divorce.

High conflict, in my definition, is being married to someone who can be abusive and manipulative, who going into the divorce process has no plans of being transparent or flexible and compromising, who might rather leave the bank account empty or the children on the playing field harmed then do the right thing. These individuals are incredibly hard to be in relationship with and actually even harder to divorce. One of the things I say to clients who I first meet who are deluded in believing that the divorce will go better than the marriage, my statement is how goes the marriage, so goes the divorce, if you're lucky.

In this episode, I want to talk about how to safely plan your exit strategy. Unlike normal divorce where you might tell your spouse they get upset, there's a period of time where they need to grieve and catch up, they might be snarky, they might be a little nasty, when you are exiting a high conflict marriage, there's a lot of strategy that has to go into it.

I'm just going to talk about some of the key points. We have a Divorce 101 program that's beginning, where we're going to be doing a deep dive to support you in being fully prepared to enter the divorce process. The first thing is you. It took me years to decide to leave my high-conflict marriage. During that period of time, from when I first started thinking about it, but didn't want to believe it, I thought I could fix things. We could fix things until I actually decided to start moving in that direction, I went from a shell of myself, from someone who was really scared, really unhinged, who had a lot of my own reactive behaviors to someone who was starting to see my worth, own my responsibility in things.

Building Self-Esteem & Emotional Resilience Before Leaving

Step one is really an internal job between your head and your heart. Before you can go toe to toe to even tell your high complex spouse, be it her or him, that you want to leave, it's vitally important that you've built some self-esteem, some resilience within yourself. That is a process, in and of itself, of being able to be introspective because most of us, when we're ready to leave, are looking at this other person who is so difficult and so displeasing, and we might even believe a lot of what they're saying about us, which makes us all the more unhinged or insecure. That's not the place you want to start.

You are already drowning. Your head is under emotional waters. We want to get your head above emotional waters. It is vitally important that you are standing on some solid ground for yourself. There's a whole lot of steps that come into play in those early stages. Whether you're reading and not yet ready, that certainly makes sense. I think we all spend a lot of time there or you may be ready, but you don't think you are because you feel uncertain, but you're actually just afraid. That's something we worked through as well that makes a lot of sense or you may have already decided.

For those of you where your spouse decided, this same rule holds true. If you are told, obviously, the first thing individuals do is they go right to that bargaining. It's like you're either devastated, you're bouncing in the grief between devastated, angry, and bargaining. While all of that is externally focused, the most valuable thing you can do in these early stages is go inside. Slow it down, start trying to get quiet because you've been living in chaos and conflict for so long that silence and stillness is your friend.

This is happening, which is just absolutely upending and unnerving to begin with. “Where am I?” Look in the mirror. “Am I happy with the person I am? What did I bring to the table?” Not what he or she said like, “You suck at this, that, and the other thing, and you are worthless.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, “What did I bring to the table? Did I bring my fear to the table? Did I bring a lack of self-worth into the marriage? Did I lose myself in the marriage? Where is my self-confidence at? Where is my belief in myself at?”

I’ll use myself as an example. I had lost myself so much that even as a parent, and my children were about 4 and 6, so they were probably around 3 and 5 when I started realizing this was something I needed to consider more seriously. I had no confidence as a parent. All of these things of where am I at right now and if I'm about to step onto a battlefield and do battle, what do I need?

You may not know what you need. Reading this will definitely help. There's a lot of support out there to begin to find yourself, to stand in the human being you were created to be, to find that understanding of resilience, of worthiness, of self-love. Once you stop believing their lies, or once you begin to not believe all of their lies about you, that's a sign that you're heading in the right direction.

Every upset is a setup for personal growth.

There's so many different things. The first thing here that we're talking about is an awareness. What comes after the emotional awareness of where I am is the management. Actually, I teach emotional intelligence and two of the quadrants are self-awareness and self-management. Those are the first two quadrants, for you to begin to do that work, to understand where you're at and the work that you need to do, and then to work on yourself.

You've probably heard me say this. Every upset is a setup for personal growth. Every time you're triggered, every time you're blamed and accused, notice what you typically do. Do you get defensive? Do you get reactive? Do you just jump into the sandbox and start tossing emotional grenades along with your spouse or do you just receive everything and shrink back and believe all these terrible things they're saying about you?

Try and find the fiber of truth in what they're saying. All of those things are behaviors that don't serve you. What we want you to start doing, what we encourage you to start doing is slowing down enough to start asking, “What is true about this? How am I behaving? How am I reacting?” One of the things we talk about is a pause and how to go from being reactive to being responsive, going from your amygdala, your reptilian brain, which is your fight, flight or freeze, to back to your frontal cortex where you can connect with your logical thinking. That's absolutely critical.

Managing Your Fears Before Taking Action

That's one of the very early stages, that emotional awareness and management and sense of self. Once you have that, then you begin to say, “I know I have to do this,” and all types of fears are going to come up. The fears that come up involve, “Can I single parent by myself? Am I good enough to single parent? Can I manage being a working parent and being a single parent? Am I going to be financially stable? Am I even going to be able to make it?”

That was a huge fear of mine. I left my divorce with debt. Am I going to be alone and lonely for the rest of my life? Many other fears. Write down your fears. In Divorce 101, we walk you through all these exercises to begin to look at and face your fears. In fact, I have a new program. It's an expiring mini-course that is a Reclaim Your Mind: Evict Your Spouse from Your Mental Space.

Strategizing How & When to Tell Your Spouse

Once you get to a place where, “I think I'm ready to start. I think I'm ready to tell,” there's a lot of steps before that. The question becomes, what do you want to say? Do you really want to vomit all that you feel and think? Is that going to be valuable? What do you not want to say? What do you want to say? Do you know what happens?

For those of you who've recently been told that your spouse is leaving, do you know what happens in your mind the moment you're given shocking and devastating news about life as you know it changing. That's what we do when we tell someone we want a divorce. There is a reaction, a psychological reaction. Understanding what that is and how much they're actually going to hear and what's valuable to say and what's not valuable to say is a key part.

That needs to be scripted. There are actually scripts that we offer to give you guidelines for what to say and not say. You then have to ask yourself, “When do I tell? Am I going to say something Sunday afternoon in front of the kids? No. What day of the week do I do it? What time of day do I do it? What makes the most sense? Do I need to tell and then get the heck out of dodge for a period of time?”

If I have kids and really any kids living under the roof, what do I want to do about that? How might my spouse react? What do I need to keep in mind so that I not only keep myself safe emotionally, physically, and otherwise, but I keep everyone else in the household safe too? There's a lot of strategy that goes into this very first step of deciding you're ready to leave, and then figuring out how to even communicate that.

The other thing that I learned was that once I communicated, I was like, “I'm glad that's done,” it was almost like Groundhogs Day because when you tell someone who has a personality disorder, especially certain personality disorders, that you're leaving, it is such an assault to the ego that the ramifications of that, for me, they were shocking. I just didn't expect it. I had to tell and go through the same devastation with my spouse, maybe a dozen times, until I really got tired of it. He was just very stuck in denial, “I am going to control you and you are not going to do this.” We want to look at that. What's possible so that you can be prepared?

Exiting a high-conflict marriage is like launching a rocket—early preparation is key to ensuring a successful journey.

What do you do afterwards? Many of you have heard my story. I had to live under the same roof with my spouse for three and a half years because in New York, if I left, he could go to school, pick up the kids, bring them home, and then I'd be in an apartment all by myself and my kids would be with dad. That wasn't an option for me. What do you do afterwards? How do you live under the same roof together?

Preparing For A High-Conflict Divorce

There are a lot of choices. Some people have very few choices, some people have larger homes and more choices. Sometimes, your choices are limited by your fear and not the practicality of your situation. These are all things again that when someone is coming alongside you and helping you figure out each step of the way, exiting a high conflict marriage is like when NASA sets a spaceship to head toward into space.

They spend so much time with that rocket on the ground figuring out exactly the right trajectory so that it's hitting its mark when it heads into space. Exiting a high-conflict marriage is very much like that. The more prepared you are in those very early stages, the better off you are. Once you've figured that out, “When do I tell, what do I do with the kids when I'm telling, and then after I’ve told, what is living under the same roof going to look like and what control do I have over that?”

At that point, it's very important to get educated and not by your best friend or your sibling or your neighbor down the block because their divorce isn't going to be like your divorce and their divorce attorney may not be the right divorce attorney for you. Now getting educated is what does this world of divorce even look like? What does that journey look like? Who are the experts? How does it unfold? What should I expect being from a high conflict marriage? Who are the extra experts I may need? What do I need to know about my finances? What do I need to know about my legal rights, first and foremost?

The reason I say all of this is that there's a very good chance that your soon-to-be ex is going to tell you how it's going to be. They are the primary earner. They may tell you, “All of this money over the last 5, 10, 20, 30 years is mine. I'm the one who's been working. You're walking away with what you came in with.” I’ve heard that dozens of times. If you're the primary earner, your spouse who stays at home might say, “You suck as a parent. You've never done anything. You're not doing anything. You're not getting any custody, and I'm going to make sure of it.”

These are the kinds of things that are going to absolutely scare the wits out of any one of us. They're just not true. Unless your spouse is a matrimonial attorney, they really don't know any better than you what their rights and your rights are. It's vitally important that you get educated and that you don't just get educated by anybody, but that you get educated by somebody who is skilled in supporting men and women through high-conflict divorce.

I'm going to stop here because this literally just scratches the surface, and I’ll be diving into all of the different details as we go through my Parent Solo series. I want to invite you to reach out to [email protected] if this is resonating with you, if you have questions, if you have a specific situation, because I would really like to call out some of those situations. These are pretty quick little episodes. I want to be able to help as many of you as possible by talking about your circumstances and sharing what you can do in unique situations.

A little bit about two things. I have this mini course I’ve just created. Reclaim Your Mind: Evict Your Spouse from Your Mental Space. That's something we all have to do. It's a brief course. It's free, so check the link to the page and you can just sign up and get started right away. I'm in that platform so you can tag me and ask questions, and I would love to support you.

As I said before, I am launching a beta version of a program called Divorce 101. It's a smart start for high-conflict divorce, and it takes you through everything I talked about and much more over the course of eight weeks. We have a link for that. I’ll be chatting a little bit about that each week. I just want to leave you with a little encouragement. My divorce was three and a half years. It was hellacious. It felt like forever in a day. I was completely divorced in 2006.

I'm going to say to you, even though I had the whole high conflict co-parenting after that, when you get to the end, when you are living under a separate roof, even if you're not at the end, and you begin to experience the freedom of not always having your shoulders kissing your ear lobes when you come home and wondering what today's crisis or chaos or conflict would be, there is a sense of freedom and liberation.

Even more than that, when you start doing the work on yourself and really refocusing on you and becoming the best of you, which means healing wounds that have caused you to even enter a marriage like this, and refining character traits that you may have developed as a child because of your childhood dysfunction, but no longer serve you, when you do that work, whether you want to be free and single for the rest of your life or find new love, healthy love, you are going to, first and foremost, love yourself. That feels incredibly liberating, exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding after emerging from these incredibly difficult relationships that you and I have experienced. I will see you again next time. Please, [email protected] if you have questions, comments, or requests for topics. See you soon.

Important Links

• Divorce 101
• Reclaim Your Mind: Evict Your Spouse from Your Mental Space
• Journey Beyond Divorce Email
• Book A Rapid Relief Call