How to Stay Calm During Divorce: Regulate First, Decide Second

How to stay calm during divorce when your body will not cooperate. A divorce coach and J.D. on flooding, the two-minute practice that brings your thinking back, and why nothing gets decided in the next twenty minutes.

Dear Divorce Coach:

My spouse and I separated in June and we are in the middle of mediation. We have two children, eleven and eight. On paper this is going fine. In my body it is not.

Last Tuesday at 9:40 at night a text came in about Thanksgiving. Four lines. By the time I finished reading it my heart was pounding, my hands were shaking, and I had typed and sent three paragraphs in under a minute. I have regretted every one of them for a week. Then on Thursday, in our mediation session, the opposite happened. They brought up the house, my mind went completely white, and I heard myself say “fine, whatever you think” about something I do not think is fine at all.

I run a team of fourteen people. At work I am the calm one. Why can I not think when it matters most, and how do I stop doing this?

Hitting Send Too Soon in Santa Fe

Dear Hitting Send Too Soon,

I want to start with the question under your question, because I suspect you have been asking it at two in the morning. Nothing is wrong with you. The person who runs a team of fourteen and the person who sent three paragraphs at 9:41 are the same person, in two different states of the nervous system. Once you understand the state, both Tuesday and Thursday make complete sense.

What happens in your body when you cannot think

When something feels like a threat, your body does not wait for your opinion. Your heart rate climbs, your breathing goes shallow, and blood moves toward the big muscles, which is useful if you need to run and useless if you need to write a text about pie. The part of your brain that weighs options, remembers what you meant to say, and pictures next week goes quiet. Harvard Health has a plain-language explanation of the stress response if you want the biology.

A text from the person you are divorcing, about the first holiday schedule since you separated, is a threat to your body. Not a lion, but close enough.

Here is the part most people have never been told. Once you tip into that state, which researchers who study couples in conflict call flooding, it takes about twenty minutes for your body to come back down. Nothing you decide inside those twenty minutes is coming from the version of you who runs a team. On Tuesday you fought. On Thursday you froze. Those are the same alarm going off, with two different exits.

Regulate first, decide second

I have sat with people at this exact table for more than a decade, since 2015, and the rule I come back to most often is four words long. Regulate first. Decide second.

You cannot think your way out of a flooded nervous system. You settle the body first and wait for the thinking to come back, which it does, every time. The order matters. Most of us try it backwards. We try to reason ourselves calm, usually by drafting the perfect reply, which keeps the alarm ringing and produces three paragraphs at 9:41. This is the pivot from reacting to responding that I talk about everywhere, and the pivot starts in the body, not in the words.

So the first question is never “what should I say.” The first question is “what state am I in,” and if the answer is flooded, the next step is not words.

A practice that takes about two minutes

This is what I teach, and it is what I do myself in the car before a hard meeting.

Feet flat on the floor. Press down through your heels and notice what is holding you up. The floor is doing its job. You are not falling.

One hand on your heart, or on your belly if that feels better. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. A slow exhale is the fastest signal your body accepts that the danger has passed. Do it three times. Count if it helps, in for four and out for six.

Say what is happening, out loud if you are alone. “I’m flooded, not failing.” Naming the state turns some of the thinking brain back on by itself.

Then give it time. Nothing gets answered in the next twenty minutes. Not the text, not the agreement, not the email from the lawyer. A text about Thanksgiving in October can wait until morning. In my experience the morning version is shorter and kinder, and nobody has ever regretted sending it.

At the mediation table

Thursday needs one more tool, because you cannot leave a session for twenty minutes without saying something. You can, though, say this: “I need ten minutes.” It is a complete sentence. Mediators expect it. The good ones are relieved when a client asks for a pause, because a yes from a flooded person tends to come apart a month later. I wrote about that too-fast yes recently, and it applies to the house as much as to a signature.

Before your next session, tell your mediator and your lawyer, if you have one, that you plan to take breaks and that you will not finalize anything in the room. Then ask yourself my favorite sorting question about the house: is this a today decision or a forever decision? Forever decisions do not get made at 4:50 on a Thursday by someone whose mind has gone white.

When it keeps happening

A practice like this handles the Tuesday night text. It does not fix a body running on five hours of sleep, three coffees and a late-night search about custody. Protect your sleep as if it were part of the settlement, because in a real sense it is. Move your body most days. I wrote about managing co-parenting stress through self-care if you want more on that side.

If the flooding is constant, if it arrives before you have even read the text, or if it stirs up older history, that is a sign to add a therapist to your team. The Divorced Girl Smiling list of trusted professionals is a good place to start. A therapist works on why the alarm is so sensitive. A divorce and conflict coach, which is my work, handles the practical and the nervous system in the moment: what to say, in what order, and how to stay steady enough to say it. Many people use both, and the two jobs fit together well.

You asked how to stop doing this. You stop by noticing the state before you reach for the phone, and by trusting that the calm person at work is still in there, waiting for the alarm to quiet down. That person shows up every time you give them twenty minutes.

Warmly,
Cherie

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