Am I Going to Be Okay?
The question underneath every money worry in divorce, and how to answer it tonight.
By Cherie Morris, J.D., CDC
There is one question I hear more than any other, and it almost never arrives during business hours. It comes at two in the morning, or in the car after a meeting with a lawyer, or in the pause after someone says "the accounts." Am I going to be okay?
It sounds like a money question, and money is part of it. Underneath, it is a safety question. Will there be enough. Will I be able to keep the house, or find one. Will I still be able to do the things that make me feel like myself. When the answer is unknown, the body treats the unknown as danger, and the mind goes looking for certainty it cannot have yet.
I want to give you a way to answer that question tonight, before the numbers are settled, because you cannot wait for the numbers to feel okay. The numbers take months. You need sleep this week.
Why the question wakes you up
Divorce hands you a stack of unknowns at once: what you own, what you owe, what the law will do with it, what your life costs on your own. A flooded nervous system cannot hold that many open loops. It does what nervous systems do under threat. Your heart rate climbs, your thinking narrows, and the part of you that plans for next year goes quiet. That is why the question feels enormous at night and slightly more manageable by ten the next morning. Nothing about your finances changed overnight. Your body did.
This matters because the state you are in when you look at the money changes what you see. Anxious, you read a statement and absorb almost none of it. Settled, you can read the same page, ask a question, and remember the answer tomorrow. So the first job is not to solve the money. The first job is to get steady enough to look.
Answer the next hour, not the whole future
When the question comes, do not try to answer all of it. Answer the next hour.
Are you okay right now, in this room, in this breath? Put both feet flat on the floor. Let one exhale run longer than the inhale, and then do that twice more. Look around and name three things you can see, two things you can hear, and one thing you can feel, the chair, the blanket, your own hand.
That is what okay feels like. Not the whole future settled. Just this hour, held. The future gets built one settled hour at a time, and you just built one.
Then, in daylight, get your arms around the money
Once your body is on your side, the money becomes a project instead of a verdict. Three moves help more than any others.
Find out what is true. Not what you fear, what is true. One list of what you own, one list of what you owe, one honest month of what your life costs. If your spouse handled the finances, this is where shame likes to show up: "I should know this." Trusting your partner with the money was not a mistake. It was a marriage, working the way marriages work. Catching up is work, not talent.
Bring one question to every meeting. Not mastery of the whole file. One real question, written down. Asking it proves you are allowed to not know things in that room, which is exactly the permission fear has been denying you.
Get the right help for each piece. A family law attorney tells you what the law provides. A certified divorce financial analyst, or a forensic accountant when there is a business or a complicated picture, makes sure a number that looks fine today still looks fine at 62. A therapist holds the grief and the history. And a divorce coach works the practical and the nervous-system side together, so you walk into those rooms able to use what the professionals are telling you. No one person answers all four questions. You are allowed to assemble a team.
What "okay" will actually look like
Here is what I have watched happen, again and again, once people stop trying to answer the whole future at two in the morning. The documents get gathered. The questions get asked. The numbers get understood instead of endured. And somewhere in the middle of that, usually without noticing the exact day, the question stops waking them up. Not because every number is settled. Because they have proof, from their own weeks, that they can handle the next thing.
So when the question comes tonight, answer the next hour. You are okay right now. That is enough for tonight, and it is where the rest begins.
About the author
Cherie Morris, J.D., CDC, is a divorce and conflict coach who works with the couple, the individual, and the whole family system. A former attorney, she has coached people through divorce since 2015. She is an instructor for the CDC Certified Divorce Coach program, the author of Should I Stay or Should I Go? and a chapter in Putting Kids First in Divorce, and the founder of Between Sessions, a peer community for divorce professionals. She works with clients in Seattle, the Washington, DC region, and nationwide by Zoom. Book a complimentary Discovery Session at https://deardivorcecoach.com/schedule-a-discovery-session/
Please note that the blogpost above does not represent the thoughts or opinions of Fresh Start Registry and solely represents the original author’s perspective.