Reconnecting With Your Values After Separation or Divorce
Separation and divorce require an almost overwhelming number of decisions. Where will you live? How will you divide your time with your children? What happens to your finances? Which friendships will change? What will holidays look like? Do you want to date? Should you change jobs, keep the house, move somewhere new?
In the middle of all those practical questions, there is another one that is easy to overlook:
What matters to me now?
Not what mattered to you as one half of a couple, what you became accustomed to doing because that was how your household worked, or what the two of you decided together was best for your family. Not what mattered to you before your marriage. What values matter most to the person you are today?
Divorce disrupts many of the structures we use to organize our lives. That disruption can be disorienting, but it also creates an opportunity to take stock of your values and think intentionally about how you want to live in this next phase.
Reassessing What Matters to You
As one half of a couple, you likely made adjustments that affected how some of your values showed up in your life. There is nothing inherently wrong with that – it's part of what partnership is all about. But when the compromises that shaped your married life are no longer needed, you have an opportunity to look again at what matters to you. What you find may be a mix of the familiar and the new.
Some things that once mattered deeply to you may still feel important, even if they haven't had much space in your life recently. You may remember how much you loved having people over, traveling, making music, being involved in your community, or pursuing your career. There can be something wonderfully clarifying about recognizing one of those parts of yourself and thinking, "Oh, yeah. That can be important to me again."
At the same time, you have changed since you entered your marriage. Your experiences may have shifted your priorities, making certain values more important and others less so. What mattered to you at 30 may not be what matters to you at 45 or 55.
Reconnecting with your values, then, isn't about returning to the person you were before your relationship. It's about taking stock of who you are now: what still matters, what has changed, and what you want to make more room for in the life ahead.
Building a Life That Reflects Your Values
Identifying your values is only the beginning. The next step is to look at the life you are living now and ask how well it reflects them.
Start by considering the areas of your life that matter most: your relationships, parenting, career, friendships, home, health, community, finances, and how you spend your time. Where do you already see your values reflected? Where is there a disconnect? You may discover, for example, that connection is one of your most important values, but your social life has dwindled over the years. Or that you deeply value creativity but have almost no outlet for it in your current life.
Those gaps don't necessarily call for dramatic changes. In fact, when so much else may already be changing, small and intentional choices can be far more manageable. If community matters to you, you might reconnect with an organization you once enjoyed or become more involved in your neighborhood. If adventure has been missing, you don't need to book a month-long trip; you might simply start exploring places you've never been.
Your values can also serve as a filter for the bigger decisions that come with rebuilding after divorce. Whether to stay in your home, pursue a new job, start dating, move to a different city, or change the way you spend your time becomes easier to think about when you know what you are trying to build toward. Values won't always give you an obvious answer, and practical realities will still matter. But they can help you distinguish between a choice that simply solves today's problem and one that moves you toward the life you actually want.
You don't need to redesign your whole life at once. Choose one area where the way you're living feels out of alignment with something that matters to you, and ask yourself: What is one thing I could change to make a little more room for this value in my life?
Over time, those choices add up. Rebuilding after divorce doesn't have to mean creating an entirely new version of yourself or designing some picture-perfect "next chapter." It can be something much more grounded: understanding what matters to you now and making choices, one by one, that allow more of those things into your life.
If you're not sure what your values are—or simply haven't stopped to think about them in a while—I've created a free Values Finder to help you identify and prioritize what matters most to you. You can access it at kandicethorn.com.
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.
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