EP52 Taking Back the Calendar and Taking Back your Life: How to Handle Anniversaries After Divorce

In this episode of "The Divorce Chapter" podcast, I reflect on the challenges of coping with anniversaries after a divorce. As someone who's been through the utter shitshow of a marriage ending, I know first-hand how difficult these days can be, especially in that first year. 

Anniversaries, such as your wedding date or other significant milestones shared with your ex, can bring a FLOOD of emotions—sadness, anger, or even a sense of loss for the future you once planned.

I delve into why these dates are so emotionally charged, and how they can trigger feelings of grief and nostalgia. I also share my own experiences with significant anniversaries, like how I dealt with my first wedding anniversary post-divorce by escaping to Cyprus and then making a decision to change my goddamn life.

Hopefully you’ll be able to get a few ideas too about how to plan ahead to reclaim the date and reclaim gorgeous YOU ❤️

In the episode, I also celebrate a new anniversary - the first one of this podcast. I never ever thought I’d be saying that but here we are and it’s all thanks to you as a wonderful listener.

Thank you thank you thank you 🥰

Here’s to another year of our next chapter 🌸

So much love,

Sarah x

P.S. We’ve also chosen September’s book over in the Divorce Book Club. 

Getting Past your Breakup by Susan J Elliott has cropped up on my TBR list for the book club several times so it must be a sign 📚

The blurb says: 

It’s over—and it really hurts. But as unbelievable as it may seem when you are in the throes of heartache, you can move past your breakup. Forget about trying to win your ex back. Forget about losing yourself and trying to make this person love you. Forget it! Starting today, this breakup is the best time to change your life for the better, inside and out. 

You can check out the book here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0738213284/ref=nosim?tag=thedivorceb00-21

I’d love to see you over there 📚

We start 1 September. 

Link to join below ⬇️

THE DIVORCE BOOK CLUB
 
https://patreon.com/thedivorcebookclub

FREE Guide to the 10 MUST read divorce books after divorce

https://thedivorcebookclub.com/free-resources/

INSTAGRAM

https://www.instagram.com/thedivorcechapter

Chapters

• 0:00 The first anniversary of the podcast - and the first anniversaries after divorce
• 4:12 If only the dates were magically removed from the calendar
• 8:38 Some of my own firsts after divorce
• 13:35 Your body keeps the score
• 15:12 Coping strategies for the sh*tty days
• 18:00 Creating new traditions?
• 21:16 The Life Quake as Transformation
• 25:47 Happy Anniversary to the Divorce Chapter (and thank you)

Transcript

Sarah Elizabeth  00:01

Hello and welcome to the divorce chapter, the podcast where we rewrite our best goddamn life stories after a divorce shit show. I'm Sarah Elizabeth, your host, and today we're diving into a topic that can be particularly bloody challenging for anyone that's gone through a divorce and that is coping with anniversaries. And the reason I actually thought about this as a topic for today is that this episode is episode number 52, of this weekly podcast, and so today is basically the first anniversary or the first birthday of the podcast. So I'm giving myself a huge fucking pat on the back as apparently only a very small minority of podcasts actually keep going without suffering what they call Podfade. Actually, I saw one stat that said 90% of podcasts don't even get past episode three, and 90% of the remaining quit after 20 episodes. So go, me and go you for keep coming back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll reflect more on the first year of the divorce chapter in a bit, but I wanted to cover anniversaries, as having been through this shit, those special dates can be super fucking hard, particularly the first of any of them. You know, I'm not just talking about anniversaries. Obviously, wedding anniversaries are the worst ones after divorce, but generally, all the special dates that were once shared between you and your ex. Now whether that's your wedding anniversary or a significant birthday or other milestone, just something that you celebrated together, those dates can bring up a huge flood of emotions, especially like I said during that first year after the divorce, or the split, or whatever. So how do you cope with these days when they roll around on the calendar? And what can you do to ease that pain, or even start to reclaim these dates as your own? And that's why I thought I'd talk a bit today about this and why these anniversaries can be so damn difficult, and also share maybe a couple of practical strategies for managing your emotions on these days, and think about how we can maybe even find new meaning in these significant dates. Obviously, as always, there's no one size fits all approach to all of this, so just listen, take what feels good and leave the rest right.  So let's start by talking about why anniversaries can be so emotionally charged after a divorce. Now it might be seemingly pretty obvious, but it is important to understand this, because the first step in coping with these days is acknowledging what you're feeling and why. Now anniversaries, by their nature, are markers of time, right? They remind us of the passage of years, of the milestones that we've reached, and I suppose you know moments that, once upon a time, were full of hope, full of happiness. So you know, when you were married, your wedding anniversary, for example, was probably a day to celebrate, like celebrating your commitment, celebrating your marriage, celebrating your love, right? And we get those themes for every anniversary too. Don't we like paper for the first one, then cotton, then is it leather, whatever. So, so on, so forth, and till we get to the biggest, like silver, Pearl, gold, emerald, diamond, the big one is that, 60,70, whatever, yeah. Anyway, I know there's whole new modern take on this too, like they're the traditional ones, but the point is, they're all annual markers of the day you said, I do and the day you promised to love each other and cherish each other until death do you part or whatever, whatever, and birthdays as well. They might have been a time to come together as a family celebrate another year round of sun and all that, but generally, a special time and one way you could show your love for the other person and receive love from the other person, right? And the problem is, is that after divorce, these dates don't just disappear from the calendar. They're not just magically removed. They still come around, but now, instead of being filled with nice things, they might be filled with sadness, they might be filled with loss or even anger, and that's never truer than during that first year after your divorce, when every first feels like a whole new fucking mountain to climb. And the reason these days are so hard is that exactly because they're tied they're tied to memories, they're tied to emotion. There's so much meaning and history attached to the day. They remind you of what once was, which just then ends up bringing up all those feelings of grief for the relationship that ended, for the loss, for the future that you had planned that's no longer a reality, the person you were when you were married, and the history as well, right? All of those past special moments you need to grieve, because when a marriage ends, it isn't inverted commas, just just the marriage that ends. It's so much more than that. So it's entirely normal, then to feel a massive sense of loss or grief on these days, even if you've been doing really well overall, like you may well have been smashing life after divorce, and then along comes the wedding anniversary, and all of a sudden you're a fucking mess again. You know? There's also that other anniversary days, the new anniversary days, the ones you didn't have before, like the day you split up, or the day you found out he was cheating, new and really fucking unwanted anniversaries, Happy Fuckiversary and all that.  So let me tell you about a couple of my own experiences with anniversaries after my shit show. So the first big date to come up after our split was actually our wedding anniversary. It would have been our 20th which is me, Old China and all that. And by this time, things had completely reversed from the split. So at the time of the split, I hadn't wanted to separate, and I was desperate to sort out our marriage. He was just done. He was done, but then all of his shit unraveled in catastrophic fashion, and then I was done. There was no way I was going back. After all the lies and the betrayal, just all of it, all of it, I was done, but then he was desperate to get me back, and it was all pretty farcical to be fair, like from the split on the 28th of December to the wedding anniversary on the fourth of June, so much had happened, so much had happened, and things had completely changed. And despite all of that, he was pretty much hounding me constantly to get back together, even though he was with someone else by then. Anyway, you know, it was just exhausting. And so I had this feeling with the wedding anniversary coming up, that I just needed to be away from him, and to me, that meant going out the country. So I booked an all inclusive holiday to Cyprus, somewhere I'd never been with him, and it turned out to be the best decision ever, as with the space and the peace to just breathe and think out there, I ended up coming home and moving out of the Museum of our marriage, which was basically The launch to my new life. So that was how I dealt with the first wedding anniversary, although a bit of a funnier one, just to amuse you. A few years after we split up, our son got married, and he and his wife had an Indian wedding ceremony the week before. The official wedding, if you like, and this ceremony was on the third of June, the day before our wedding anniversary. But everyone was staying over at the hotel where the ceremony was, and so I was kind of joking that on the morning at breakfast, I'd like skip over to him and his yet another new girlfriend and go Happy anniversary. But I didn't. I didn't. I was very, very tempted, but I didn't. I was good. Um, yeah, that was the wedding anniversaries. Ah birthday. The first year my boys and their partners and a load of my close friends went to a lovely local restaurant and really celebrated in style. It was a bit weird because it's where I'd had my 40th birthday meal the year before, but it was just celebrating with my friends in a new way. We all went back to my new my new place at Princess cottage, and partied into the night. It just made it so much better, and actually celebrated it, rather than me sitting there maudling and moaning and being miserable, you know. And then the first anniversary of the split, on the 28th of December, my bestie gave me a bottle of champagne to commemorate surviving the year, and we went out partying. And although actually that the anniversary of our actual legal divorce has never really been a thing for me, because I don't actually know what the date was, it came through in october 2014 it took fucking ages, but it had been, like, dated in September, so I'd like, been divorced a month before. I actually knew that I was divorced. So honestly, I never remember that day, the split day, was the date that I remember, and the wedding anniversary, like, although now I don't actually have any feelings about the wedding anniversary, and only usually, to be honest, remember because I know the day, like if I wrote it down at work or something, I'd go oh it's my wedding anniversary, whatever the split anniversary I do Nowadays, kind of treat it as a celebration of the start of my much happier new life. I guess, like I do, kind of think about reflect and think about how far I've come. So yeah, that was how I dealt with a few of my own firsts.  But I guess here's the thing, right, it takes time to get to meh. It it takes time to lose the attachment to these dates and find some ambivalence to it all right, and those difficult emotions in the first years, as hard as they are, as raw as they are, and as much as we don't want them, they are an entirely normal and natural part of the healing process. And I do think sometimes it's like your body remembers it before you do before your brain does. At the anniversary of my mum and dad's death, for example, the first few years, I felt really depressed and so fucking low for a good few weeks leading up to it without me even realizing the significance. It took me a good few years to realize that, oh, this is why I feel a bit shit every year from about the middle of April. So you know, it's okay to feel sad or angry or numb, pissed off like you want to air your feelings on fake book, though, that's always another one that comes up, and I get it, especially if you haven't changed your settings, and you get the poxy, unwanted memories cropping up. Don't do it. Try not to do it. Try not to do it. What's important now is how you choose to work through the shittiness and navigate these feelings, because you do get a bit of a choice, and if you can pick the right strategies, it helps.  So what are some strategies for coping with these days, especially in that first year? Well, plan ahead. That's the first one plan ahead. One of the best ways to cope with a difficult anniversary is to plan ahead, because the anticipation of the day can actually be worse than the day itself. There's such a thing called anticipatory anxiety. And the best description I heard of this is that it's like bleeding before you are cut. And it actually works in reverse too like in anticipatory excitement, like the build up to a holiday, for example, can be. Be better than the actual thing, you know, but you know, yeah, often the build up to the special day is horrendous. We end up catastrophizing. We're ruminating to a Olympic, bloody gold medal standards. So having a plan in place can really, really help to reduce the anxiety, think about what you're going to maybe need on the day, whether that's time alone to reflect, although that's not always the best idea, but you know, whether that's spending time with friends and family or doing something completely different, by planning ahead, you take control of the day instead of letting the day control you, and also acknowledge your feelings, like it's it is really important to give yourself that permission to feel whatever comes up on these dates, like, if you're sad, allow yourself to cry, allow yourself to grieve. If you're angry, acknowledge that anger just don't go keying his car or anything else that can get you arrested, you know, but honestly, bottling up your emotions or pretending that the day doesn't affect you. I don't give a shit. It's just our wedding anniversary I don't give a fuck, that sort of thing I just said, but it does affect you, so pretending that it doesn't just can make things worse, right? Have a good old journal sesh. We love a good old journal, sesh, chat to a trusted friend, even go book a therapist appointment on the day. Just process these emotions and get them out of your body, because holding on to that shit is just storing up future problems. It really is.  Or you could create new traditions like that's often an amazing way to reclaim the day that might be something like treating yourself to a day at the spa, taking a day trip to a place you've always wanted to visit, or starting a new hobby, basically by creating new memories, you're slowly starting to shift the focus from what the day used to represent to what it represents now, or what it can represent now. Or an idea, I heard name the day after your children instead, because had it not been for the marriage of the relationship, you wouldn't have had your gorgeous kids, even though they might be fuckers, sometimes they are worth celebrating, you know. So it becomes your kids names day. They don't get any presents, though no presents its not another excuse for presents, kids. This is, this is your day, and just make sure to surround yourself with support too, you know, don't be afraid to use your support squad, your people, the right people, your people will totally get how hard that first special day is. Even if they're not divorced, they get it, and if they don't get it, well, frankly, they don't deserve a spot in your squad, but honestly, just like I did my first birthday after the shit show, surrounding yourself with people who care about you makes all the difference. It helps you to feel seen. It helps you to feel less alone and remind you there are still people who love you and care about you and make sure, too, that you practice a bit of self care and self compassion, because on those days that are emotionally charged and are likely to be super challenging, self care is more important than ever, and that might be Just getting enough rest, some sleep, eating, well, exercising. It might be doing something kind for yourself, like reading a good book, taking a long bath, watching a movie. It's about looking after yourself and recognizing that you deserve to feel good, even on the tough days, and being kind to yourself, not beating yourself up if you are a sniveling wreck, it's all normal. But also take the time to reflect on your growth and how far you've come. Yes the day might be hard, really fucking hard, but it's also an opportunity to acknowledge your resilience, your strength, the progress you've made, maybe even write a letter to yourself to say, well, bloody done and record how you're feeling. Because honestly, when you look back at what you've written, what you've done, you can really see just how much you've grown. And how far you've come. You thought it was going to break you. You felt broken, yet here you are still showing up and trying every single goddamn day that that you. It's worth celebrating. I saw a thing recently that talked about life quake, and it really resonated with me, mainly because I've always described my own shit show like an earthquake. And it said like a life quake is like a significant and unexpected shift in the trajectory of your life that initially feels awful devastating shit, like, like the earthquake, like it did, but has the beneficial outcome of transformation and almost like rebirth, life quake. I'm here for that. I'm here for that, turning our pain into power. It's time to reclaim the date, take the date and transform it from a reminder of what was lost, what it was, into a celebration of what is, and more excitingly, what's yet to come. It doesn't happen overnight. I get it, honestly, I get it. And it's okay if it takes time, if it takes two, five, even 10 years, if it has to, the goal is to eventually see these days as opportunities for new things, for growth, even bloody good old fashioned joy, you know, let's make them joyful again. Let's say your wedding anniversary is coming up, instead of dreading the day, wallowing like a whale, having whale time for the day, you could choose to make it a day for celebrating your independence and your new life that you're building, maybe it's a day you start a new annual tradition, even taking a solo trip, like I did, or, you know, I don't know, hosting your own self party celebrate yourself, party with your closest mates, and birthdays, There's another opportunity for reclaiming the day. They might remind you of past celebrations with your ex, but there can also be a time to focus on you and the life that you're creating now. That's the key. It's making the day about you and what you want. And actually, on a birthday, we are celebrating you, you've been born, your life. It's not about him, and I know the first anniversary of any kind after a divorce is often the hardest, but I promise you, every year these days do get easier, I promise you, but acceptance is also a significant part of this process. You've got, you know, accept that these anniversaries will be difficult, because that acceptance allows you to prepare and cope in healthy ways. It doesn't mean you have to like or enjoy these days yet, you know, maybe that's for the future. It just means you acknowledge that they're part of your journey, and it's okay to feel however you feel. Healing is a journey, right? Journey. Coping with anniversaries after divorce is just one part of that. It's okay to grieve and feel pain and struggle, but remember you also have the power to reclaim these dates. Find new meaning in them. Keep moving forward. Keep on this next chapter. Your happy ever after. You're not alone in this, whether it's through your friends, through your family support group, whether it's through this podcast, there are people who get you, who understand what you're going through, and are here to support you, right?  And talking of this podcast and a beautiful new special first anniversary for me, here is to a year of the divorce chapter podcast, something I never, ever imagined saying ever if you'd have told me on the first wedding anniversary after the split, after the breakup, or the first anniversary of the breakup itself, that I'd end up becoming a divorce mentor and having a podcast where I'd be celebrating its first birthday, I'd have told you you're fucking nuts love I would like, you know, but here we are, and what a year we've done, around 1500 100 minutes, which is just mad when at the start, I panicked I'd be able to speak for 15 minutes. So you've got over 24 hours of waffle, you lucky people. But honestly, you know what? Honestly, there's been times in this year of just before starting as well, I've battled, I've cried over the fucking tech and the editing and the How to shit like it's been a fucking mission at times, but the content itself, that stuff I've truly loved every single one of those 1500 minutes, to be able to take my own shit show and my own experiences and turn it into something that might just be able to help one person, someone somewhere, going through this right now, well, I'm fucking proud of myself. I'm really fucking proud of myself. Actually, we've covered so much. I made a note of all the things we've covered. We've done, all things, being single, our thoughts, our feelings, the grief, the trauma, especially betrayal, trauma and infidelity, which we touched on a fair few times, about domestic abuse, what that looks like, what it does to us. We've done attachment. We've done habits, adult kids, friendships, even a bit of the old woo, woo. We've visualized and planned our next chapter. We've talked through what we've learned how to sort your sleep out, even alcohol. We've talked in laws, confidence, tattoos, co parenting, pets, co dependencies, hyper independence. We've Honestly, I feel like we've covered so much, and now we've started to have some really amazing guests on too. We've had legally Nik as our first guest, which was lovely, Elisa Lindstrom as our decluttering expert. And more recently, we've had Chantelle Dyson with the single spark. We've got a few more lined up as well. We've got lawyers and money experts lined up, as well as some beautiful, raw personal stories coming up as well. So as always, please, please, please. If you do want to hear something specific, there's a or there's an expert that you'd really like me to have on the podcast. Please do let me know, and if this year of the divorce chapter has helped you even just a tiny bit, I would love love. Love it. If you could share the pod with your friends, share it on the socials, and also, if you could spare just a few seconds of your time to rate and review the episode, I honestly would be so grateful. Wow. So here is to the next year of the divorce chapter, and the next year the podcast. And here's to the next year of the amazing you. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and allowing me to be part of your journey too. I honestly am so grateful. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. I will be back in your beautiful earbuds again next week with so much love from me