The other day I wrote about how 4 in 10 marriages end in divorce; how no one expects it to be them; and yet there are some fairly common reasons as to why it happens even to the best of us.

[I’m tempted to rewrite that sentence and change “the best of us,” but I’ll leave it in because, a) it is a common saying, and, 2) because what if it’s also kinda true sometimes? After all, life is paradox.]

I also mentioned in that article that I’d share a bit more specifically what happened, or what contributed to my own divorce. Which is what this article is about.

But I’ll preface this by saying a few disclaimers:

Disclaimers for Writing About My Divorce

1. This is my perspective. It is honest and true, but it can’t not be subjectively slanted.

2. I refuse to speak ill of my ex. In fact, as you’ll read in a minute, I still think very highly of her in so many ways.

3. There are things I obviously will not share in this article because they are private and/or because they’re not mine to share. But they do not fundamentally alter what I’ll share below.

In ways I never could’ve anticipated, writing publicly about divorce is tricky.

I honestly don’t do it all that often, and when I do I’m not always sure I’m doing it right… or well.

How much is too much?
Am I being truthful?
How do I write about my ex in a way that still honors her humanity, but also reflects my reality?
How can I make sure that if my kids ever read what I write that they will feel honored, protected, and loved?

In response you may reasonably reply, Then don’t write about it, Colby.

And maybe you’re right.

But this experience of:

• Getting divorced,

• being the one who didn’t want the divorce,

• having nearly two decades of a good marriage/family prior to the divorce,

• not only not wanting the divorce but then also not getting to live with your kids any longer,

• being a parent (especially a dad) who has now become the “other parent,”

this experience is not unique to me by any stretch.

People (especially men) all over the world feel the above pains, and they/we are in need of feeling seen. Feeling validated. Feeling cared for. They/we are looking for help, support, and people saying those magic words of, “Me too. You’re not alone.”

So yeah, it’s tricky. I want to write about divorce, but I want to try and do it well. Do it fairly. Do it with respect and care and honor.

I won’t always walk that line perfectly. But I’m practicing the courage to try.

A Surprising Divorce

If you would’ve asked most (all?) people in our orbit they would’ve probably said that my wife and I had a fantastic marriage. I’ll bet there were even some who, if not envious, at least saw in us a picture of what a successful relationship looked like.

And here’s the thing: as far as I’m concerned those people were mostly right.

I mean obviously our relationship wasn’t perfect (that doesn’t exist), but looking back—and certainly while I was in it—if I compared it to my experience and observations with the marriages around us, I think we crushed it.

We had no secret life happening behind the scenes. What you saw was what you got, warts and all. Warts which we didn’t hide but openly talked about at our church, on our podcast, to therapists, and even right in front of friends and family.

All that to say, I don’t blame people if when they heard about our separation they were confused. Nor do I blame them for assuming that something had to have “happened” because it just didn’t make a lot of sense… on the surface.

But with three years of reflection, and on the other side of lots of grief and healing, it’s easier now to look back and name some of what existed under the surface. Or, actually, I’m not sure I love that language (“under the surface”) because it implies things were hidden… so perhaps I might say, I can now see with more clarity the ways in which we tried to make things work that weren’t working.

We made the dysfunctional functional.

We… or perhaps I should say “I” here… I over focused on the positive and gritted through the negative. I ignored some pretty glaring red flags, and hoped that the orange flags would eventually fade away (they did not). And I feel confident she would say the same about me.

It’s like we had concurrent streams in our marriage. One flowed well, was refreshing, nourished us and our kids and others. While the other stream would get caught up in eddies, go stale, and produce bacteria and funk.

Perhaps we thought given enough time the healthy stream would merge with, lift up, and heal the funky stream. Looking back I think my former spouse saw what I couldn’t see: that was never going to happen.

So what caused that second stream to stale, get funky, and ultimately produce life eating bacteria?

I’ll get to that in second, but first…

How I Talk About Our Divorce

Nowadays, if/when it comes up I generally begin by saying all sorts of positive things about my ex. Because that is real and true, and because that is my core belief about humanity: people are good, and most of us are doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

Then I talk about some of the ways that our marriage was successful and good and worthwhile because make no mistake, our marriage was good and successful in both its breadth and depth.

Just off the top of my head, here are some reasons I refuse to call my marriage a failure:

• We have four incredible, amazing, smart, compassionate, thoughtful, intelligent, kind, creative, and loving children. The world is better off because Zeke (20), Willow (19), Jae (15), and Huck (13) are in it. You’re welcome, earth.

• We each grew immensely as individuals during our 19 year run. Sometimes in spite of the other, but more often than not because of the support, the space, the empowerment, and the love we showed each other. I was a better man in 2022 than I was in 2003, and she a better woman. That’s amazing. And successful.

• We created and led an absolutely gorgeous faith community in San Diego for nearly nine years. The number of lives touched directly and indirectly because Sojourn Grace Collective existed is too numerous to count. Wildly, wildly successful.

• We published some remarkable podcasts via The Kate & Colby Show and (I believe) did a lot of good work to help parents, married people, and people of faith feel seen and encouraged and supported.

• While we obviously struggled at times with communication, and emotional intimacy felt like a goal we never fully unlocked (which I take a lionshare of the responsibility for, especially our first ten years), I still feel like we had a very good, very close, very fun and meaningful relationship. What people saw from the outside was, by and large, what and who we were. There was no secret-her or secret-me behind closed doors. Nothing that would cause people to be aghast and think, “Wow, I never would’ve thought that!” I loved her, she loved me, and in so many ways we thrived together.

I list all this to say, simply because our marriage ended after 19 years does not therefore render the thing a failure.

While I may have bought in to such a lie early on in my grief stage, such a perspective seems absurd to me now.

So yeah, if I do talk to people about “why we got divorced,” I’ll begin with positive things about both my former wife and about us as a couple.

From there I will acknowledge my own failures and issues, and how I know I wasn’t always an easy person to be married to. As I wrote the other day,

The Blame Pie™ (if indeed we must use such a word as “blame,” and if we must visualize it as a tasty pastry) can always be divided up. Both people have their strengths and weakness, pros and cons. Both have ways they were helpful to the relationship and ways they contributed to its demise.

Then—and only then—will I try to land the plane by naming what I see as the largest contributing factors as to why we divorced, including:

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No One Expects to Get Divorced

No couple gets married expecting to also one day get divorced.

Which is to say, no one plans to get divorced.

While some people may harbor small, quiet feelings of, “Meh, …

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In case it’s not obvious, divorce is one of those things in life where you can’t truly grasp or comprehend what it will be like unless and until you experience it.

I mean that both in terms of the lows and the highs.

Obviously each person and each couple will experience a different set of lows/highs (or pros/cons) of their separation. Two and a half years into my own divorce, there are some lows that were lower than I could’ve guessed, and some highs that I could not have seen coming.

Lows that were (far) worse than I could’ve guessed include:

• the heartbreak of the person you love no longer wanting to be with you;

• the disruption of a life you’ve grown accustomed to;

• the depression of feeling the weights of shame and failure;

• the fear of not knowing what will come next;

Highs that I would not have predicted include:

• discovering (and then reclaiming!) how much of yourself you’d lost in the relationship;

• healing from years of painful cycles;

• the opportunity to gain clarity on who you are and what you want in life;

• finding new love that makes more sense and fits better with who you’ve always been and who you are becoming;

Divorce is a trip, man.

A constant swirling of head and heart.

Now, the lows I listed above have, for the most part, found sporadic trends in the upward direction. In other words, the pain and sadness that were so acute in the early days/weeks/months are less intense—thank God.

However, one low in particular has only grown deeper as time has passed.

I’m referring to the low of…

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The focus for today was on noticing the differences in how we tend to speak to o…

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They say the Firsts are the worst.

After great loss and during deep grief, as you slowly begin engaging with your life again, there come these moments when you do something—could be as mundane as a load of laundry or as significant as celebrating Christmas—something you’ve done a million times before but always… always with them. And now it’s just you.

They say the Firsts are the worst.

On the conscious level you have years of stories, entire storage containers filled with memories of each time you did that one thing. You remember where you were and how it smelled. You recall straining to reenact how you did it the time before so that you could repeat precious rituals. Rituals that would become traditions. Traditions that would become the norm.

On the subconscious level, each time you did a thing again and again your body banked the memories in your central nervous system… without consent. It just, happens. It’s part of how your brain knows how to keep you alive. It’s brilliant like that. It creates these little shortcuts and generalizations and categories, all in an effort to reduce how much brain power it takes you to comprehend the next thing. It’s efficient, the brain. It’s why you can drive your car down the freeway and sometimes realize that you hadn’t really been paying attention the last few minutes, and yet also, you were, because your brain was handling millions of micro decisions for you. So your body stores all this information in ways that let you not have to think about it.

Sometimes in trauma work we can get bummed out that our brains do this because this is also how trauma gets stored in our body. This might lead us to feel low-key resentful for how the brain and body work—as if it should know better than to keep perishable items in the pantry for years. But truly, it’s just doing what it’s been programmed to do: keep you alive in the only ways it knows how. So it stores data, tucks it away, lets most of it run in the background. And for the most part this is fine. We don’t really think about it (that’s the point).

Until suddenly we do something, something that had been established over the course of years through rituals and traditions, something that had its own neat little folder stored in our memory reserves deep in the vault of our nervous system, and yet this time it’s different… this time it’s novel… and novelty snaps the brain out of auto mode. Instead of keeping you alive by running these nice, minimal-effort-required programs in the background, suddenly all hands are on deck to deal with this new perceived threat.

They say the Firsts are the worst.

The first time you do a thing alone after enduring loss (through death or divorce or some other kind of separation) it shocks you like a defib to the heart, but not the literal blood-pumping heart, the metaphorical here’s-where-I-store-all-my-feelings heart.

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Prior to August 15, 2022, I’d only ever heard about the phenomenon described as “panic attack.”

Truth be told, it wasn’t so much that I doubted their existence as much as I underestimated their power to utterly immobilize you. There might even have been a small part of me that, I don’t know, looked down on those who experienced panic attacks.

As though they simply lacked the mental fortitude to just, you know, get over it.

Ladies and gentleman, I repent of my ways.

I get it now.

What is a Panic Attack?

The opening line of MayoClinic.com describes panic attacks like this:

A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause.

• Sudden: you don’t see it coming, you can’t plan for it, it just happens.

• Intense fear: your nervous system is in full blown protect mode. Fight, flight, freeze responses are brought online, all systems go.

• Triggers physical reactions: even though the episode is only happening in your mind, the reaction is distributed throughout the body.

• No real danger or cause: there is no lion in the bush, no poison in the blood stream, no actual threat to your (physical) well being, and yet your body is very much reacting as though there is.

Episodes can vary in duration (when I think back on the dozen or so I had in that two month period of my life they ranged from maybe 5 to 50 minutes). And while the intensity also varies, for me it was more like degrees-of-awful. Each one burned like hell, and at that level of pain it doesn’t really make much of a difference between horrible, terrible, or god-awful.

As mentioned, the first time this happened to me was Monday night, August 15th, 2022.

The day my marriage died.

Trying to Prepare for Divorce

On the morning of August 15th, Kate (my then-wife of 18 years, 357 days) told me that our marriage was over.

As I wrote about here, the ending of our marriage was something that I simultaneously and paradoxically expected and never saw coming. For the two weeks leading up to that morning I had almost daily been giving myself pep talks in the mirror, telling myself, “I got you, Colby, no matter what happens.”

I guess there are some things in life that, no matter how much you try, you can’t ever really be ready for them. Divorce was that for me.

Growing up as a child of divorce (a really nasty one, one that tore apart our family and imprinted trauma on my brain that I’m still trying to heal from), one of my biggest (only?) goals in life was to never put my own kids through that. And perhaps also to never put the eight-year-old-kid-inside-me through it again, either.

But even beyond the mere avoidance of the suffering that divorce can bring, my dream was to reset a Family Tree. To create a legacy of belonging and love and connection with Kate and me at the root, stable and strong and firm. This dream was my North Star, the thing that compelled me to finally go to therapy shortly after turning 30 when Kate, for the first time (or at least, the first time I heard/received it) really truly communicated her feelings and fears about the issues in our relationship.

At that point in my life I was still living pretty unconsciously. Disconnected from my emotional world (thanks to the aforementioned trauma), I had grown in to a pretty selfish person who was difficult to get close to. My lack of openness and inability to be vulnerable kept people out—my wife most of all. Being married to me had to have been a pretty lonely experience.

So when, ten years into our marriage, the prospect of separation first entered the atmosphere of possibility, my revulsion of divorce kicked in and I got serious about getting help. I spent the next eight years in various seasons and sessions of therapy, a truly life saving experience. Thanks to the patience, clarity, and honesty of Angel, Allison, Alair, and Moriah, I’ve had so many breakthroughs on the couch about why I am the way I am and, more importantly, how to get better.

But this article isn’t about that, this is about my first panic attack, so let’s get back on track. Mostly I just wanted to set the stage for how devastating Monday, August 15th was for me—even if, on some level, I saw it coming.

An Erratic Afternoon

After we had the “our marriage just died” conversation in the morning, Kate left the house for awhile and I tried to be normal—but clearly, in hindsight, I was spiraling, trying to manage the chaos swirling in my heart and mind.

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Look, there’s no way around it: being a #divorceddad really sucks (for me), insofar as it has meant my life went from being with my kids aaaallllll the time, to, well hardly …

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Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky

As I’ve written here, and here, the final week of 2022 turned out to be the time in my post-divorce chapter where I’d finally engage with the Anger Stage of Grief.

On one hand it felt good to finally let myself feel all the feels I’d been keeping at bay. But on the other hand, as I said, I don’t particularly like or enjoy the emotion of anger. So it was a confusing and complicated week for me.

On the morning of December 31st I woke up early, lit the fire in the living room, opened my Kindle and looked for something to read. My eyes halted on the following cover:

I don’t even remember how or why I originally came across and purchased this book several months prior. But there it sat, undownloaded and unopened on my Kindle.

*Tap* … *Download* … Why not? Let’s start reading.

I didn’t stop for three hours.

The author, Gabriel Cohen, tells the story of how his wife unexpectedly ended their marriage and it left him empty, confused, and alone.

Same, bro. Same.

One night he found himself randomly attending a seminar on Buddhism where he was immediately drawn to the ideas and principles shared by the teacher. Eventually he began practicing himself, and the books describes how it provided for him a healing path for his divorce.

Now, over the years I’ve dabbled in and around Buddhism (primarily through reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron), so it wasn’t so much that I was struck for the first time by some of what the author was saying, rather it was one of those “right place, right time” moments, where my soul was perfectly primed to receive certain ideas and words and concepts.

As a result of reading Cohen’s story, two monumental shifts happened in my heart and mind over the weekend of the last day of 2022 and the first of 2023.

They are…

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One year ago today I emerged from a fog of Anger with regards to my divorce that was threatening to close my heart for good and subsume my spirit to cynicism.

Thankfully, through the timing of Providence, I read a book over the New Year’s weekend of 2022/23 that utterly changed my perspective and liberated me from my downward spiral of Anger and resentment.

I’ll tell you more about that book later, but first let me share with you how it is I even got to Anger (the fourth and, for me, final Stage of Grief).

It began with Thanksgiving of 2022 and peaked on New Year’s Eve.

My Second-Worst Week of 2022

Last year’s Holiday season—from Thanksgiving through Christmas of 2022—was an acutely painful time for me.

Fresh off the ending of my marriage, I’d been living out of the house for about four months at the time and was experiencing a number of “firsts.”

And the firsts are always the worst.

I remember one therapy session in which my therapist offered her theory as to why that time of year (Thanksgiving through Christmas) is particularly hard for someone who’s experienced some form of deep grief (aka, death of a loved one, or an unwanted divorce). She said that

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“I’ve always loved Christmas,” I insisted the other day to a friend after she hinted that I seemed rather Grinch-y about something.

But no sooner did the words leave my mouth than I realized wait, that’s not true. That’s revisionist history.

I have not, in fact, always loved Christmas.

Let me try and explain.

To put it plainly, growing up in a divorced home with parents who didn’t (couldn’t?) cooperate at holiday times was stressful AF.

Prior to the divorce (which happened around ages 8-10 for me… it was a lengthy, messy process), I’m sure, like most kids, I loved Christmas (and I’ll lump Birthdays in as well). I don’t have a ton of memories before age 8, but many of the ones I (feel like I) do have involve Christmas time. Specifically going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for the Martin family gathering every year on Christmas Eve!

• All the cousins going downstairs to the basement while the adults filled our stockings

• While in the basement, going back and forth from watching bits and pieces of The Christmas Story in one room and shooting pool in the other

• Mandarin oranges at the bottom of the stocking

• A new ceramic clown figurine every year (for me, anyway. Each grandchild was assigned an animal at birth, so that my Grandma would get a new figurine every Christmas for each kid. For reasons unknown, I was the only one not given an animal. Instead, I was assigned clowns. Some day I’ll share with you my clown collection. You’re welcome)

• Hearing the Christmas story read (and even one year, getting to be the kid to read it!)

Those memories are warm. They’re fond. They fill me with lightness and love.

But post divorce? Christmas started to suck.

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Oh. Right. No ring.

I haven’t had a ring on my finger since last August, and yet still there are moments that catch me by surprise.

For 19 years I felt the cold, smooth sensation of metal against my skin. A constant reminder of the vows I made, the commitments I entered in to, the choice I made to live a kind of life were one person—and one person only—would be my Person.

19 years doesn’t… can’t… get easily rewired by only one year. So yeah, I still have these moments where I’m like, “oh, right, there’s no ring there.”

I don’t use bar soap all that often, but every time I did my ring would carve out the sides of the soft rectangle and leave little pieces of soap trapped between the metal and my finger, requiring a bit more scrubbing during the rinse phase to clean it out.

But one night, a few months back while in a hotel in Indy, the bar slid smoothly across my left hand, and for a moment my body reacted to the lack of a snag.

Oh. Right. No ring.

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“Is it too soon to be dating already?”

Too soon.

Too soon??

Hmmm… I know this is a pretty standard question to ask in certain situations, but I feel less and less convinced that it has any real merit.

It…

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Huh?

She went on to explain (which I'll do here in a minute) and it makes SO MUCH SENSE.

But first let me ask you, have you ever:

• Experienced deep grief and then been subsequently shocked and discouraged by how your friends and family react and treat you?

• Been close to someone who’s experienced deep grief and not been sure what to do or say (that would hopefully avoid the aforementioned “shock” and “discourage”)?

• Wondered why some people who aren’t themselves the direct recipient of the grief event nonetheless act in a way that makes it seem like it’s happening to them?

If you answered yes to any of that, then read on. Because the Ring Theory (aka, Comfort in, Dump out) is a game changer.

And if you answered no to any of the above, then, well, bully for you that you’ve gone through life thus far unscathed by grief and its terrible ripple effects (and maybe bookmark this for later, cause grief comes for us all).

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The week following the death of our marriage was weird.

Hard, obviously, but also really weird.

Last week I shared the story of how I tried living in the house after my ex ended our marriage because she wanted to try and keep the family together. Even keep “us” together… kind of? A domestic partnership sorta thing, I guess.

Which, when she first suggested it and asked me what I thought, my first words, “Well, that’s not the kind of life I want to live.”

I’m not interested in a roommate. Especially one I was still in love with and crazy about. Such a setup seemed not only improbable to me, but also super depressing.

She didn’t like my answer. Accused me of being selfish, which I struggled to understand because didn’t she ask me to share my thoughts on the matter? Later that day I reflected back on that moment and considered how perhaps a different (better?) response might’ve been to acknowledge that I’d heard the things she shared, communicate back to her that I saw and understood her… and then maybe I could’ve shared my feelings without it blowing up and becoming about how selfish I was to “center” myself?

I don’t know, y’all. A year later and I’m still trying to figure these things out. How do you share honestly about what you’re feeling without it also appearing as though you are centering yourself and your feelings?

If you have any ideas, please send help.

Anyway, back to the weirdness of that week…

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You may recall that last week I reflected on the one year anniversary of when my marriage ended.

Well, today allow me to share with you how this day, August 23rd, would have been my former wife and mine’s 20th anniversary, and how also, one year ago today (on what was our 19th anniversary), I finally moved out of the house for good.

But wait… if the marriage ended on August 15th, but I didn’t move out until August 23rd, then… huh?

Yeah. I know.

I’ll try and explain.

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