Facing Fear: A Divorce Story

Today I'm getting honest about the emotional rollercoaster of dealing with controlling behaviors, losing friends, and ultimately finding the strength to rebuild. From navigating toxic relationships and smear campaigns to wrestling with my own reactions, I've learned powerful lessons on letting go of control, regulating my emotions, and discovering patience. This episode isn’t just about my story; it’s about how we can all find strength in tough times, no matter the challenges we face.

Episode Highlights:
[03:40] - A night of confrontation: standing up against intimidation in my own home.
[10:24] - Losing friends and discovering who’s truly supportive in difficult times. 
[13:15] - The impact of a smear campaign and finding the strength to cut out toxic people.
[16:50] - Key lessons from my divorce: giving up control and finding inner peace.
[17:45] - Emotional regulation: shifting from reactive to calm in challenging situations.
[18:50] - Learning patience: why the journey takes time, and that’s okay.

Links & Resources:

Be sure to follow, share, and leave a comment if this show resonates with you! Send me a message at podpage.com/themusicoflife to share your experiences, or to leave a comment. I'd love to feature it in a future episode.

Transcript

Caryn Portnoy: 0:00

Hi everyone, and welcome to the music of Life. I'm your host. Karen Portnoy, before I get into this episode, please comment, ask questions, share some of your experiences, and don't forget to subscribe. What were some of the scariest moments in your divorce? You know, the kind that left you shaking, or the kind that that made you jump out of your skin, or just something that horrified you about your divorce and how your ex spouse treated you. I want to address something that happened one night I spoke about it in an earlier episode where my ex husband was alienating my daughter from me while we were still living together in the house, he would often have her in his bedroom with the door closed. My issue about her being in his room with the door closed had to do with the fact that he was constantly alienating her from me, not for any other reason. On this one night, I knew that it was getting late, and I had a feeling that my daughter fell asleep in his bed with the door closed. So I knocked on the door, and I saw that she had fallen asleep, and I said to her that it was not appropriate for her to fall asleep in his bed with the door closed, and I asked her to please move into her own bed. She carried on and stomped and and went into her room. I went into my room, and lo and behold, he got out of bed and decided to go into her room, and he was chatting with her, which he often did, to assert his dominance and his presence in her room and with her. It was kind of his way of claiming her, that he had her attention. He was controlling the whole thing, you know, knowing that I was in my room and and I wasn't going to go into her room while he was there. It was just a way of him controlling the situation, and he did it several times a day, every day, on this one particular night, though I thought to myself, while I was in my room, I own half of this house. I have rights to be wherever I want to be in this house too. Why does he get, you know, full dominion over her room? So I decided that I was going to go in her room too. He started in with me, and this was all in front of her. He started in with me about how he pays the mortgage, and therefore it's his house, and he owns half her room and all this stuff. I mean, even though my name is on the deed too, we both owned the house, and he was being so petty about like, I mean, I was waiting for him to say how many square feet of her room he owns. It was ridiculous. But he was getting so irate that I was standing in her room with him, he turned around and stormed out of her room while I was still standing there. He was halfway down the hall, and within seconds, he turned around and ran back into her room, and right in my face, he had his hand up and locked and loaded and ready to go, and I saw pure evil in his eyes, pure evil. He must have somehow broken himself off from whatever rage he was feeling, and he turned around, and he walked out of her room and into her bathroom, I believe, to cool down. And I turned around and followed him and got in his face and said, You want to hit me so bad, go ahead, because then I get to call the police and get your ass tossed out of here. And he turned to me and he said, I don't hit women. So as it turned out later on, one of my friends said to me, that was the dumbest move you could ever make. All it took was him hitting like punching my head and knocking me out, and who knows if I ever would have gotten up again. But in my mind, the reason that I got up in his face was because I wanted to send the message to him that I wasn't afraid of him. It turned out that shortly after this episode, I ended up joining a boxing class just in case. So that was the night he almost hit me to say I was shaking every bone in my body is an understatement when you're up against somebody who has such rage and such anger. And you know, the signs were there over the years. I mean, he did punch a couple of holes in a couple of walls. And, you know, he constantly had road rage when his wife and daughter were in. Car. You just don't know when he's going to actually snap. And I really thought that was going to be the night that he did. I could not believe that this was happening in front of our daughter. I want to move to another incident that happened. I believe it was in 2022 one of my now ex friends, who I felt the closest to out of all of our friends and our friend group, we had their family over for dinners and holidays and various occasions, as they had us over to their house too. We used to vacation with them. Our kids knew each other since they were three years old, and she used to send me cards every now and then, whether it was a birthday card or just a, you know, thinking of you kind of card, always saying how special I was, what a great person I am, how much she loves me, all of that. But, you know, people's true colors really do come out when you divorce. My instinct always said to me that her husband was one of my ex husband's good friends. They were close, and I believe her husband was one of his bigger supporters throughout the divorce, and I believe that my friend wasn't strong enough to go up against her husband to fight for me. But you know, they invited my ex husband and my daughter to their house all the time, and I always wondered, why are you having them over and not me with my daughter or me alone, or whatever like, I'm still the same person. And now whatever story he sold everyone I don't know. So now they were inviting them over exclusively, and not me at any point, and it hurt, but, you know, it was what it was. I mean, I had my own demons to fight in my divorce, and I wasn't going to get bogged down by this, but it was, it was an observation, you know, when I was cutting out all of my ex friends out of my life and deleting and unfriending and blocking and all of that. She was one of them, because in my mind, it was like, Well, if you're not for me, you're against me. And if she wasn't willing to fight for me and say, Well, you know, we care about Karen too, then it made it easier for me to mentally and emotionally separate from her and them. So some time had had gone by and I was working at my daughter's sleep away camp, as I had done for six years. While I was at Camp working, my ex friend texted me or emailed me and asked if we could get together after camp, her and her daughters, and me and my daughter, and we would have a girls weekend, you know, just us. And I thought that was lovely. And I said, of course. And I said, but I'm just letting you know that there are going to be lawyers involved in picking a date with this because I knew that my ex husband was going to try and sabotage this trip, and I told her as such. Now she's kind of known for kind of flaking out, like making plans and then canceling at the last minute, or stuff like that. So that's why I said to her up front you know, lawyers are going to be involved, which means I have to pay my attorney. He has to pay his attorney to get this girl's trip worked out. So I was clear about that, and so we went ahead and we made plans for a particular weekend. I told my ex husband what my intention was in going on this trip with my daughter, making sure I got his consent, which, you know, was apparently something I needed to do. And so I thought we were good to go. And he gave me a hard time about the date, because he, you know, something with his work schedule, or, I don't remember what the logistics were, but he it wasn't so easy breezy. He gave me a hard time about it, and that's when I had to get my attorney involved to secure this weekend so that my daughter and I could go away, and my daughter wanted to go. So don't you know? The next thing I know, my friend texts me that her husband said that they would be going away that weekend as a family. I don't know if it was like upstate New York or I don't remember where it was, but basically it was very evident to me that my ex husband had gotten to her husband and somehow convinced him to. Either say or actually book their own trip for that weekend. So as I expected, the whole weekend was totally sabotaged by my ex husband. So I said nothing, because I was obviously angry. I had to pay my attorney to deal with this, and then have my ex husband sabotage it at the last minute anyway, and I did not reach out to my friend at all after that, I was pissed. Many months later, I got a text from her saying, Hey girl, just thinking about you. Hope you're well, let's grab lunch sometime. You know, something like that, light and breezy. And at that point, I was done. I was just done, and I replied, No thanks, I'm good. And that was the end of our friendship. And I might have seen her once, not too many months ago, I believe she was walking in front of my car, and I I would think that she saw me before I saw her, because by the time I noticed it was her, she had already almost disappeared at that point. But that's how far I've come in in these three years of starting out being totally out of control, totally reactive, totally like free falling, and I was a mess at the beginning of my divorce to walk away from someone, not angrily, not making a stink, not acting crazy, not like whatever it was. I was very short and sweet and direct. I'm done with this friendship. And she got the message, and I was able to walk away with my head held high, and that's it. It was a very important lesson for me, though, because when I realized that he had taken this massive smear campaign against me to our friends, to our community, to his family, and, you know, worst, my daughter. I don't know what he said about me. I don't want to know what he said about me, but everyone seemed to jump on his bandwagon, which is typical for a covert narcissist and and this is what I've learned and understood from the experts, but it was very empowering to me once I started healing, that I was able to rid myself of the fake friends that I considered friends for so many years, once I removed them from my life officially on my terms, I had that 1000 pound weight lifting off my back, and I realized that removing toxic people from my life meant that there was now room for new people to emerge into my life, people who were real and and genuinely good friends, my soul tribe awaits me. I still had a small circle of my tried and true friends who really did have my back, but I'm clear that I have blue skies ahead when it comes to attracting new, true friends for the next chapter of my life. So a few things that I learned, a couple of lessons that I learned along the way throughout my divorce, you know, at the beginning, when I was totally out of control and free falling, and I just felt like the bottom was was pulled out from under me, and I had no idea how to navigate this part. It was very unclear. We were all struggling to figure out how to move forward and how to get through this time. I was in the dark about so much. What I realized was that I had to learn how to give up control. That was a major lesson for me. You know, raising my daughter for 12 out of her 15 years, I was a stay at home mom, and I was in charge of everything. My ex husband worked. He worked on the weekend. Sometimes he was admittedly a hands off father. I mean, I never doubted his love for her, but you know, it's not like he spent tons and tons of time with her, either from week to week. It was mostly me. I was involved in everything I knew, everything you know, that's what being a stay at home mom is, and I was at every event, every school thing, every camp thing. I mean, I was always there for her. So giving up control was a really huge thing, but I did it, and at some point I remember I was just flowing. I. Was just going with the flow. If things went in a way that I didn't like it or I didn't want it, I just let it go. I released it and I just kept going. That was a big, big deal and a big hurdle for me to get over. I was very aware that this was something I needed to learn how to do. Another thing that was so important was regulating my emotions, which kind of went hand in hand with giving up control, because I was so reactive through so much of my marriage. It was, you know, all the arguing, all the bickering, all the everything. It was just I was constantly reactive, and it was a terrible thing. It was not something to make things better. I'm sure it made things worse, but I didn't have a handle on it. And clearly I was spiraling. I was so overwhelmed with emotion, and what do I do next? And how do I handle this? And you know, it was just it was overwhelming. And so for me, I really had to figure out how to regulate my emotions where I wasn't so reactive. And it took a long time and a lot of healing, but I did it. And I mean who I am now versus where I was three years ago, about this is like night and day. But that was a hard lesson for me, and one that is definitely serving me so much better, since, because life throws shit at you all the time, there's no way around it. So you can't change what's going on. You can only change your response to it. And that was, that was what I was working on. That was a biggie, also. And then lastly, the other thing that I really, really had to learn was patience. I was very attached to the outcomes of things and the timing of things and when things were supposed to happen and all that stuff. And I was forced to learn patience. You know, my attorney said that our divorce did not need to take three years to complete. We didn't have complicated finances, we didn't have complicated real estate. We weren't dissolving a business together. It was very straightforward. He was very emotional about the whole thing the divorce. Who was going to get the house, who was going to get custody? Like he operated from his emotions the whole way through. And I kept looking at it as a business transaction. It's like, we should sell the house and go our separate ways and move on. He wasn't gonna have it. He believed that my daughter needed to be in her childhood house, and he was never gonna leave that house. So he was on a quest to get the house, get the kid, get the money, and I was gonna be on the street living in a cardboard box, as he used to love to say, I so however long it took for our divorce to you know, I never saw a light at the end of the tunnel the entire way through. And somewhere earlier in 2024, this year, my attorney said to me, we're in the final stages. And I didn't believe her. I did not believe her because I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel until we were actually signing our divorce agreement in her office. And it wasn't until the ink was dry that I finally realized that this is finally happening. But I did not see it the entire way through, but I did learn patience. Please join me every Thursday for a new episode. I invite you to comment, like, share, subscribe. You can reach me at the music of life five, five@gmail.com with any questions or stories or experiences or anything that you want to share with me, I'd be happy to talk about it on another episode. You can check out my website@podpage.com slash the music of life. You