I’m going to get vulnerable with you and tell you that I’ve survived a divorce. That doesn’t make me unique, as between a third and a half of married couples might end the same. However, I experienced likely one of the top 1% most contentious divorces, according to the book Splitting, by Bill Eddy and Randi Kreger, and right on the heels of the brutal treatment of my aggressive and high-risk cancer. Though I’ve always been an intuitive person, I felt blindsided when my closest ally suddenly considered himself an enemy. I’d already spent some months in willful denial and was set to experience many more months of lying awake and trying to figure out all the ways I’d gone wrong.
Second guessing your past is one way to continuously punish yourself for something you can never change; your own history. Just as every beginner poker player knows the experience of feeling her heart drop when the hole cards, she’d confidently folded a moment before would have made two pair on the flop, I allowed myself to spiral into mental gymnastics as to how I could have prevented my divorce by being a more perfect wife. Was it the time I refused to cuddle with him in the chair in my living room in the dappled sunset light? Was it the rude words I said to him in a grocery store parking lot 14 years earlier? The more reasons I came up with, the farther away from reality they seemed and the worse I felt. 72o is still a terrible hand, even if you play it “perfectly.” Perhaps if I had avoided every failing as a wife, I might have only encountered the surprise divorce a few more years down the line.
Backing up a bit, let’s examine why this pointless self-flagellation occurred, and how poker cured me of my sleepless nights hoping for a better past. All my self-blame came from a place of wanting control in an uncontrollable world. As a control freak, the more I told myself I was at fault, the more I felt like I could somehow prevent anything of the sort from ever happening to me again. Rationally, I understood that there was no way to guarantee that I’d never have my heart broken again. But, in practice, I couldn’t let myself off the hook and accept that the world is full of unknowns. The best exercise of letting go of control turned out to be poker, in addition of course to therapy and a wonderful support group called Al-Anon that teaches you that you’re never at fault for someone else’s drinking.
Now, when I fold a hand preflop, I don’t even remember what hand I folded when the flop falls on the felt. Instead, I save my brain space for things that can affect my future, such as the tactics my opponents are taking against one another, and the hands they show down. I no longer lie awake at night thinking of the 892,420th reason that my marriage failed. I can save my brain space for being the best mom I can, and being kind to myself and others.
Written by Dr. Alexandra Doc Chauran
