Written by: Ravit Rose | Everything Divorce
You’re overwhelmed and can’t seem to get yourself to go into the office.
Your performance is suffering and your boss is questioning your long term value to the company.
Your irritability is impacting the team and when it’s time for personnel changes, your name comes up as a challenge for the organization.
You’re apathetic and in light of everything happening in your world, the motivation to push it. harder at work isn’t there.
You want to call out sick again, and it’s not the first time this month (or week).
You’ve checked out and everyone around you knows it.
If any of these sound like you, you’re not lazy or failing, you need somatic support.
Your anger, apathy, and avoidance are all messages from your body that what you’re experiencing is not manageable with your current resources.
Your nervous system is in survival and your instinct takes over to do whatever is most critical to keep moving forward which doesn’t always look like pushing it to the next level in your career. Instead, sometimes survival looks like the complete opposite.
That shift can be difficult to understand, especially when it changes how you see yourself and the person beside you. I’ve written more about this experience in, Who You Marry Isn’t Who You Divorce, and It’s Better, because understanding this shift can help make sense of why the person beside you can suddenly feel so unfamiliar.
How Divorce Can Affect Your Career and Ability to Earn
When the Instability of the Relationship Means Less Risk Taking at Work
Jim’s wife had been the main caregiver for their elementary schooler and the primary income earner for the family. Jim was a career creative, and had been successful with a big firm that was expanding rapidly. During the relationship, Jim’s wife had provided the financial stability they needed so he could pursue his creative outlets which were starting to pay off. In the marriage he had struggled with consistency and it was only made more obvious in the divorce.
Jim’s wife had been an anchor, but now with the marriage ending, he was floundering. They were splitting time between two households, sharing childcare responsibilities, and navigating the divorce that had been years in the making. Jim was totally depleted. He started to miss deadlines, and was getting consistent critical feedback from his colleagues. He was dropping the ball and clients weren’t happy. While his team knew he was struggling, his volatile emotional state and spotty deliverables made him a liability.
What came across as irritability and apathy on the surface in the workplace was actually his deep grief, sense of shame, and overwhelming sadness. There wasn’t as much space for inspiration and creative expression in the midst of navigating the loss of the relationship, and the stability at home that had previously allowed him to take risks professionally.
How Unresolved Divorce Stress Can Affect Your Career
Despite having a quasi dream job in his creative field, he quit to pursue his own side business shortly after the divorce because he couldn’t handle the feedback and pressure of the company performance. He struggled to get work and when he did have projects, he burned bridges and his reputation in the process; including firing off a heated email to an entire staff questioning the morals and effectiveness of their executive team the day of an annual event.
After many years and many damaged professional relationships, Jim finally had the capacity to get support. When his internal world started to even out, so did his professional experience. Jim started to recognize his patterns of avoidance, began to repair relationships, and address his feelings of failure both personally and in his work. After Jim connected more deeply to the survival states presented by his body, the tendency to lash out and run away were lessened. With somatic support, Jim became a consistent co-parent, started dating again and is rebuilding his business.
For Jim, the process took years to finally get support, but the same timeline doesn’t have to be true for you. If you’re struggling with going into work or staying consistent professionally, support is available to you. This is exactly the type of work I do with clients to help you address what’s happening when you feel like your agency and motivation is lacking. Somatic support can help the body process what you’re experiencing externally and provide the internal stability you need to keep going.
How Divorce Stress Shows Up at Work
Difficulty in Work Explained by the Survival Responses
If you have some capacity for curiosity, start with exploring what you need in the moment without judgement. Maybe you do need a day off or a piece of chocolate cake to give yourself some comfort. In the midst of so much change, try to find something that feels stable or an aspect of your life that isn’t changing right now like your home, a friendship, a hobby or a routine.
Orienting yourself to what feels stable can give your nervous system a little break to come back online and go back to work. Identify something that feels stable and predictable, even if it’s your morning coffee routine. Take a moment to pause and notice how stability shows up in the body as a starting point. This one small point of stability and consistency can be an anchor for you. Once you have this, keep reading.
Divorce changes our capacity for work performance with increased responsibilities, countless decisions, and a disruption to home life. The following behaviors are signs of different survival patterns your body might be going into to protect you on some level from stress, discomfort or the reality that you’re facing.
The survival responses are Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn. These responses can often be explained away by being under stress, but at the most basic level, you’re protecting yourself. We’ll cover how this shows up at work and what to do about it.
Fight Response at Work
You’re at capacity and you’re feeling frustration with yourself, your situation, and/or your colleagues. The FIGHT response here can look like:
- Being short with your email responses
- Replying to messages with information and no greeting
- Difficulty being patient when someone else is trying to problem solve
- Not letting anyone else work on the project because you don’t think they will be able to do it properly
- Micromanaging can feel like taking control when your world is spinning
Flight Response at Work
You’re “running away” somehow by putting space in between you and your stressor. This might feel like the only way to get through it.
- Procrastination: you keep putting things off until it’s too late and urgency arises to put you into obligatory action
- Perfectionism: if it can’t be perfect, you don’t want to start
- Distraction: You’ll prioritize tasks that feel easier than work like laundry, the hobby you haven’t touched in years or doom scrolling when you should be responding to emails or preparing for your next presentation.
When the work doesn’t get done, it starts to snowball to a point where you could go into a shutdown response because it’s become too much to handle. When you pass the point of what you can manage, the body powers down. Shutting off seems like the best way to protect yourself.
Freeze Response at Work
You’re not able to do what you need to do. The FREEZE response can look like.
- Feeling unmotivated
- Difficulty getting up on time to be prepared
- Not knowing where to start on a project
- Mentally blanking out
- Trying to be strategic and it’s like the lights are on and no one is home
- You’re waiting until you feel better or have the energy
- You stumble over your words, you can’t seem to get your thoughts out at the moment
- You have ideas, but when it comes time to share them, it’s like you can’t speak
Fawn Response at Work
Another shut down response if fawn. FAWN is classic people pleasing behavior. You’ll do what seems like the path of least resistance, even if it means you’ll have to deal with the backlash later.
- You say yes, when you know your capacity is low
- You stay quiet, even though advocating for yourself would be beneficial
- You act like everything is fine, but the box of tissues in your car is almost gone
- You reassure people around you that you’re going to be okay even when you’re not so sure….
When you’re going through divorce, your capacity has shifted because of the toll it takes on your nervous system. Divorce is taxing emotionally, financially, mentally, spiritually, and physically.
It’s not that you aren’t capable, it’s that you’re carrying more than you were before. It makes sense that you would be slowed down with a heavier load.
This heavier load can look like additional appointments with lawyers, therapists, and conversations with friends and family discussing your situation, managing more logistics and navigating co-parenting.
I explore this workplace freeze response more deeply in, You’re Getting Divorced? How to Manage the Freeze Response at Work, including what it can look like when your ability to function professionally starts to change.
When Divorce Forces You to Step Back From Your Career
Changing Course Professionally to Survive Divorce
My client, Alex, was managing a team and communications for a large organization when they went through their first divorce. The divorce was charged and all of Alex’s emotional space was taken up by trying to stay stable while also advancing their career and considering a cross country move post breakup. They wanted desperately to perform well, but the energy needed to invest in their professional development wasn’t there. The emotional space that was taken up by the divorce left little to give at work beyond the bare minimum.
All they had space for was the task at hand. The urgent, most critical tasks, but anything beyond the minimum was too much. Unfortunately, this meant changing organizations and intentionally taking a pay cut, and a role that didn’t have any managerial expectations because they were completely burnt out after the divorce.
Alex came to me after their second divorce, significant mental health challenges and a desire to feel like they were going to be happy again someday. Together, we worked on self worth, identifying where they were overgiving to avoid rejection, and how to design their life in a way that was supportive instead of draining. Alex is still practicing the tools we implemented together to have healthy boundaries at work while supporting family as a new step parent.
When things become too much, our system gets overloaded and we shut down. This isn’t to shame or guilt or something to feel poorly about, but rather a natural response to overwhelm. Things get to be too much and the body goes into a protective state as it is designed to do.
When Divorce Stress Starts Affecting Your Work and When to Get Support
If you’re struggling professionally while going through divorce, this is a completely normal response to a major life changing event. If you're feeling dysregulated or like you aren’t quite in control of your life, this is a sign that there is something deeper to be addressed. Regulation alone won't resolve your triggers. The trigger will remain until it is renegotiated. As a Trauma Trained Relational Somatic Practitioner, the one-on-one work I do with clients is fundamental to their ability to feel discomfort without spiraling. It’s not that you can’t handle it, but you may need to increase your capacity to deal with all of the changes happening in your life. This is the work I do with clients to support their nervous system during these types of life altering events.
