C (5:02)

I had a thought a moment ago in all serious, I wish your husband, my friend and brother, our friend and brother Chaz was here. He's such a powerful 12 stepper. And they're so good. And of course, in the 12 steps, we have many good things. And the, the big one is the serenity prayer. God grant me. So it's not coming from other people or just within me that God grant me the serenity. And when I pray that I often will pray like this. God grant me. And I pray it a lot. God grant me the serenity. I do that motion. Peace. God Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And there ought to be a seal off from the psalms there, a pause, a breath, the courage. I don't need peace and serenity here. I need courage on this one, the courage to change the things I can change. I want to be mindful. What can I do? Forgiveness, as we've talked about, is something I can work on and change, but then I need the wisdom to know the difference. Another version of that is, God, grant me the serenity, the peace to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the person I can change, and the wisdom from God to know the only one I can change is me. So in the stages of grief, and just a bit of a disclaimer, which we do from time to time on the podcast, is when Elizabeth Kubler Ross came out with the classic stages of grief. Mighty good work. And people would talk about nine months to a year or whatever, and these were categories to think in versus just locking down some rigorous doctrine categories to think in. Okay, nine months. And I should be on, well, guess what's the problem with nine months? The bursaries, as we call them. You know, an anniversary once a year. You've not gone through the first, just on a calendar of everything. So to work through that and the cycling around a healthy cycle, that if grief comes back around in a different thing and a trigger or an activation point out there on the news or a friend or something, to not be surprised, but to say to yourself, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm just probably going through the cycle again. As we've said before, grief is our friend, not our enemy. It's like a canoe in the river guiding us through. We'll land on acceptance. Should I run through just the kind of classic stages of grief?

B (7:26)

That sounds great. And I do want to say, right before we jump into this as well, that it's not just grieving the loss of relationships, like the loss of the relationship, the marriage, and then the friendships that change, but it's. It's grieving other things as well. You know, it's. And you don't even recognize all the things that you're going to have to grieve. You know, you, you may grieve practical things, like who's going to mow the yard, who's going to help me carry heavy furniture, who's going to help me with the kids on a daily basis. You know, so there's, there's all of these things. There's macro changes. You're no longer married, but there's so many micro changes about life that you'll also gr.

D (8:15)

I think for me and Lisa, we had processed through some of this for another book project. But it's the grief of the future that you thought was going. You were going to have that you didn't realize. You put so much weight and stock in that. Like, this is how the relationship was and this is how your kids were going to react to that. And this is how. And you kind of built this picture of what the beautiful future was going to be. And then the reality hits and you're like, oh, how do I grieve my anticipation for a future that hasn't even happened?

B (8:46)

Yeah. And how do I now live in uncertainty? Because, you know, I was married nearly 30 years to my first husband and I pretty much felt like I could look into the future and I didn't know every detail, but I pretty much could see how my future was going to play out.

C (9:07)

As you should have.

B (9:08)

But then all of a sudden, now I'm divorced, I look into the future and I have no idea. There's great uncertainty. And it's really hard to walk toward an uncertain future. It's really hard to walk toward a future that you never envisioned, you never wanted, you never asked for. And so, yeah, there was a lot of grief around that as well.

C (9:29)

Well, the lines we use in the book from my friend Nate Larkin, the new book on surviving an unwanted divorce is what happens in vagueness stays in vagueness. So looking backwards or looking your current life, you really don't want to have a lot of vagueness. Like, you want to get clarity, you want to be able. God's not the author of confusion. That's proper. But in the stages of grief, there will be some vagueness. And to give yourself permission again, I said it a moment ago as you go, oh, yeah, why, of course I knew this could happen. And a new trigger point or an activation point. And what it does, I must be very clinical from what is you're not going to sit and just shock your body with what in the world you have to do. Self talk again. Nehemiah 5:7, take counsel with yourself and go, oh, and if you could learn these, go back, pause, rewind the tape or the video part of this. And it's in the new book coming out on surviving unwanted divorce. And go, where might I be? Talk to yourself, even preach the gospel to yourself. Where might I be in the stages of grief? The first is, what I don't like about that word is it has been corrupted that this person's just in denial over there. And it's like another. It's like a river in Africa. You know, the river denial? No, there's a lot of stuff we're doing, including why can't it be in India? Yeah, well, wherever it is, you know, wherever. Excuse the geography, but it's interesting because what people will do is they're misusing a word because often what's going on in sin and in addiction and in toxic behavior is rationalization. I'm rationalizing. I want to respect the stages of grief here. That person's not in denial or you're dealing with in your life, they're in rationalization. And the idea is there's a shattered dream, there's a shattered reality. You deserve to have a shock and awe like, whoa, this can't. You know, they're going to walk through the door again. Or maybe literally, you wake up from a dream and give yourself permission, or just wake up from a night's sleep where you don't think you dreamed and think, am I really divorced? You might check your finger or the death of someone. Right. So denial is very common. It's not an issue to run away from.

B (11:36)

I know. For me, denial became a resistance toward walking toward that uncertain future. And it was so hard for me to even say the word divorce. And it definitely was this brutal thing of taking my ring off and, and then checking the box of divorced on marital status. And then people asking, you know, are you married? Are you single? Or at a restaurant? You know, like, are you waiting on someone? No, I'm. I'm actually out to dinner by myself, you know, and there were just so many things like that. That denial for me was me resisting, me pushing back. I'm just not ready to take my ring off yet. I'm just not ready to, you know, cooperate with the statement of divorce. You know, I. I'm just not ready to check that box yet. And it was. It was hard.

C (12:35)

You know, I love about that. I'm sure we've talked about it. Even personally, I love when a person says, have you noticed anything? I go, I don't know, help me here. I'm fairly observant. And that was taken off and it took them months. And sadly, people, why are you still wearing your rings? Like, that's abusive. And when they were ready and almost, it's like they woke up and said, I can't even tell you empirically why, but I'm ready for that to come off. And the world will always be a trigger rich environment. Post divorce, post death because people don't often mean harm, but they're like, oh, you're waiting for someone. So to go in. And that's where we get into that. Association versus dissociation. Association means just connect. It's like literally putting that ring on I've associated and saying, yeah, I never know today when it will be. But some issue may come up of me wanting to go into denial or thinking, not again, and it's going to happen after that. And by the way, great book, of which there are many, it's not supposed to be this way. That's when we first really connected. And to say that that's not denial is to say, no, it's kind of not supposed to be this way. What level it is, right? And then anger. Let's do a couple of things on anger. Anger turned outward. That's just. You could be mad at God, by the way, God can take it. Read Joel, the imprecatory psalms, and anger, then at people and the injustice of it all. I want people to move through those murky waters with the canoe and say, I'm just mad. Give yourself permission to be mad about that. To be angry. And then anger turned inward, not dealt with, is known as depression. I will just literally suppress. And when I suppress, we will later be expressed while I submerge is later going to emerge. So anger turned inward. Two aspects of anger, bargaining, which is really good. I don't know if there's a person I've ever met that didn't. Maybe they got I feel a pain or something. And God, if you'll just get me through this, I promise to eat better. We do a lot of bargaining and that's okay. But here can be the thought, I do that loud. Fancy football, well, that's a category, but no, really. And part of that is there can be a sense God. Is there just a way or could you change, especially around divorce. Would you change? I've had women, especially my talk radio days, where they would call in and say, my husband's divorced. Listen, he's already married to someone new. But I pray in Jesus name God, would you please let them divorce or let that new spouse die and he come back to me. I didn't judge or make fun of them, but mental health is a commitment.

B (15:06)

To reality at all costs, at all costs.

D (15:08)

I do love that. And I know I made a joke about fancy football, but on a real level, that whole bargaining thing, it's actually rooted in an Old Testament context of retributional theology. You know, if I do this, and this is going to happen. So then you start to feel like, well, if my morality just lines up, then good things should happen to me. And we want to justify things like oh, they were immoral. And so that's why all these bad things happen. And in the midst of that, it's almost like you're trying to play chess with God.

C (15:32)

Well, I think you are, you know.

D (15:33)

And you're trying to outmaneuver the Lord in order to get the thing that you want. And yet sometimes if we got all the things that we wanted, my goodness, right, like life would not be as hopeful and beautiful because we need an omniscient, all knowing God to be able to give us not what we want, but what we actually need.

C (15:51)

And if God didn't give me what I want, all of a sudden I'll feel he following the metaphor, he checkmates me. And now I'm angry at God.

D (15:58)

That's right.

C (15:59)

Not a healthy anger.

B (16:00)

You know, I think the thing that's so hard about bargaining is that often we're doing it for what we perceive as a very good thing. You know, we don't want to be divorced. You know, we don't want to our family broken, you know, we, we don't, we don't want to like suddenly be single. You know, for me, I was 50, I was single. I was, I was just, I mean as I listened to these statements, I was knee deep in denial and then textbook knee deep in anger and really feeling not only was I betrayed by my ex husband, but I felt betrayed by God. And then knee deep in bargaining like my prayer life was all bargaining. Like God, if you will just do this, you know, God, can't you see, Just make it a redemption story. And so I want to be so tender here with bargaining because you're not bargaining out of selfish desires. You're bargaining because you wanted your marriage to stay together or you wanted your life to look differently. So it's not always bargaining because you're being selfish. It's bargaining because it was a good thing that got broken and it hurts.

D (17:17)

But sometimes what you're bargaining, that's so good, Lisa. And sometimes what you're bargaining, if we do a self assessment on it, is you're bargaining with things that are outside of your control.

B (17:26)

That's right.

D (17:27)

Right. And that is a devastating scenario to be in because you desperately want the right thing. But sometimes what you desire is actually very contingent on that other person and that other person's willingness to change. Other person's repentance, other person's Stepping to discipleship, wholeness, and health. And it's like you're here trying to bargain with the Lord, but your bargaining chips, in some sense, some of them don't even belong to you. Like, you can't control that part of it.

B (17:52)

That's right.

D (17:52)

And so I think we just have to be careful with that.

A (17:55)

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B (19:09)

And also bargaining for me was also attaching my hope to things I had no control over, you know, attaching my hope for a future that looked like I thought it was going to look like, you know, And I kept hoping, you know, maybe one more, you know, one more conference, one more book, one more time that I forgive him, you know, one. One more conversation with a pastor, one more counseling session. And I kept attaching my hope for the future to decisions that I had no say so over. And the Bible makes it really clear. Hope deferred makes the heart sick indeed. And it was like a carrot being dangled in front of me that actually I had hung on the thing that I was chasing. You know, it's like I'd taken my hope and put it right here on this other person, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing. And my heart was getting sicker and sicker and sicker because I felt like I was sinking.

C (20:06)

Well, and one of you may have been, can I do Jimbo's take on bargaining and Anger, it's the chicken and the egg for me at 63 years old and working with so many people and in my own life. And that is the idea would be in the stages of grief, you would see anger coming in, bargaining coming in. And I'm not worried about which one comes first because I believe I have found, even in my own life, a dance that I'm angry, that I'm bargaining, that I'm angry because I didn't get what you know, I'm not going to God's ultimate garage sale with God being the head of the garage sale, bargaining, can I reduce this? Those you do not want to get locked into these stages of grief and make them so linear because they will flow in and out and you might be back in denial. And you thought, did I even hit acceptance yet? Which is the next one? And it's the final part of this all, what we often call finally true grief. And there's a release that happened again. You may go back through this again several times. But the acceptance, and that's where I go back to that serenity prayer. And I really find a surrender there, y', all, of just saying, God, not my will. How many times have we talked about, but thy will be done? We close all of our Haven Place retreats with our friend Hillary Scott. Thy will and thy will be done, but just a sense of more and more. And I believe about maybe second, third, fifth time through the stages of grief can be. And which are also mirroring the stages of healing can be. Lord, I think in a newer way, I think I'm finally letting this go. And there's an acceptance. That's where that mental health and spiritual health is a commitment to reality at all cost. It'll cost you to grieve, and that's okay. It will really cost you to not grieve.

B (21:50)

So for the note takers that are listening, of course, all of this is in our new book, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. But let me just give you those stages of grief one more time. Denial, anger turned outward, or anger toward inward, which is depression. So those can be very interchangeable. So denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and then finally acceptance.

D (22:16)

Yeah.

C (22:16)

And again, in my own life, and the many people I've worked with said it a moment ago, I'm going to be locked down with these stages of grief because I know that dance of bargaining, anger in, anger out, bargaining like that, that's that middle piece of this thing, a little merry, merry go round that I find with people I work with, which makes sense in my own journey Will be. I'll stay in those. And I'm on a sidebar off the canoe, the river of grief. And I'm cycling around over here. That's not a bad thing. The way out. Robert Frost, the poet, said, the way out is through. So you keep moving through. Don't be surprised. I feel stuck over here. You may not be stuck. You may just be in movement over here. Right? Not stuck.

B (22:55)

I think one part of acceptance that's really important for us to deal with, too, is it's not just accepting that I was going to be a divorced woman. It was also accepting what happened in the past and not traveling mentally back into my past and rewriting things to be better than they actually were, which just compounded the grief that I was in no doubt. And I really had to work hard on this. So I. I just kept making mental notes like, lisa, don't go back and romanticize the past and think, like, wow, I just want to return to that. You know, that's a very biblical thing. Just like the children of Israel, they went out to the desert, and they were delivered from Egypt. God did this miraculous thing they'd been crying out to God to do. They get delivered, they're out in the desert, and then what?

D (23:52)

And then they go, well, why are we here, Moses? Did you bring us out here to die?

C (23:57)

Us back to Egypt?

D (23:57)

We had meat, and we had fish. And I think Moses was probably about to lose his mind. There is a reason why he struck that rock eventually, and it's because the people have. They have tricked him for the last time. Lisa. Like, it is just too much. And the irony of it all is, I think if I were Moses, I'd be like, no, y' all are gaslighting. Because you know who was eating all that good stuff?

A (24:18)

Me.

D (24:18)

I was eating it because I was in the palace. Y' all were slaves. You're servants. You were not eating all that good stuff. I was eating that good stuff. But. But to your point, I do think that there's this way that we can go back and we can glorify and romanticize a past that is honestly not even true of the situation.

B (24:35)

And we can, like I said, travel mentally back and maximize what was good. Like, little scraps of love.

C (24:42)

There often is good stuff. People will wipe it all out. Like, we had a couple of moments at Disney or on a vacation. I tell people it takes sometimes years later, but they can go or see a family album with your ex in it or whatever and say, there were a few moments this myopic black and white stuff doesn't work. There were some moments along the way that were peaceful. And that's a good memory, I think, to go there early in a revisionist history or just searching for it. Not just shopping for pain we've talked about, but shopping for this pleasure. It can't be all bad. Just give yourself time to sort through. But after a while, a person says there are a few good moments.

B (25:18)

Yeah, yeah. And for me, there were years that. That felt good. Decades, actually, you know, but, you know, in the 10 years of trauma, I had such a temptation to maximize, you know, what was good, these little scraps of love and minimize the real hurt and heartbreak and the experiences that I had.

C (25:42)

Until you didn't.

B (25:43)

Until I didn't. And that was part of acceptance, too.

D (25:46)

And part of, I think when it didn't is when the things that you could no longer deny started to come crashing down. And so in some sense, it's like we have a tendency to hang way too much hope on these isolated moments. And my son Levi, he plays lacrosse. And you know those little 3M hanger things that you have that can only hold a certain amount of weight? Well, he's got them up to hold his hats in his room, but this kid decided to hang up all of his lacrosse stuff on it. And then he came down and was so angry because all of them fell off. And we're like, bro, those are not designed to hang all your lacrosse stuff on that. And so I think there is even a sense where, like, you've got these memories, but you're trying hang all of your hope on these memories that were honest and they were good for that moment, but were inflating them, and now they come crashing down, and you're now left dealing with the chaos of it.

B (26:35)

Yeah, I was having that conversation with a friend recently, and she's trying to survive an unwanted divorce. She's going through it. She's in the thick of the hurt and the pain and all of that. And she called me one day, and she was sitting in her car outside of her office and sobbing. And she just said, I got so triggered and caught off guard this morning because I opened up the bathroom cabinet and it used to be full of towels that were folded by my husband. And he folds them in such a distinctive way. And as I watched those towels being used, it was like my life being married to him was disappearing right before my very eyes. And she said, I'm down to two towels.

C (27:22)

Wow. It's a picture.

B (27:24)

And so I sat there and I listened to her and I totally just said, man, I understand that that's so hard. And then based on some really good therapy that I've done with you, Jim, I asked her a question. Are you open to a thought? And I said, I think we need to make sure that we keep introducing doses of reality into that towel scenario. And what I mean by that is, you know, the towels that he was folding at that time, he was having an affair. And so, you know, it's easy to take out that fact and see, no, this was like a loving act. Like, this is evidence of something good he did, you know, but when we introduce doses of reality into that scenario, you know, I said very gently, very lovingly, I just said, you know, it may be that he was folding those towels, putting them in your cabinet while he was on the phone with his mistress. Super hard to think about.

C (28:31)

I want to honor that. That feels, I'm going to use a word here generically, so to speak, but that feels prophetic to me and full of gravitas and weight that you knew the friend enough. Of course, you use that door opening thing of, are you open to a thought? That's not just therapy technique. The human brain's wired to, you know, I believe I am. So you invited yourself in, mirroring Jesus in Revelation 3, stood at the door and knocked, hey, can I come in? And the person had. Then her friend had some buy in. And then say then to speak reality over that versus walking in, hey, how are you doing? Let me just tell you about those towels. You got towel trauma and I'm going to raise. No, no, no, you didn't do that, nor would you, but you walked in deeply. And may we continue, especially with the word of God and all that we have, but to speak reality over people and say, are you open to this? And that's what you did. What happened next, though?

B (29:24)

Yeah. And so, you know, I said to her, or he could have even been over at her house and her cabinet could be full of towels. And again, not to compound my friend's hurt, but to sort of bring her back into reality that, you know, you can't look at those towels and romanticize, you know, the relationship that you had at the end, because it was pretty devastating, you know. And then I said, but here's the good news. When you finish using those towels, it's gonna be time for you to decide. And you get to decide how you want those towels folded next. Like, you could decide you want your towels rolled up. You could decide that you want your towels Folded in a square. You could say you want your towels folded, you know, over, like a rectangle.

D (30:13)

Maybe you don't want your towels folded.

B (30:14)

Maybe you don't want your towels folded. You can put them in a pile.

C (30:17)

Or take them to Goodw.

B (30:19)

Yeah. Or maybe take them to Goodwill. Or you can fold them like the cruise ships into little animals. The point is, now let's take some agency here. And agency means, what can I do? Like not. Not being so paralyzed, but what I can't do, but what can I do? And let's step into what is going to be part of the future now. And you get to decide how your towels will be folded. And in that moment, I could hear the hope. She stopped crying. And she said, I needed this this morning. Thank you so much. And we got off the phone. Well, I was at the airport when we're having this conversation. She was in her car outside of her office. And when we hung up the phone, I started packing up my things. And they called, you know, that it was time for me to board. So I'm walking down the aisle at the airport, and there was a man sitting at the end of the aisle. And he reached out and tapped me as I walked by, and he said, I am so sorry to admit that I was completely listening in the conversation you were having. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but what you said has profoundly impacted me in the best way today. And so then I got on the plane and I thought, okay, you know, this is an important part of acceptance, is making sure that we do have a commitment to reality at all costs. I don't mean shopping for pain, you know, I don't mean a friend berating you with these kind of things. I mean, in a tender, loving way, can we just, in our minds, make sure that we don't maximize the good from the past, minimize what was so hurtful from the past, and let's stay in reality. I think that's really crucial for acceptance.

C (32:07)

I just gotta say real quick, and I told you today, you may not remember it, I said, no, buddy, you're also a therapist. This thing of therapy, which I get being professionalized, fully understand that I'm in the tribe of that. But what I heard was how beautiful with Paul, with Timothy, you will teach those who will teach others, who will teach others. You were flat out without, by design. You were in a therapy session with her. I mean, when you look at that, therapeutic we've talked about, even the healer in us. So for you all tuning in today, listening or watching is most people are not going to the therapist. Just so, you know, statistically, they're darn sure not going to go do a counseling intensive. Statistically. So the idea of coffee cup counseling and friendship counseling, and I love that you've done that. I think your narrative, not only the guy on the plane, but to listeners and viewers to be able to understand they can be on the front lines. And. And that also came out of your own personal work, to your credit, that you did. You weren't just speaking from your head. You talked about part of the path that you had walked.

B (33:15)

And it was an exercise that helped me.

C (33:17)

Yeah.

B (33:17)

You know, the Bible does instruct that we are to take the comfort that we have received and use it to comfort other people. And I think that's really important. Joel, any final thoughts?

D (33:28)

I mean, I think you guys really summed it up really well. And so I. No, I think that was really good.

B (33:34)

I want to read you one last thing that I wrote in our new book that's coming out, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. The cure for grief is not time. Although time helps with the intensity and frequency of the pain, it's not what will finally close the chapters of your life. The cure is acceptance. It's a futile exercise to hope that by resisting reality, the grief will dissipate. It won't. It will only twist your life into a chokehold of hopelessness. So my encouragement for you today is even when the facts are really, really hard, and I want to keep reminding you that I walked through this. I'm in a different season now, and I'm so thankful that I was able to go through these stages of grief. And to be honest, sometimes I get triggered, and I'm right back in the stages of grief. Even though I have fully accepted what was in the past, I've moved on now. And after years of saying I'll never get into another relationship, you know, I met and eventually married my husband, Chaz, and I'm able to see what a beautiful marriage is supposed to look like. And experiencing that has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Even still, I don't hang my hope on Chaz. I hang my hope, love it. The only safe place that it can be, and that is on the Lord Jesus, who already stands in our future. He already knows. It may be uncertain to us, but it is definitely not uncertain to him. So no matter where you're at in your journey toward healing, I just want to say thank you for tuning in to therapy and theology. And we pray with everything in our heart that not only this episode has been helpful, but this entire season.

A (35:23)

Thanks for tuning in to today's conversation. Here's a few things I don't want you to miss. First, we want to hear from you and would be so honored if you took the survey you can find by accessing the link in our show Notes. Your feedback is crucial for shaping future therapy and theology conversations and experiences. Also, make sure you secure your copy of Surviving an Unwanted Divorce co written by Lisa, Dr. Joel and Jim. You can find that link by visiting the show notes as well. Therapy and Theology is brought to you by Proverbs 31 Ministries, where we believe if you know the truth and live the truth, it changes everything. We'll see you next time.

B (36:05)

Hi friends, this is Lisa Terkers and I am so excited to share that from November 3rd through November 14th, 2025, I'll be on the Trustigan Tour with my friend and worship leader Tasha Lake. Here's what I've come to know none of us gets to live this life unmarked by hurt, so none of us gets to live this life without trust issues. My goal for these nights is to help you see that having your trust broken may be life altering, but it doesn't have to be life ruining. Check out TPRLive Co to get your tickets and we'll see you soon.