Seeing Beyond the Lines: How Our Internal World Shapes Our Separation Journey

We often find ourselves in situations after separation that no one ever taught us how to handle. The problems that come with conflict separation are ones we’ve never faced before, so we panic. But here’s where it gets interesting.

The way we see the world, our internal representation of it, is how we create our strategies of protection.

There was a study carried out on kittens raised in the dark. One group was shown only black and white vertical lines, while the other was shown horizontal ones. What was fascinating was that the kittens raised to see vertical lines could navigate through vertical objects, but couldn’t jump up and perch like most cats do. The ones raised on horizontal lines could perch, but struggled to navigate through vertical spaces.

Our relationships work much the same way. The relationships we are raised in, and the internal representations we form from them, shape the way we see reality. What we choose to listen to, what we believe, and what we think is possible all come from this conditioning.

For those who have been lied to by a former partner for years, the internal representation of the world we live in is often not even our own. It’s been shaped, manipulated, and rewritten by someone else’s words, behaviours, and fears, leaving us uncertain of what’s real.

Jay Shetty talks about a client in one of his coaching programs who believed that earning $100,000 a year was the limit of what was possible. Jay then introduced him to someone making $100,000 a month, then $100,000 a week, and then a day, and so on. The expansion of the mind to what we believe is possible depends entirely on how wide our vision is.

And that’s the problem for most people going through conflict separation. Everyone around you, lawyers, friends, family, often tells you to fight or you’ll lose everything. But how often do we seek out the stories of those who made it work? How often do we look for examples of parents who reached a positive outcome for themselves and their children?

Too often, both people stay stuck in the fight, each believing it’s the only way to protect themselves. They’re encouraged by those around them, feeding the negative possibilities rather than what’s actually possible.

When we stay stuck and desperate for a single outcome, we create the very stress and anxiety that keeps us trapped in that narrow view of possible solutions. Our strategies are built from the past while we’re trying to navigate something new. The solution can never be found in the memory of something we don’t fully understand, nor can our current learned strategies enlighten us to what’s possible. The answers can be right in front of us, but we only see what we’ve been exposed to, the narratives we’ve been told, the images we’ve witnessed, and that short field of vision keeps us stuck in the anxiety of a nervous system that knows it doesn’t have the answers. For if we did, we wouldn’t fear the future.