8 Critical Steps to Transforming Your Life after Losing Custody of Your Child!

Loss of Custody for a parent simply means that you no longer have primary custody of your child.

It does not mean that you do not have rights as a parent;

and as a parent you are still a very important part of your child’s life. The issues and challenges differ for every non-custodial mother as well as the events leading up to them; however, the emotions that the rock the mothers’ worlds are common. Little did I know it was all about me. My mind was always on the kids. Did they miss me? Did they hate me? Did they really believe I was a terrible mother? A

terrible Person? I was so humiliated and I was an emotional roller coaster. I had to be strong on the outside while I was a wreck on the inside. My self-esteem was shattered. I lost myself completely. It was horrible for me. You never want to allow your kids to feel guilty. You have to stay strong on the outside. You can’t really talk about it. There’s nothing anyone can do. When my kids went to live with their father my world turned completely upside down. It comparably changed as much as when I was married and had our first child with the difference being on opposite ends of the happiness spectrum.

I ran

the gamut of emotions over the course of many years even long after our kids were grown and had children of their own. I was alone with no one to talk to and I had no idea that it didn’t have to be this hard. What did I learn? That it was my attitude all along. And it is completely in my power to change my attitude. Today, acceptance is my mantra. I accept total responsibility for my attitude about everything that has happened to me, what I’ve done and what I accomplished through hard work, discipline, desire and passion. So, no matter what your life looks like now I can promise with the application of these 7 steps, there is life after divorce and loss of custody. Here are the 7 Critical Steps You Need To Feel Happy Again!

1. ACCEPT that it happened and let go of YOUR CONTROL. If you are like I was when my children’s father was awarded custody, you experienced a number of emotional reactions such as disbelief, denial or fear. You look for reasons to support these feelings and stay in a state of immobilization or fighting a lost cause, possibly making matters for you even worse than they already are. Blaming yourself keeps you stuck, feeling like a victim. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Fear immobilizes you. When you stay in victim mode you are immobilized with fear. You wait for what is going to happen next to you. A monster is only a monster because you don’t know what it looks like. Once you know what it looks like, you identify it differently and you can start figuring out a way to deal with it. Once you are sick and tired of letting it control you and scare you, the sooner you accept and the sooner you move forward. Things can change, but it’s important not to spend all your energy on thinking you have to change it.

Critical Healing Tip: Accept that it happened. It is what it is. Even if you want, hope and plan to get your children back, acknowledge that it may not happen. Do the best you can for yourself and your children, working with what you have. Appreciate any and all time and communication with them. Express love at every opportunity. If you are okay, they will be more apt to be okay. Your children pay attention to your response to everything, so think about your influence on how they feel about themselves and where they are.

2. Evaluate/Analyze the Situation without Emotional Attachment Step outside of yourself and take a look at what actually is. See your situation as a blessing even if it’s hard. Every time you feel anger, realize you’re giving away your power. There is a message for you in your situation and when you look deeper into it, you’ll discover what that is. Eventually, you will find this is a gift and things will change for you for the better. EXPERIENCE the LOSS OF CUSTODY as a failure rather than you BECOMING a failure. As Zig Ziglar says: “Failure is an event, not a person.” YOU are not a failure. Losing custody is something that happened; it does not define you as a person. Admit you could have done things differently. And recognize you can’t change what has already been done so you can move on. You may or may not get your kids back. However, you can master how you feel by having faith that everything seems to work out perfectly in the end. Critical Healing Tip: Make the experience bigger than you rather than about you. Learn to meditate and ask for understanding. Look for the blessing in the experience. Acknowledge you don’t own your kids, they are not possessions. They are a gift to you for whatever time you have with them.

3. You are still their MOTHER. Loss of custody creates a huge hole in your heart. You probably know that empty feeling all too well. It’s like a vacuum sucking in whatever feelings are available like a wound fills with blood. For example, if you feel anger, fear, hatred or sorrow for yourself it’s going to lodge in the hole in your heart and there won’t be room for feelings of love, happiness or forgiveness until you release some of the other feelings. Even when your children aren’t with you, you are still their mother and you still affect your kids’ emotional and physical state of happiness. Time and distance can’t block thoughts and feelings. Your heart is still connected to your children and they feel it. You can send them love and your child will feel it whether or not you get the opportunity to say it or hear about it. Just know it. Critical Healing Tip: Work out your negative emotions and let them go before you focus on your kids. Love without expectations or conditions. Love them, because love is not interrupted by time or space. It is felt even when not spoken. Point to remember: in order to love another you must love yourself first because you cannot give what you do not have. When you love yourself you have to share that love with another. If you don’t feel your own importance, you can’t expect them to know their own importance without you role modeling self-love.

You may have a

challenge with falling in love with you again, but no worries, because you can learn to love yourself again with the help of a mentor or a coach. Here’s my suggestion for you: don’t waste any more time feeling blame or anger. Take charge of your life and live again!

There is a wonderful book written by Kimberly Ann Coots called “Your Divine Worth”. I highly recommend this book for guidance in finding your self-worth and learning to love you again.

4. Express Your Emotions so that you can release them. Hiding your emotions does not make them go away. Worse yet, they get passed onto others, particularly your kids. Kids have a tendency to sense your guilt and they feel guilty, your anger and they get angry too, you feel badly and they feel they did something wrong, you blame others and they blame themselves. There is energy in your emotions and it can be felt, particularly by your kids. They have an uncanny ability to absorb and they internalize it. And it changes who they are. Repressed emotions also affect other areas of your life such as your career, relationships, family members, and your self-esteem, feelings of worthiness, anger, trust, and fear. They can change you as a person – who you are. When you encounter resistant emotions and limiting beliefs, it helps to have a way to handle these on your own. The great thing is, when you begin to remove the limiting beliefs (your concerns, fears, and doubts) that are in your way, things become easier. Critical Healing Tip: Give yourself an opportunity to acknowledge and release negative emotions so you can visit your children in love. Do not hide or bury them; they will not go away. The very thing you may want to hold onto is the very thing you need to give away. Let go of your negative emotions. They do not serve you. Make the best of your situation. Here are a number of techniques for helping you overcome any resistant emotions or limiting beliefs. These include: Byron Katie‟s „The Work”; The Sedona Method; Meridian Tapping Techniques, such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques); or learning to meditate. (There are numerous ways to

meditate and you need to try several until you find which works best for you.) 5. Ask for Help You are not alone. It’s easy to believe you are the only one who understands what you are going through, but the fact is that even though you have a unique story that led up to your loss of custody, it is common for other mothers who have lost custody battles to experience those emotions themselves as well as understand the pain you have. You have gone through this experience for a reason and talking to others is a great way to find how you can benefit by sharing your story with others and hearing theirs. Critical Healing Tip: Join a group. There are a number of different groups of mothers who lovingly accept other mothers who have lost custody of their children into their group to support, vent, share, encourage, offer their knowledge, etc. I suggest the Facebook group “Mothers Without Custody” or NANCM , “National Association of Non Custodial Moms, Inc” to name a couple.

6. Find the GIFT in the experience. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Appreciate what you have. Whether it’s time with your children, phone calls, the experience of having them, or knowing about them; be grateful for anything and everything you can think of. In my case, I found a deeper stronger relationship with my kids during our weekend visits than when I had custody. We took our time together for granted until we lost it. We learned to respect and appreciate each other much more than before.

Your body is a communicator of your thoughts. Remember your thoughts create your emotions, and you are in complete control over what you think. Your emotions create your attitude and your attitude affects your behaviors. When we get a handle on our thoughts, we can then get a grip on our emotion, thus, being able to do something about our behaviors. Sometimes our behaviors reveal STRONG emotions. Critical Healing Tip: Take time each day to appreciate everything in your life. Create a Gratitude List each morning, writing down at least twenty things that you are grateful for before doing anything else. Sometimes things are taken for granted until you lose them. Like how often are we thankful that we are able to breathe? Anyone who has asthma or is using oxygen will tell you that it is a blessing. You can be thankful for the sun shining, that your dog is happy to see you or your car starting on the first attempt at turning the key. Make a mental note of each miracle that happens every day. Focus on the positives in your life. Recognize the gift you are to others. You will see a difference in your life when you change your thoughts and your perception of everything that is around you.

7. IDENTIFY WHO YOU ARE AND REDEFINE YOUR PURPOSE. Go deep within and find the spiritual side of yourself. Make this bigger than you are and know that you are going to need help. Ask for Divine guidance to the answers you seek. You had a purpose before you had children and you have one now. Look within and figure out all that you learned so far and what you want to get from this experience. What do you have going on inside that you haven’t dealt with yet? Do you feel all the weight is on your shoulders? Are you feeling sadness and anger; as though you just exist rather than LIVE? You can make your life

meaningful instead of painful. You can be joyful, laugh and be the light for others. You can help heal and embrace the lives of others. Critical Healing Tip: Shift – find something bigger than your pain. “The best way to find you is to lose yourself in service to others” (Gandhi). Be what you want to attract in world – understand what you really want and need and then create it. All prosperity comes from giving “energy”. As Cynthia Kersey stated in an interview, “The roots of deep happiness is deep giving without expectation of any kind”.

8. FORGIVE Yourself – Stop Beating Yourself Up Hanging onto guilt is just that - HANGING. It serves no useful purpose. As a matter of fact, no one can continue living with guilt. A person will turn it into something they can deal with. For instance, if you continue to blame yourself or allow someone else to give you a reason to feel guilty, after a while you might turn it into anger or feeling sorry for yourself, or even justify what it is you’re feeling guilty about. Then you express the new feeling (such as anger) in some way and it gets carried over to others. Your left over baggage from past may be the reason you choose a partner much like your parent or caregiver, where you work and how much you work, how you think about money, how you perceive you are seen to others, and the list goes on. Your choices at the time you were a child were made for you, good or bad. But in reality, nothing from your childhood has anything to do with the choices you make now, and as an adult, you create everything that happens to you through your own choices. You are responsible for putting yourself in whatever situation you encounter with your choices. For instance, you may not decide that you want to be in an accident, but you do choose to be in that particular place at that particular

time. And you make those decisions through your thoughts, perceptions and attitudes. Do you want others to determine your thoughts, perceptions and attitudes by believing their judgments, criticisms and conclusions? Make them your own and realize you have the power to change them as well as change your life. Critical Healing Tip: Know that you are a child of God and you have an important mission in this life. Everything you experience in life has a purpose and it is what makes you who you are. All pain is to make you stronger. It is no mistake that you had your experiences and you are not being punished, you are developing. The greater your pain, the greater your calling. Think of ways you may be able to use the blessings from your experiences to serve others. You have gifts you are meant to share. Know that you are a worthy being. In Summary: Losing custody of your children has an emotional impact particularly on women because of the feelings of judgment and criticism that is common to most mothers who have undergone the experience. Emotions are caused from thoughts, and thoughts stem from past experiences, many times carried over from childhood. These 8 Critical Steps are for you to help guide you in realizing that changing your perspective by changing your thoughts can change the direction of your life. For information on more in depth guidance please contact me at http://www.marydirksen.com.

Blessings to you along with much peace and love. Mary Dirksen