Separation: deciding clearly when nothing is clear

Conditions and Diagnoses

Decisions about assets and about the children have to be made precisely when sleeping, concentrating and thinking have become difficult. On that point.

September 11, 20269 min read

Illustration for the article: Separation: deciding clearly when nothing is clear

The meeting room at the firm is comfortable. Coffee poured, sparkling water, a table far too big for two people. The solicitor sets out the structure of the settlement clearly: the properties, the shareholding, what is in, what stays out, what has to be decided by Friday.

He is following it. He asks a sensible question about one of the items. He writes something in his notebook.

And then, somewhere between one thing and the next, she asks him what he would prefer — and he realizes he has no idea how long ago he stopped listening. He does not know whether it was ten seconds or three minutes. He looks at his own note and cannot work out what he meant by it. He says he needs to think. He leaves the building, gets into the car, and sits in the car park for a length of time he does not keep track of.

He is not a man who loses the thread in meetings. He spent twenty years making complex decisions under pressure, and that is exactly why this frightens him. It is not the difficulty of the material. It is something else, and he has no name for it.

That night, lying in bed, he can put it better. Something like: my life has been turned upside down, but I need to be lucid enough to decide. And that is precisely the trap of this moment — the most consequential decisions of a life tend to be demanded exactly when the person is least able to make them.

Perhaps you recognized something there. Or perhaps you are thinking of a friend who is going through it now and has been answering messages in a strange way. Either way, it is worth saying in plain words: none of it would mean there is something wrong with the person. A separation dismantles the routine, where you live, the financial structure, the social network and the picture you have of yourself, all at once — and I have never known anyone to go through that without suffering.

Suffering over a separation is not falling ill

This needs saying before anything else, because the resistance to seeing a psychiatrist usually starts here.

The pain of a marriage breaking up is expected pain. It has anger in it, sadness, humiliation, relief, guilt — sometimes all of it in the same day, sometimes all of it in the same hour. It comes in waves, it is worse at night and at weekends, and it gets worse on dates that used to be shared. That is not a symptom of anything. It is what happens when a long attachment comes apart.

Nobody needs treatment for suffering over a separation. And a psychiatrist who turns every pain into a diagnosis is doing a poor job.

But there is a point, and it can be identified.

The point at which the thing changes in kind

What I tend to see is that the turn does not happen in the intensity of the pain. It happens in the functioning.

Sleep is the first indicator, and the most reliable. Sleeping badly in the week of the difficult conversation is one thing. Having spent six weeks waking at four in the morning, every day, with your thoughts already moving and no way back to sleep, is another. When sleep comes apart and stays apart, the body stops replacing what it spends, and everything else degrades from there.

Concentration is the second. Not the occasional distraction, but the sustained inability to read a document to the end, to follow a meeting, to hold a line of reasoning without it slipping away. For anyone who works with text, with analysis, with judgment — a lawyer, a judge, a senior civil servant, an executive — that is not discomfort: it is the loss of the tool you work with.

The third is the capacity to decide. It degrades in two opposite ways, and both turn up in the same period. Either the person becomes unable to close anything, revisiting the same choice twenty times and postponing indefinitely. Or she starts deciding abruptly, on impulse, to be rid of the discomfort of having it hanging over her.

When those three appear together and hold for weeks, we are no longer looking only at legitimate pain. We are looking at something that is exacting a concrete price, at a moment when the price is high.

Why this matters now and not at some other time

Because the decisions of this phase are mostly irreversible.

The settlement is signed once. The arrangement for the children shapes the next several years and is hard to redo afterwards. Leaving a partnership, selling a property, giving up an entitlement — all of that gets decided within a few months, and all of it will still be in force long after the pain has passed.

And there are two temptations that show up with some regularity.

The first is to concede everything just to have it over. The person is exhausted, cannot stand the dispute any longer, and gives away what she should not give away in order to buy silence. She calls it generosity, or letting go. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply the wish for it to stop.

The second is the opposite: turning the proceedings into the place where the anger will live. Every filing becomes an instrument, every deadline becomes contested ground, and the case stretches on for years because neither side wants it to end — ending would mean having to feel what is underneath.

Someone who has been sleeping four hours a night for two months is far less able to recognize which of the two she is falling into.

The children

This is the point where almost everyone demands most of themselves and judges themselves worst.

What I usually hear is a version of: I am trying not to take it out on them, but I am not all here. And that is true. Someone who is sleeping badly and whose tolerance is reduced responds differently, has less patience, goes absent in her head during dinner. Not because she does not love them, but because there is no reserve.

I am not going to say what to do about that — it is not the kind of thing a generic recommendation settles. But it is worth noticing that this tends to be the first thing to improve when sleep and concentration come back. And it is worth noticing that not being all there is not the same as being absent. The two get confused very often by people who are busy accusing themselves.

On the resistance to seeing a psychiatrist

It almost always has three components, and all three deserve to be taken seriously.

The first: “I’m not ill, I’m going through something.” Correct. An evaluation does not exist to hand a diagnosis to someone who does not have one. It exists to tell apart what is an expected reaction from what has already crossed that line — and that distinction cannot be made alone, from the inside, because from the inside everything feels equally unbearable.

The second: “I don’t want anything that will slow me down.” That is a legitimate concern for someone holding a demanding role, and it should be said at the first appointment, in those words. What treatment is aiming at is a matter to be discussed, not imposed — and “I need to keep operating” is a perfectly legitimate aim to put on the table.

The third is the quietest: looking for help feels like admitting the separation won. That the other person, or the situation, managed to knock you off your axis. That component is rarely said out loud and is usually the most decisive.

On what organizing does not solve

There is a part of this that is not about insomnia and not about concentration.

A separation forces someone to look at old choices, at what was kept going for years without being examined, at the role they occupied in that relationship and at what repeated itself from older stories. That is the kind of thing that can be examined properly in a space of analytically oriented psychotherapy — not as a method for getting over it faster, but as a place where it is possible to look at your own relationship with all of it, without hurry and without any obligation to arrive at a useful conclusion.

The two things do not compete. One deals with what is compromising the functioning now; the other with what will still be there long after the file has been closed.

None of this has to be decided today

You do not have to conclude anything. You do not have to convince yourself that you are badly enough off to justify an appointment, or prove anything to anyone.

It is only worth considering one thing: if sleep has come apart, if concentration is not returning, and if the decisions you have to make are the kind that cannot be remade — then this is not a bad moment to have someone looking at it with you. Not because you are fragile. Because the cost of deciding while you are not in a condition to decide, in this particular case, is far too high.