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Break Divorce Health Self-help

BREAK: Choosing a Therapist

A therapist can be an important person in your life during divorce. I’m not going to discuss why one refuses therapy. Frankly, I can’t get into that. You have to do what works for you. Therapy helped me through divorce.

While I started therapy with one person at the beginning of my divorce after 1-2 meetings, I felt a little uncomfortable, plus I was moving. I decided to search around for a new one.

I had a solid therapist who really helped me transition through divorce. Here are my suggestions and ideas:

  1. Google and do some research about the practitioners in your area. Ask for recommendations from friends.
  2. Note that psychiatrists can prescribe meds, but psychologists and counselors do not.
  3. Do you think that this person can help you as you are moving through your divorce? Remember that there are different steps. A person who is there smack in the middle of your crisis can be great for that time period, and may not work post-divorce. We turn to different people at different points. Understand and think about what you need.
  4. What is the background of the therapist—area of expertise? Perhaps the therapist is an expert in adolescent behavior or addiction, couples therapy? You have to get a handle on this.
  5. Area of knowledge/framework: Personally, I avoid Freudians. Freud was an interesting philosopher and a cocaine addict with dubious ideas about women. If you say you are a Freudian practitioner, I am going to run the hell away. Call me a downer, but yeah, my feeling is that Freud probably made a helluva lot of women feel bad about themselves. I vote for Gestalt or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — the latter, in particular, deals in the here and now. But most practitioners do know and understand different modalities. For me, I wanted to just get through the divorce. Yes, I delved into early childhood, but in the trenches of divorce I had no bandwidth to rewind as the divorce itself was grueling week after week. I didn’t get into a huge amount of my past until later. Now, I’m ready to work with a different sort of therapist. So again, you have to figure out what you need.
  6. Do you feel comfortable talking to this person? Age, background, gender, ethnicity, political leanings? You will be meeting this person at least once a week or so, how do you feel about this person?
  7. Therapy is about emotional work and understanding people’s position in society and within the context of a certain type of patriarchal culture. I have personally never worked with a male therapist, but then again, I have seen a male gynecologist exactly once. In the past, I have also prioritized therapists who understand my position as a woman of color. I’ve had black, Asian-Chinese and Korean descent, and white women therapists. Before you run to a therapist, do some reflection about what you think you will need during this time period of the divorce process. Some people feel more comfortable working with people who are completely unlike who they are. Others not. It all is down to knowing who you need to be on your team. A therapist is on your team.
  8. If you don’t want to see a therapist or are unable to do so, make sure you can count on friends or family as you transition. Divorce is hard. We all need support!
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Belief and Philosophy Blog Break Divorce Health Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

BREAK: Choosing Your Divorce Lawyer

A word to those embarking on their divorce journey: a key player on your divorce team is your lawyer. Divorce is the disruption of a business agreement. A break. It is not a time to say “Oh, I don’t really care. I feel too tired to make any decisions.” Think about it: No matter how tired you got of organizing your wedding, you were able to find the energy to figure out the logistics or style of your cake or dress. Muster the energy to get legal support. The only divorce that goes away is the completed one.

Get referrals to lawyers from friends. I interviewed a dozen lawyers both overseas and in the US. You need to be willing to give the facts. Be prepared to discuss the details and personal information. Divorce varies from state to state, nation to nation. Know some basics—google.

Your lawyer must be on your team. This is more important than any other quality or characteristic. Will the lawyer understand you more due to your gender? Ethnicity? Background? Frankly, that’s hard to say. The lawyer must understand your perspective. I had one lawyer (woman) tell me she didn’t like representing women as they were “too emotional”.

I didn’t hire her—and I would go so far as any woman would be absolutely bonkers to hire someone who is uttering such sexist statements. This woman is rooting for the patriarchy. I will bluntly state something here. You may be too (with or without knowing it), but get this women, if someone is rooting for the patriarchy, where does that leave you? In. The. Dust. Or if you prefer a metaphor from this image: smashing your head on a coral reef.

If you are in a precarious psychological state or are not versed in the financial or business implications of your split, you need to know your lawyer will look out for you. You must be able to speak truthfully to this person. If you get a bad vibe, if you can’t trust this person, do not ignore your instincts—find someone else.

One of the best pieces of advice I got from a friend was this: “Do not use your lawyer as a therapist.” Lawyers figure out your legal and financial interests. Therapists fix your emotional issues. Using your lawyer as a therapist is very costly.

Ask the following:

  • Experience with your type of case (be prepared to state in a few sentences what you have going on—kids, money, property etc…).
  • Retainer and hourly rates/estimate
  • Advice about mediation, collaborative, or standard divorce
  • Time framework and availability

Start writing your divorce story. How do you do this? You have to start changing your mind about who you are and who you were. Examine the Master Narratives that governed your life. Look at yourself with new eyes. Writing your story and sharing it with your lawyer will help move you forward, as well as center your thoughts and ideas as you head into the next chapter of your brave and beautiful life.

 

 

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Belief and Philosophy Blog Hawai'i Health Self-help

Hawai’i: Friendship

I spent the ages of 13-17 in boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover. I say now that the only time I wasn’t competing was when I was sleeping. Andover was about performance, excellence, and achievement within the very specific parameters of the East Coast establishment.

In retrospect my journey in life has been highly influenced by the relatively short amount of time I attended that school. I lost touch with almost everyone I knew from that time, and as the years passed came to wonder if I had imagined the friendships I had cultivated there.

In the end, I concluded that the majority of the ways that we were taught to behave were in fact oppositional to how one cultivates friendship and compassion, and the relationships were primarily utilitarian. Adolescence is a difficult time, never mind if you are thrown into an environment that focuses on your believed potential. I deeply appreciated learning the profound lessons of literary analysis, and yes, the testing of one’s abilities is part of growing up.

But true friendship is rarely made of this stuff. It’s about kindness, support, and tolerance. It’s about the joys and foibles of a human relationship. Compassion. Foibles. Joys. Forgiveness. Connection of the spirit and heart. I would like to say that I developed a host of friendships from Andover, but truly, I did not. I’d say I had hundreds of acquaintances, some very close, but could rarely be myself, although what teen is herself? That’s the nature of being a teen! Figuring it out! I will say that if a true friendship was developed and survived from that time, it is likely to be real. Like many private institutions for the elite, it functioned as a place of networking.

For years in my adult life I avoided anyone having to do with the school. I questioned if I had anything in common with them, politically, emotionally, or socially. It was designed to be an environment of handpicked children who were anointed by the Admissions Office Gods as young leaders in the making. After I left, I didn’t feel I was leading in anything. Where was I supposed to lead someone? Why me? Who is leading? Can’t I follow? I’m tired! Where are we heading? This leading stuff is very not mellow! she said…in cowardice? With anxiety? When I did bother to check in on what was going on with most of the people, I noted how many of them continued to compete, and behave in a manner I deeply questioned for reasons of ethics and kindness.

 

During COVID I reconnected with my old dormmate and friend Catherine Cotins. We had seen each other once over a decade ago when I was in Boston for a conference, having found each other again on social media. We had lost touch since high school graduation and had gone on our separate paths, navigating our way through school, children, illness, deaths, work, marriage, divorce, and the long river of life with everything that it throws your way.

A few months ago Cathy Cotins came to Hawai’i. We talked, hiked, laughed, and went out stand-up paddleboarding and got tired shoulders. I met her son and she met mine. She went to dinner with mom and dad after all that time. Her son was older than she was when she had last seen my parents. She had spent the summer after senior year with my family while we toiled in my dad’s lab injecting rats with diseases (more on that later…I know how to swiftly break a rat’s neck, but uh, haven’t used that dubious skill ever since. Any science interest either one of us remotely had was dead by the end of that summer!). We couldn’t stop talking and sharing. What was both meaningful, reassuring, and exciting about meeting up with each other was knowing that I did have a true friend who knew who I was so long ago, and here we are, decades later, and we still have this connection.

 

She gave me this little book I Like You by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast about friendship and inscribed these words: “…I hope we can always stay friends. We’re so different so much the same, and good compliments to each other all at the same time. We may not do that much together, but when we do something, it’s always so much fun no matter how small…The world isn’t such a bad place with friends like you in it.”

Andover was hard on both of us, an experience we wanted to forget for our own individual reasons. I’m so glad we are friends again and know I will know her the rest of my life. This is a fantastic feeling.

Cathy texted me after she returned, both of us so happy to have reconnected and said this about seeing each other, especially in the context of that hard time during school and what it did: I feel less broken.

That’s what a good friendship does—it heals and opens you through connection. It changes the future and present as it changes the memories of a place and time. By reconnecting again, the ending changed, and in this way, everything else ripples back and forth and flows with a different sense of meaning. We get better through knowing and sharing with other people. We need people to cheer us on in life, to empathize and to be compassionate with us. This friendship makes me so very happy. She’s thousands of miles away, but there are few people in life who get who you are and to know someone does! What a great feeling! I feel honored to call Cathy my friend!

This is all to say that yes, get in touch with that person you once knew, because there is a good chance that what you will find out is that you did know each other, you were friends, and that can make all the difference as you journey on discovering who you are. Because the way that someone knows you, if the person really knows you, is probably important and a reminder of possibility and dreams. You are there for each other. Connect. Reconnect. Friendship.

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Belief and Philosophy Blog Educators Hawai'i Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Hawai’i: Family

I’m starting to learn how to play Chang-gi/Jang-gi or Korean chess, or what some may call Chinese chess. I’m doing this, so that Dad and I can have some activity together. The Kid and Dad played 5-in-a-row. Dad can beat The Kid at this game. He’s also good at chess. He told me this is how he spent part of the Korean War with his brother and cousin, hiding in the attic to avoid being drafted as a young teenager, the three of them playing chess.

I first learned to play chess in the third, maybe fourth grade. A friend taught me and failed to tell me that losing the pawn was not as bad as losing a rook and she easily won for several rounds. I developed an interest in playing chess, enough to have Dad come home from a business trip with a small magnetic chess set. I still have it. He learned Western chess; we played together. My ambition became to beat him.

I played other Korean boys in Iowa, most distinctly one who won against me with a series of memorized moves. I was in awe. I asked him how he learned chess, and he showed me a chess book. I went to the mall, ordered the same book, Dear Reader, I still have it, LOL. I studied it, and then memorized the moves. I got better. I kept playing. I didn’t ever play the boy again, but I ended up challenging Dad to chess and beating him.

I beat him once, but obviously, he was the person I wanted to win, as I didn’t play much after that match. Dad laughed. I had taught him now to play Western chess, and he had always beaten me up to that point. Looking back, I know he had let me win, played a bit casually, but no matter. I felt like it, and he admitted it: I had won.

So much of my identity throughout my life was tied to being my father’s daughter. The daughter of a scholar and research scientist and doctor. The daughter of someone who had survived the Korean War, who had won the nation’s top scholarship to come to the West, who had a PhD and MD by the time he was 27. He headed a research lab. He was the only person of color with his field’s medical association. He was a colonel in the Army. He published over 200 papers. He spoke multiple languages. He lived a big life. Mostly, he was unique, unabashedly exhausting, often temperamental, humorous, brilliant, and fiercely loyal. It was under this shadow that I lived and tried to measure myself and my accomplishments, and of course, I always came up short. I still do. The complications of his existence were exacerbated by language challenges and his struggles with the truth of race in the US. Dad’s journey was long. Difficult. In almost every sense, it was my mother who made his navigation in the US possible (more on Mom in my next post!).

Dad was the one who had always drilled into my brain that I had to have more, be more, accomplish more, to be treated with half the respect, as he said, because I was Korean, because I was Asian, because I was female. This was the lesson that my father kept repeating, and this was the lesson that nearly broke me, or perhaps did. (I’m since rather patched together on my merry way…)

I particularly remember these ideas when at boarding school. I would not buckle. No. I would not. Because I was not a quitter. I was the daughter of Dr. Tai-June Yoo and the white students who bullied, belittled, had no idea what I did to reinvent. It wasn’t me who was on the line. It was my race. It was my ethnicity. It was my gender. I would not let anyone down. Ever! Tough times. I got sick of living up to everything–and as one does, it led to completely giving up that type of structural existence. Too exhausting. Too narrow. It did not fit. Even if that meant disappointing Dad.

It took me decades for me to see that there are truths to how we learn and function in a nation and that our families messages are to be interpreted according to who we are individually. We can’t be everything to everyone all the time. What we can be however is this–people who slow down and play a game chess now and then, people who try to learn something new, people who try to understand that our own paths are informed by others, but are our own paths full of foibles, mistakes, joys, and unexpected happenings.

Stay tuned.

Maybe one day I’ll beat dad at Korean chess.

Miracles do happen.

 

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Educators Hawai'i Parenting Teachers

Hawai’i: Beyond Van Gogh

This was a fantastic interpretation of Van Gogh’s life and work. I was thoroughly impressed by how it could engage so many people and inspire reflections about life and art. The Kid and the grandparents, my sister, we all enjoyed it. I’m thinking about how art can be used to galvanize discussion and how exclusivity is never the point of expression. The human questions of belonging and origin are crucial to all of us. Decades ago, I saw an exhibit of his work at the Met. This was an entirely different experience, but distilled the essence of the WHY of his work. Imaginative. Compelling.

I hope that we can see more exhibits here in Hawai’i that are accessible to all ages, and strongly believe that the people of Hawai’i can also export the art and expression that this geographic locale prompts. This is the mission of (THROB) The Hawai’i Review of Books; I am glad to be a part of this endeavor.

We face challenges wherever we live, but I am always grateful to be living here. There is a reminder here in every gesture, that we are temporal, that nature governs our lives, that beauty and good fortune is in our very existence.

 

 

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Belief and Philosophy Gods and Pineapples Hawai'i Health Poetry Self-help

Hawai’i: Stars and Pines

Diamond Head Cemetery. A Cook pine from New Caledonia. Yellow stars that poured from a tree? Anyone know the name? The ground as sky. The dead slumber. Decades pass. Beloved Mother. In Loving Memory. She loved the sea. Flowerless. Forgotten. This heaven was the toil of stiff hands. The invention of paradise. Lost. Airplane-filled. A single taste. A myth cascades. Rock and soil call the return to dust. Go back to where you came from.