There is help after partner leaves you
Dear Readers: Today, I've asked a question by reaching out to a post-divorce coach in Australia who's provided answers: Why do some formerly loving, good husbands suddenly leave their wives?
Fiona May is a transition and relationship coach with certification in life coaching who lives in Perth. She married at 18 and had three children by 21. She farmed with her husband of 28 years ... until he went golfing in Thailand and remained there with a local woman.
Today, retired from a manufacturing business she built from scratch, May works with women and men whose presumed life partners suddenly left them.
May's goal over the past four years has been to help both sexes with the life-enhancing task of resetting their lives and shining after divorce.
But first, she devoted herself to learning about family therapy, strategic intervention for herself and her children (early- to mid-20s when their father left) and neurolinguistic programming about how learned behaviour as children affects our adult choices. “I wasn't going to remain heartbroken, bitter or stuck. I had to heal, grow and love myself.”
She addressed my question about men head on: “There are commonalities in that some men were similarly abruptly left by their wives. Men also have been getting a raw deal. By the time a man leaves, the relationship usually had a problem including miscommunication and the wife shutting down. Men leave because they don't have the skills to correct the relationship.”
Couples need to learn how to understand each other, not tear each other down, she says. “When women and men both accept responsibility, they actually recognize what happened. We empower ourselves.”
Her program, through her website womenontransition.com, offers a free consultation, a 12-week paid program and other free resources. There are 13,500 members in her Facebook group.
May is head female coach on the eight-person leadership team. Her son, Kody, head male coach, teaches men to “become leaders in their life and relationships,” May says.
Some coaching applies to men and women alike: “Don't lose yourself in the next relationship you find. You need to take down your walls and be whole, to allow a good man or woman to love you.”
She adds, “Divorce doesn't have to only be devastating. It's the biggest challenge to face, yet some people do better after the divorce.
“We try to help them grow beyond what they know from their upbringing and past ... to no longer hear a voice inside saying they're “not good enough.”
The end goal? “To identify our own needs and what we're expecting from a partner, and see what a healthy relationship looks like, while also learning to recognize red flags.”
Her own family life healed from her initially shattering divorce, when she, her children and the “beautiful man,” as she describes her second husband, all agreed to renewed contact with their father and his current partner at family events.
Not all men who leave a marriage are terrible people, she says, and I agree, since neither are all women who do the same thing.
From my own experience, as well as learning from so many readers who write me their stories of once-promising marriages that ceased to thrive, May brings a positive perspective wrapped in her own confident pitch toward a better life post-divorce.