A New Way Of More Rapid Healing Has Arrived…

In a divorce situation typically everything is upside down and mixed up. If you are the petitioner, you are probably on your way toward something new—not always but in many cases something has triggered the initiation of the divorce. Your mind is usually full of new things and new experiences that you are after.

For the respondent, there is usually turmoil, uncertainty, fear and sometimes anger. To get through this, time is the major factor but it can be helped along by some new and rather interesting inventions in the form of social networking on the web. I am writing about Facebook (FB). FB membership grew from 150,000,000 users in January to 175,000,000 by February—that is significant for one month. According to one website, 45 percent of FB’s U.S. audience is over 26 years old and the fastest growing audience in the U.S. women over 55 with a 175.3% growth in the last 120 days. It is growing faster with women than men in almost every age group.

The average age of men and women getting divorced is rising at an alarming rate with the advent of people living longer and realizing that at 50 they still have a lot of life left. A total of 13,678 people over 60 were divorce in 2007, up from 12,636 the previous year and from 9,052 in 1997. The question that comes to my mind is where are these divorced folks finding new lives?

I postulate that these social networking web based organizations are allowing an easier transition into the next life than was experienced before FB and others came into being. From the freedom of your living room, you can search out friendship with little threat and even if you are very shy, you can make friends easily.

Let’s go through the process to show how easy it is to make friends. You open up your computer and type in the internet address for one of the organizations. You sign up by choosing a username and password—now you are a member. This is when decisions are made; how much information do you put on the web for others to see and how truthful do you want that information to be. My personal suggestion is the truth is better than a lie. I know one person who put down that she is in her middle 50’s and the truth is that she is in her 60’s. Another option is that you could choose to leave some information out of your profile.

I have seen different tactics about inputting information. For example, I have seen, no picture at all while others have put graphics or a distorted picture– most I think though, put in a recent picture. You can list your sex and even your sexual preference. You can state that you want friendships, dating, networking or a relationship. You can list your marital status and age or leave it out altogether. All is your choice to what you want to show the world. Yes, I said show the world. This where it gets tricky when you realize that anyone who has a “friendship” with you can see everything that you have put out to the world.

What is a “friendship”? A friendship is anything that you want it to be. You can search for members of your high school or college graduating class and select who you liked and ask them to be your friend on FB. You can also eliminate and actually block someone that you did not like from seeing anything about you—there are safeguards built in for protection. You could also look for someone who worked with you in the past at a company or just put in someone’s name that you thought of and see if they are on FB for you to develop a friendship with in the future. You can search geographically for a friend or by a job description—the ways of finding someone seem endless. I joined back in January, yes I was part of the 25 million and actually found my cousin that I had not seen for forty years through his son of the same name who lived in Panama. Pretty cool!

You are probably asking yourself, how can FB or something like it can help you build your new life. Well that part is easy. Every time that one of your friends puts something about their daily life up on FB, you get to see it and so do all of your friends. You find out that Jean, your friend from high school that you connected with last month, is also friends with Bill who you knew from your last job. You can then, through FB, ask Bill to become your friend because of your previous friendship at work. When Bill agrees to become your friend, you get access to his list of friends and may see someone else that you know, etc., etc..

Along the way, as your read stories about someone who is communicating through FB with their friends, you might like the writing of someone that you do not know but would like to get to meet and so you ask for an invitation. This system allows you to grow your network of friends far beyond what you would normally be able to with little threat to your safety and freedom. Remember, you are still sitting there in your robe and slippers with the television on in the background.

As your friendships develop, you become a bit more bold about what you put on your site and what you might say to someone in their “chat” section. Chat is where you can have a personal dialog with an individual party without prying eyes seeing your text. You can even send email through FB for longer and even more personal communications if you desire. I would tell you that there is some point that you will stop and re-evaluate the information that you have put up on the web and even those who have become your “friends” on FB. The euphoria of the new toy will wear off and you will find that Johnnie that you thought that you would really like, wrote too much about his dog and it become irritating and so you just removed him from your friends list. This is natural and even there was an article in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago about the etiquette of how to remove someone. The cool thing is that if you remove someone from your list, they system does not tell them so maybe you can get away clean.

As you can see, we have now set up a profile on FB and put in the information that we want to tell others. We have used it to make new “web” friends and eliminate those who probably were not real friends anyway. The divorced person now has a network of friends to help him or her get to the next step of meeting someone new and it is fun.

The most common questions that I have heard has been, “When do you find time to do all of this extra stuff when your schedule was full already”. Don’t worry, you will find the time and I have heard that some folks do a lot of networking on FB around the world at night. When you are getting positive gratification by your actions, you will find the time.

Along the way, you find that FB has internal applications that promote friendship. It seems that there are hundreds of these applications from sending someone a virtual cup of coffee to starting a virtual pillow fight with another person. They even have kidnapping games where you can get to know someone through playing the game. I will have to admit that I made a very good friend on FB with the wife of a good friend. No, there is nothing going on and even her husband joined FB and they share hers and my conversations freely. She challenged me to a FB pillow fight (I know it sounds strange) and we are still fighting the same game today after several weeks. I am determined that she is going to lose.

I spent this entire time writing about FB and you may wonder why. Well it has no instructions and can be daunting to someone who is new so maybe if you share some of what I have written they might get curious and look into it. I sincerely believe that healing after a divorce has to be easier than digging yourself a hole and pulling the earth over your head. Using technology that was originally designed to replace a college yearbook for the web has grown to be a great boon for our industry in helping our client/patients get on with their lives. I think that it is valuable.

In my practice, I often talk of the knot that is in the stomach of someone getting divorced. It is so devastating to so many that they need my services as a divorce planner to help them get to that next level where they can see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”. I believe that Facebook, My Space, Linked In and/or Plaxo can be vehicles, along with good planning, to get someone through the troubling time of a divorce in today’s world. It is better than what our parents had to work with.

In a divorce situation typically everything is upside down and mixed up. If you are the petitioner, you are probably on your way toward something new—not always but in many cases something has triggered the initiation of the divorce. Your mind is usually full of new things and new experiences that you are after.

For the respondent, there is usually turmoil, uncertainty, fear and sometimes anger. To get through this, time is the major factor but it can be helped along by some new and rather interesting inventions in the form of social networking on the web. I am writing about Facebook (FB).

FB membership grew from 150,000,000 users in January to 175,000,000 by February—that is significant for one month. According to one website, 45 percent of FB’s U.S. audience is over 26 years old and the fastest growing audience in the U.S. women over 55 with a 175.3% growth in the last 120 days. It is growing faster with women than men in almost every age group.

The average age of men and women getting divorced is rising at an alarming rate with the advent of people living longer and realizing that at 50 they still have a lot of life left. A total of 13,678 people over 60 were divorce in 2007, up from 12,636 the previous year and from 9,052 in 1997. The question that comes to my mind is where are these divorced folks finding new lives?

I postulate that these social networking web based organizations are allowing an easier transition into the next life than was experienced before FB and others came into being. From the freedom of your living room, you can search out friendship with little threat and even if you are very shy, you can make friends easily.

Let’s go through the process to show how easy it is to make friends. You open up your computer and type in the internet address for one of the organizations. You sign up by choosing a username and password—now you are a member. This is when decisions are made; how much information do you put on the web for others to see and how truthful do you want that information to be. My personal suggestion is the truth is better than a lie. I know one person who put down that she is in her middle 50’s and the truth is that she is in her 60’s. Another option is that you could choose to leave some information out of your profile.

I have seen different tactics about inputting information. For example, I have seen, no picture at all while others have put graphics or a distorted picture– most I think though, put in a recent picture. You can list your sex and even your sexual preference. You can state that you want friendships, dating, networking or a relationship. You can list your marital status and age or leave it out altogether. All is your choice to what you want to show the world. Yes, I said show the world. This where it gets tricky when you realize that anyone who has a “friendship” with you can see everything that you have put out to the world.

What is a “friendship”? A friendship is anything that you want it to be. You can search for members of your high school or college graduating class and select who you liked and ask them to be your friend on FB. You can also eliminate and actually block someone that you did not like from seeing anything about you—there are safeguards built in for protection. You could also look for someone who worked with you in the past at a company or just put in someone’s name that you thought of and see if they are on FB for you to develop a friendship with in the future. You can search geographically for a friend or by a job description—the ways of finding someone seem endless. I joined back in January, yes I was part of the 25 million and actually found my cousin that I had not seen for forty years through his son of the same name who lived in Panama. Pretty cool!

You are probably asking yourself, how can FB or something like it can help you build your new life. Well that part is easy. Every time that one of your friends puts something about their daily life up on FB, you get to see it and so do all of your friends. You find out that Jean, your friend from high school that you connected with last month, is also friends with Bill who you knew from your last job. You can then, through FB, ask Bill to become your friend because of your previous friendship at work. When Bill agrees to become your friend, you get access to his list of friends and may see someone else that you know, etc., etc..

Along the way, as your read stories about someone who is communicating through FB with their friends, you might like the writing of someone that you do not know but would like to get to meet and so you ask for an invitation. This system allows you to grow your network of friends far beyond what you would normally be able to with little threat to your safety and freedom. Remember, you are still sitting there in your robe and slippers with the television on in the background.

As your friendships develop, you become a bit more bold about what you put on your site and what you might say to someone in their “chat” section. Chat is where you can have a personal dialog with an individual party without prying eyes seeing your text. You can even send email through FB for longer and even more personal communications if you desire. I would tell you that there is some point that you will stop and re-evaluate the information that you have put up on the web and even those who have become your “friends” on FB. The euphoria of the new toy will wear off and you will find that Johnnie that you thought that you would really like, wrote too much about his dog and it become irritating and so you just removed him from your friends list. This is natural and even there was an article in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago about the etiquette of how to remove someone. The cool thing is that if you remove someone from your list, they system does not tell them so maybe you can get away clean.

As you can see, we have now set up a profile on FB and put in the information that we want to tell others. We have used it to make new “web” friends and eliminate those who probably were not real friends anyway. The divorced person now has a network of friends to help him or her get to the next step of meeting someone new and it is fun.

The most common questions that I have heard has been, “When do you find time to do all of this extra stuff when your schedule was full already”. Don’t worry, you will find the time and I have heard that some folks do a lot of networking on FB around the world at night. When you are getting positive gratification by your actions, you will find the time.

Along the way, you find that FB has internal applications that promote friendship. It seems that there are hundreds of these applications from sending someone a virtual cup of coffee to starting a virtual pillow fight with another person. They even have kidnapping games where you can get to know someone through playing the game. I will have to admit that I made a very good friend on FB with the wife of a good friend. No, there is nothing going on and even her husband joined FB and they share hers and my conversations freely. She challenged me to a FB pillow fight (I know it sounds strange) and we are still fighting the same game today after several weeks. I am determined that she is going to lose.

I spent this entire time writing about FB and you may wonder why. Well it has no instructions and can be daunting to someone who is new so maybe if you share some of what I have written they might get curious and look into it. I sincerely believe that healing after a divorce has to be easier than digging yourself a hole and pulling the earth over your head. Using technology that was originally designed to replace a college yearbook for the web has grown to be a great boon for our industry in helping our client/patients get on with their lives. I think that it is valuable.

In my practice, I often talk of the knot that is in the stomach of someone getting divorced. It is so devastating to so many that they need my services as a divorce planner to help them get to that next level where they can see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”. I believe that Facebook, My Space, Linked In and/or Plaxo can be vehicles, along with good planning, to get someone through the troubling time of a divorce in today’s world. It is better than what our parents had to work with.

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