How Divorce Could be Affecting Your Job (And What to Do About It)

Going through a divorce can affect every part of your life, from your relationships to your employment. While you should be working with a divorce attorney on the legal and possibly financial parts of a divorce, there are many other aspects of ending a long-term relationship that are better addressed with the help of a psychotherapist. Understanding how divorce could be affecting your job on a practical and emotional level can help you understand what to do about it, and how to approach divorce from a healthy emotional perspective.

Divorce Could be Affecting Your Job (Even if Your Spouse Isn’t)

You may have heard horror stories from people going through messy divorces where their spouse shows up at work or even gets them fired. This is rare and tends to happen when couples have wrestled with high conflict or even trauma throughout their marriage. But divorce could be affecting your job even if your spouse isn’t taking things to this extreme.

Some of the ways divorce affects your job are entirely practical:

• Taking time off work for court hearings or meetings with your attorney
• Updating your paperwork with Human Resources regarding tax withholdings and emergency contacts
• Setting up income withholding to pay child support or spousal support (also called alimony)

However, there are also significant emotional and interpersonal ways divorce could be affecting your job. That is where working with a psychotherapist in short-term or ongoing therapy could help you navigate the process more smoothly.

Emotions About Your Divorce Could Affect Your Job

Going through a divorce is an emotionally difficult process. It may be a stressor triggering other mental health conditions. However, even people without a pre-existing mental health condition can find they are more emotionally reactive. You may experience anger, sadness, frustration, or even fear. Those emotions may come up while you are on the job and interfere with your ability to work. A call from your attorney or text from your spouse may disrupt your concentration or even overcome your coping mechanisms, causing you to lash out at your coworkers.

This is why working with a psychotherapist for short-term divorce therapy can be so beneficial. By giving yourself a time and place to work through the emotions that come from divorce, you can make it easier to cope while doing important things in your life – like working or caring for your children – without having unhealthy emotional reactions to stressors that happen while the divorce is pending.

Should You Tell Your Co-Workers About Your Divorce?

Many people understandably want to keep their personal lives private and avoid providing gossip for coworkers at the office. However, there may be a good reason to tell your co-workers that you are going through a divorce:

• Encourage empathy when you become emotional at work
• Explaining why you are have difficulty concentrating at work
• Providing context for shifting assignments for team members
• Avoiding uncomfortable questions about your spouse from coworkers who know you both

However, even if you choose to tell your coworkers that you are getting a divorce, you don’t need to share any significant details about your relationship with your spouse, or the divorce process itself. Your coworkers may try to be helpful, telling you what you should door encouraging you to commiserate about your spouse. However, therapy or your attorney’s office are better places for those conversations. Instead, let your boss know when you will have court-related conflicts or need to take time off, but otherwise, avoid getting into details with your team members.

Divorce Can Change Your Priorities Around Work

The time taken actually doing the work of getting divorce takes time, energy, and mental focus. You may need to dedicate time to collecting financial documents, responding to questions, or talking to your attorney during working hours. This means work will necessarily shift downward in your priority list. It is also possible that your priorities at work will change as well. For example, increased demands on your finances may lead you to prioritize overtime, additional commissions, or other financial incentives more than you have in the past.

Divorce Can Affect Your Ability to Work

On the other hand, you may need to temporarily reduce your hours so you can exercise parenting time, make arrangements to move out of the family home, or pick up or drop off your children from school, daycare, or extracurricular activities. You may want to work with your psychotherapist to address how to approach your boss to talk about your divorce and ask for the necessary flexibility into your work.  Your therapist can also help you define and prioritize your goals during the divorce process to make sure your employment stays on the list.

Divorce can even change your priorities about whether you work at all. Often, if one partner in a marriage has been a stay-at-home parent or caregiver, divorce means returning to work. But re-entering the workforce can be emotionally challenging. Especially, if you are also continuing to provide childcare, the challenge of finding and maintaining a part- or full-time employment may seem overwhelming or even impossible. Working with a psychotherapist can help you manage the negative emotions that come with job hunting, and the increased stress around working as a soon-to-be-single parent.

Going through a divorce isn’t easy. It can affect you’re your job on a practical, interpersonal, and emotional level. Working with a psychotherapist can help smooth out the bumps in the road and make it easier to maintain a healthy work-life balance, even as your personal life is in flux.

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience. He helps adults and couples with life changes like divorce and grief through short-term therapy or ongoing counseling. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.