Telling the Story of Your Divorce with Steve Friedman

In the midst of difficult life transitions like divorce, it is human nature to reach extreme, self-defeating conclusions: I’m incapable of love! All men are sociopaths! The world is unspeakably cruel! How can we take a closer look at what happened in our relationship and expand the narrative to something a little more nuanced, a little more balanced, a little closer to the truth? One strategy that works is to tell the story of your divorce in writing.

Steve Friedman is the award-winning author of seven books, and his essays on relationships have appeared in anthologies like Modern Love and The Bastard on the Couch. Steve’s work has appeared in a number of national publications, including Esquire, GQ and The Washington Post, and he was the writer of the first Modern Love column in The New York Times. Steve teaches the popular writing course Divorce, Breakups and New Beginnings: Telling Your Story through the organization UNtied.

Today, Steve joins Katherine to discuss how writing helps people make difficult life transitions. He explains how the demands of storytelling impose order in a chaotic world and afford us a more nuanced perspective of divorce. Steve also shares the value of exploring separation in the context of a writing workshop and walks us through some of the exercises he uses to examine a story from different perspectives. Listen in for insight around what Steve has learned about love through teaching and writing about relationships and learn how telling the story of your divorce can help you move forward!