Thriving After an Unwanted Divorce with Dr. Imara Moses

Hi there, I'm Dr. Zoe. I'm glad you're here. This is the place for developing your strength as a woman and helping you navigate difficult relationships in your life, including that sometimes difficult relationship with yourself. Being a strong woman is not about what other people can see, and it's not about how loud you are about it. It's a quiet knowing. This isn't therapy, but you may feel like you've been to therapy after one of my episodes. Here, we also explore the intersection of psychology and faith, all with the purpose of creating a new Welcome to Redefining Your Superwoman. Dr. Imara Moses, thank you so much for coming to the show today.

Thank you for having me, Dr. Zoe. I'm excited to be here.

I am thrilled because I know women are going to be blessed. They are going to get so much from your story. So let's dive in. But before we get started, Let's hear your Superwoman win and your Superwoman fail that I ask all of my guests.

So my Superwoman win for this week is I finally decided to have someone come to my house and help me with the cooking. Yes, I work full-time, actually picked up another part-time job, and I have 2 little ones at home, and it was just becoming very overwhelming to try to deal with the meals as well. Right. I felt really happy that I chose to take care of myself in that way and get some help with the food. And then my Superwoman fail for this week is I think I let my kids watch too much television. I think being home this whole year from COVID we've gotten really comfortable with the electronics. And this week, I think we took it to another level, which I felt kind of bad about.

Well, there you go. Real momhood. As I was telling you earlier, I think my kids are home watching TV right now.

Mine are upstairs playing video games.

That is— that's real. And we all sometimes, you know, feel like a failure. I get it. But they're gonna be okay. They're gonna turn out just fine. Yeah, maybe they'll be professional gamers. We can kind of rationalize that, right? That's right. That's right. Oh, well, thank you for sharing that.

Thank you.

So we're going to talk about how you came from a place of having an unwanted divorce to a place of strength, resiliency, and really freedom now. Can you kind of set the tone and tell us your story?

Thanks. You know, the story is one that I never thought I was going to experience.

Mm-hmm.

I grew up in the church, and I always believed that I would get married and be married until I died or my spouse died.

Mm-hmm.

My parents have been married for over 30 years. My grandparents were married for over 50 years. So I grew up around that as a reasonable, attainable goal. But unfortunately, when I was going through high school and college, I went through these experiences where I was not wanted or I was not esteemed as the desirable girl at my school. And that kind of hurt. And I think as Black women who go to schools where we're not in the majority, that's a common thing that I didn't realize until I became an adult.

Right.

A lot of us didn't have the prom date, or a lot of us didn't go out on dates when we were in high school. And that's just because of the numbers. It had nothing to do with you as an individual. But anyway, not knowing that as a young person, that affected my self-esteem. And then when I got into college, had one or two relationships that did not work well. One of them was with your proverbial player.

Mm-hmm.

And I had never been treated that way before. And I think there was a part of me that knew that it wasn't right, that it wasn't healthy. But I just wanted male attention so badly, right? Because that's kind of how we're exposed in our culture is that you got to get a man, you got to get a boyfriend. And that starts like really—

Way early.

Way early, right? So by the time I got into medical school, I was in my early 20s, still a virgin, you know, in holding with my Christian beliefs, but was really having that itch to just get married. So I met my now ex-husband right before I started medical school. And it was one of those situations where they seem like a really great guy, very nice, very sweet, very daunting, showering me with more attention than I had ever received in my entire life, not realizing at the time that it's actually a technique called love bombing. What? And for those who aren't familiar, love bombing is when you're dealing with someone with narcissistic personality disorder. They just shower you with loads and loads of affection, and it's actually an abnormal amount, right? Because at the time I was thinking, oh, you know, this is exactly how it's supposed to be. He's supposed to want to call me every 3 seconds and know my every move, not realizing that it actually wasn't healthy. And so we got married, and very soon after, like the wedding night, I was finally starting to see things that either I hadn't wanted to see in the past because I wanted to be married so badly, Or maybe I just literally didn't see. I, I really think it's the first answer. A lot of things I just didn't want to see. But because I wanted to be married until I died, Mm-hmm. I was like, I'm gonna hang in here. You know, this is just the normal ups and downs of married life, or so I thought. But the things I was experiencing weren't the normal ups and downs of married life. So Things like staying out super late, like 3, 4 o'clock in the morning, and not letting me know where he was. Would try to call him on his phone, it would go to voicemail.

Yeah.

And when I would ask him about it, there were all the excuses. Oh, my battery died. Oh, I was out with my friends. Oh, you don't want to go out with me. I've asked you to come with me, but you just want to go to sleep. So it was a lot of blame shifting, if you will. Uh, and then things like not wanting to, um, contribute his portion of his paycheck towards our family sustenance. So wouldn't buy groceries, wouldn't pay bills, wouldn't pay for half the rent. And at the time, again, very giving personality.

Mm-hmm.

Just giving, giving, giving, thinking that this is what I'm supposed to be doing as a good wife. Well, we start having children and then things get worse. So we're still staying out really late at night. And then I find out that you were actually having, you know, extramarital relationships. There were— there was an episode of physical abuse while I was pregnant. And shortly thereafter, I had a miscarriage. And, you know, in the midst of the miscarriages, I'm thinking, We've just lost our child. He's telling me, well, it's a blessing in disguise.

Mm-hmm.

And there was no mourning. There was no look at being upset. There was no trying to comfort. And so it just kind of went round and round and round until on my last pregnancy, I found out I had a sexually transmitted disease. And so again, just the teachings that I had had from youth of you stay in the marriage forever. You don't leave. Even then, I was still thinking I'm going to try to make this work. So I put a lot of the pressure of trying to heal the relationship on myself when that's just not how marriage was designed. It takes two people to make it strong and to make it healthy. And so went on like that for a total of eight years. In this, by this point, I've graduated from medical school. I've had two living children. I'm carrying. Being a whole husband on my back. And we moved to New Mexico where I'm in the military. So I'm taking care of military service members. Very stressful. The thought of having to deploy is always looming over you. And at the end, towards the end of the relationship, he decided that he was just going to leave the family. Because he wanted to go to medical school himself, but he wasn't going to apply to medical schools within the United States and be close to home. He was determined that he was going to leave and do it overseas. And he did. He just left.

Good luck.

And again, I'm still trying to hold on to this relationship while he's overseas. He's up to his same old, same old in terms of entertaining other females, but started to project onto me. So he would call back home and accuse me of having affairs. He actually took me through a smear campaign where he called first, second, and third level supervisors. He even called an Air Force general at another base and sent all these emails about how I was having an affair. And it was very hurtful because I never cheated throughout the entire relationship, trying to work on it. But I realized in that moment that You certainly don't care about me because if I was to get— you know, in the military you can get thrown out, you can get demoted, you can even be imprisoned for adultery. If any of those things were to happen to me, then there would be nobody left to take care of the children because you've gone. So you would really be hurting the children inadvertently. So at that point I said, well, you know, he doesn't even care about the children either. I think I'm finally ready to leave.

So that was your turning point?

That was my turning point. Now, shortly before then, my mental health was in the tubes. I was very depressed. I was starting to have physical health problems, and I considered myself to be strong and resilient, but eventually my body started breaking down, and it was my body's way of saying, hey, Things here are not good. Now, you might be walking around in a cloud telling yourself everything is okay, that you're going to work this out, but we are having issues here. We're not going to keep doing this.

Right.

So I reached out to a counselor and she helped walk me through the steps of first saying, you know, what you're going through is not normal. And just kind of— there's a word for it where you, um, you acknowledge the person, you, you hear them, you, um, What is the word? She basically just said—

Well, you used the word normalize. Yeah. You know, I'm not sure which word you're searching for right now, but in this experience with my clients, I know that they, who essentially are being gaslit, right? I know that they have that internal still small voice that knows, but there's so much going on, they're so confused and they can't see it. And so I just validate that internal Voice for them, right? And let them know that they're not crazy, there's nothing wrong with them, they're not the problem, they need to get the strength to get out, right?

Yes, Dr. Zoe, that word validate

is

so important because when you're being gaslit,

yes,

you're looking at the sky and you know it's blue But the person keeps telling you that it's purple.

Yes.

Maybe black. The tea is black. And you're like, no, it's blue. And they're like, no, it's black. And they do everything to make you think it's black to the point that you start thinking you have gone crazy, that you don't even know your colors anymore.

Absolutely. And they tell you, you have something wrong with you. You need to get help. All of it. Yes.

So to have a counselor come and validate you and say, no, actually the sky is blue. It starts to clear this haze.

Yes.

It's so funny because like within 30 minutes of talking to a sane, healthy woman, it's like, oh, you're right. The sky is blue. I am actually in a really bad place right now. And it's like, I couldn't, I didn't feel like I could talk to my friends or family because I was so embarrassed. So ashamed. And I didn't want— I couldn't bear their emotional reaction in addition to carrying my own. So it was really helpful for me to have that objective third party through my counselor to help me walk through that. And so as my vision started to clear, I started to realize that one of my problems was I was an enabler.

Yes.

I let him not pay the bills for 8 years. I overcompensated to carry his load. I let him continue to come into the house in the wee hours of the morning. I didn't put my foot down when I knew he was doing things that were inappropriate for a married man. And so the focus of the counseling was really not so much him, But it was me, right?

I am so, so glad you said that because, you know, there's this line between victim blaming and helping a victim take responsibility for what they are accepting, right? And, and I want women to hear that because it's not that anyone is blaming you for what he's doing, but you do have a choice To stay. You do have a choice to accept. You do have a choice to enable, or you can do the opposite. And he will continue to go on and be the person he is, but you don't have to be there for him.

Exactly right, Zoe. And I think as Christian women, we have been beaten over the head with the verses about forgiveness and long-suffering. We think that we are supposed to stay and endure the abuse Because, you know, Christ endured abuse and Christ died for our sins. I mean, so I'm just being like Christ. But one thing that my counselor pointed out was Christ died for the greater good. When we allow our husbands to mistreat us that way, that is not for their good, right? We're enabling their selfishness. Right. We're enabling destructive habits that can destroy future generations. So what is good for our husbands is when we stand on the truth and say, no, this is not God's intention for marriage. I cannot let you continue to treat me this way. And exactly like you said, they're going to do what they're going to do. I would, I would venture to say there are some men who would change, but there are a lot who won't. Mm-hmm. And so you have to be willing to say, well, you know what? As much as I want to honor God in this marriage, I can't— at least for myself, I could not continue in the marriage because I had hatred in my heart. And I knew that was not honoring to God, no more than a divorce would have been honoring to him. So I chose to leave. I think what really got me to that point was I looked at my kids. I have 2 boys. And I was like, you know, if I stay and he chooses not to change his behavior, my children are going to grow up in an environment where they are learning that this behavior is normal and this is how you treat your wife. And I do not want my boys to learn that. So I'm going to exit stage left. And I'll see you on the other side. Right. So that was a really hard thing to do because I was committed to marriage. I loved my husband. It's not what I wanted to do, but I also realized I couldn't continue to stay in a toxic environment like that and let it spill over onto the kids more than it already had.

Yes. And you know, for women out there who may be in this place, Of, I recognize my marriage in her story, but I'm terrified and I don't want to lose my marriage. I would just like to encourage you, number one, it's okay to be terrified, right? And you don't have to lose your marriage, but you have to be willing to lose your marriage in order for change to occur. Mm-hmm. You have to be in a place where you're willing to set those boundaries strong and say, if Things don't change, I'm going to go. And then that essentially puts the responsibility on his plate. And either he will or he won't. It's scary. It's scary. So let's talk about that scary step. So ultimately you ended up going towards divorce. Did you have all of those terrifying feelings?

I was mortified. I was paralyzed with fear because all that was going through my head is all the people who are looking at me and think I have it all together. I'm gonna— they're gonna know that I don't have it all together, that I'm actually a mess. And then I said, oh, everyone's going to be looking at my boys as another set of statistics, another set of Black boys without their daddy. And that just tore me apart. Oh, I'm going to have the label of a single mom. And I'll be honest, I had my own prejudices about what a single mom looked like, what, why she became a single mom in the first place. And I was horrified at having that label applied to me. I was horrified that, you know, my ex-husband was going to get a new girlfriend and then bring her around my kids. And they were going to be exposed to that. I was horrified. About having to shuffle them between 2 households. Just the whole thing made me sick. But I, again, I said, I can either do this or my boys can grow up in this messed up environment. And I actually had a relative who was in an emotionally abusive relationship, and she stayed. She endured till the end, until he passed away. And I can see it in her offspring, some of those traits that they inevitably picked up because they lived in the house for the entire childhood and young adult years. And so I said, no, I just don't want that. So I basically closed my eyes and jumped. I just did.

I love it. I love it. So you closed your eyes and you jumped. And so now you're a single mom. How did you come from a place of shame, guilt, fear about your future, your kids' future, to where you are now?

So I think that's the most beautiful part of the whole story is, you know, in the first week or two that this was happening, I remember putting my kids to bed. I would go take a shower and I would just cry. And cry and sob and just get it all out because I had been holding it in the whole day to try to give my children the best version of me. But once they were in bed, I just let everything out. And then I would go into my room and I would journal. And I would write down all the fears that I had about being divorced and about being a single mom. And I would On one column, and then on another column, I would write down a true thought, right? So if I said to myself, my kids are going to be delinquents, I'm going to, I'm going to mess up my kids because they don't have their dad. I wrote that down. And then on the other side, well, now wait a minute. Are they really going to grow up to be delinquents, or is this just a story that you're telling yourself because that's all that they've shown you on TV? Like, you know, I could actually choose to be an amazing mom, get myself together, get mentally whole, spiritually whole, start taking care of myself physically. I could get it together and actually be an amazing mom for my boys, and they actually won't grow up to be delinquents, right? And I

just—

what if he gets a girlfriend and he brings her around my kids? Yeah. Well, now wait a minute. Do you really think— well, the thought that I had was, well, if he was able to get you and you're a nice young lady, maybe if he gets another girlfriend who— if he tricks another one, maybe— Right. Maybe she'll be really nice too, and she actually won't abuse your kids like you're thinking she will. But what if she's not so nice? Well, then all you have to do is talk to your boys. About how people should be treating them. What does it mean to be kind and respectful and then create a safe space for them to come and talk to you after the visit is over and you guys decompress together? And so I just kind of went through each scary thought and reframed it, and I looked at that every day. Every day, because see, every day the thoughts were coming up. Every 30 seconds the thoughts are coming up. So I would look at that every day and I would read it and I would just meditate on it and I would get it in my heart. And so now here we are almost 5, 6 years later and I'm, you know, the kids are doing great. They're doing really good. I'm like, oh, we're gonna go get you tested for the gifted program. Oh, maybe you can skip 3rd grade. Oh, so it's almost like when you set the intention and you make those small steps every day, a couple days turns into weeks, and then it's months, and then it's years. And I fully expect that when they turn 18, 19, and it's time to leave the house, that I have raised them into the men that I envisioned, the men that I was trying to save. All those years ago when I was making this gut-wrenching decision. Yeah. So it really has been for me the power of the thought.

Yes. Because you were willing to take the leap. You couldn't see exactly. You had all those fears, but you were willing to take the leap.

Yeah.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I know that it will give a woman out there some hope. And I love the cognitive behavioral skills you're talking about. Those are fantastic. That's all about self-talk. And you guys know I am a huge proponent for self-talk. So I want to be clear with my listeners. I want to make sure that they know everything, right? Because you have written a book and you have written the book under a pen name. So we are using your pen name. Dr. Amara. All of everything that we said, of course, is completely true and accurate, but you're using a pen name. Can you explain? Well, tell them about your book and then explain why you are using the pen name.

So the name of the book is Lift Her Up: A Single Mother's Memoir of Heartbreak, Betrayal, and Triumph. And I wrote the book, um, number one, because I like to write. But number 2, it was almost that last catharsis of getting it all out on paper and closing the book and being done. And I opted to write the book under a pen name for a couple of different reasons. The main one was for my son's privacy, right? I felt like as they grew up, I never wanted to do anything that they would be ashamed of, or, you know, some— the book is kind of gritty. There are some very graphic parts of the book. Right. And so I never wanted one of their friends one day to say, hey, I read your mom's book and she did this and she said that. So it was more to protect their privacy. And then a lot of women who have been in abusive relationships, they don't want to create more fuel for another fire. So if my ex-husband was to ever read the book, I could easily see him doing something to retaliate. And so it was more about just protecting my privacy, but wanting to share that it is possible to go through a divorce and come out on the other side. Okay. Okay. It is possible to be in an abusive relationship and still achieve all of your career goals. Still raise really wonderful kids and just kind of show how I did it, what it looked like, and really to dismantle a lot of the stereotypes about single moms. So I talk about how I went through medical school. I talk about how I was in the military. I talk about how I was able to go to the Ivy Leagues. So all those things, because those aren't the images that they show us on television. And so really just to give hope and a light To any lady who's going through a really bad relationship.

And you have done that fabulously well. I have had the benefit of reading the book even in some of its beginning stages. I am— I'm so proud of you. The book is phenomenal. And so I will put a link in the show notes for, for you guys to go lift her up. And find it on Amazon. You can find it at all the places, right? Yes.

Yeah. You know, Zoe, it's so funny just the way that we met because we met on a writing website and there's just so many people on the website and half of them don't respond, you know, when you're posting, trying to get a partner. But it was to me a miracle. That you and I met in that way. And it's just been so special to go through the journey together of writing our stories down to help other women. It's so encouraging. And when I look at you and everything that you've accomplished and everything that you've gone through yourself, it just puts me in a state of awe.

Oh, well, thank you. And it was, I mean, it was a godsend how we met. We didn't, See, you know, our— we didn't know anything about our backgrounds or anything as we— yeah, we've shared our memoirs from, from the very beginning and now they are being birthed and out there in the world. Yes. Yes. So go get this book. Be encouraged, be inspired, get all the hope that you need that if you are in a similar situation that you can get out and have the exact same experience that Dr. Amara is having. Is there any last word that you could share with a listener who may be in this place?

I would say that you know what direction you should go in. And as Dr. Zoe mentioned, that quiet, still voice, that intuition— I call it God's superpower to you, right? And so if you just take a moment to just be quiet and be still You know what you should do, and it's okay to reach out for help, to ask somebody to hold your hand and help you take the jump, because it's really hard to do. And, you know, leaving the marriage is not the best choice for everybody, so it's something that you have to consider very heavily and ultimately make the right decision for you. Um, but yeah, that's what I would say is listen to that, that still small voice inside.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you.

You have an awesome night.

You too, Dr. Zoe. We'll talk soon.

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman. New shows go up every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and text the word strong to 38470. To get my weekly encouragement. I look forward to connecting with you amazing women on social media throughout the week. Have a super week!