Why Is Divorce So Emotionally Painful?

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Question: Why Is Divorce So Emotionally Painful?

Answer:

I’d not put much thought into the emotional pain that divorce causes until I went through my own divorce. Divorce was just something that happened to people, just another turn of events. I had this misguided belief that a couple sat down and came to a mutual agreement to divorce, and moved on from there.

Then came my own divorce, intense emotional pain and years of healing for everyone touched by the situation. There is nothing like personal experience to change your perspective!

I recently had a conversation with a woman who was beating herself up because she “couldn’t move on.” She had been divorced for two months and thought that once the divorce was final she would feel a since of relief. Instead she felt fear, anxiety and loss.

Regardless of whether you are the one who wanted a divorce or, the one who was left behind, there is emotional pain and healing to be expected. Perhaps if we look at where the feelings of sadness and negative emotions come from it will be easier to understand why the healing process can take longer than expected for some who divorce.

Where Does The Pain of Divorce Come From?

• You’ve lost someone you once loved or maybe still love. There is a grieving process much like one would experience if they lost a loved one to death. It isn’t unusual to blame yourself for the end of the marriage or, blame your ex spouse.
  For those who didn’t want a divorce there will be periods of anger at everything and everyone. You may withdraw from friends and support and isolate yourself in an attempt for self-protection. Your ex is someone you were once intimately attached to; give yourself time to adjust to that loss.
• You’ve lost dreams for the future. In a marriage we live in the present and the future. There are constant thoughts of where we, as a couple will be 5, 10 or 20 years down the road. With divorce any future the two of you had planned is gone; you have to start from scratch and learn to build a future for one after a divorce.
  It is easy for newly divorced individuals to get stuck in the present or the past, ruminating over what went wrong and how they are feeling, “right now” instead of looking forward. Is it any wonder that some find it hard to get past the pain of having to let go of the future and start over again?
• You’ve lost an intact family. If we have children we all work hard at having the “perfect” family. A lot of time and emotional energy goes into maintaining a great intact family. A lot of emotional pain goes into letting go of the idea that we didn’t have a “perfect” family.
  When a family falls apart we are made more aware of the work and energy that will go into building a new and different family with a new partner. We have to not only take into consideration or own pain and fears we have to focus on doing what is in the best interest of our children who’ve suffered the greatest loss of all.
• You feel as if you have failed. Most of us don’t live with constant denial and are able to take responsibility for the role we played in the demise of our marriage. Admitting to ourselves that we made mistakes can leave us feeling vulnerable and riddled with guilt.
  Even as common place as divorce is in today’s society there is still a certain amount of shame and embarrassment attached to the idea that we were not able to keep our marriage together. Facing others in our social circle, church or family can bring up negative emotions that also take time to heal. It is a matter of adjusting, going from being part of a couple to single again after a divorce. And, that being OK within and without.

The above is a short list. It, by no means covers all the bases. Pain is relative and each divorce situation in unique. You will suffer losses that are exclusive to your marriage and your recovery. The secret to recovering and moving on after divorce is to become self-aware and honest with yourself.

Divorce may mean freedom but with that freedom comes loss, and there must be a willingness to take the necessary time to heal.

This article is by Cathy Meyer and you can read it here:-http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/copingandemotionalissue/f/Why-Is-Divorce-So-Emotionally-Painful.htm

Alimony That Does Not Look Like Alimony

Peter J Reilly Contributor

I focus on the tax issues of individuals, businesses & more

TAXES 4/30/2014 @ 9:55AM

When money flows from one ex-spouse to another it will generally be one of three things – alimony, child support or property division.  Alimony has tax consequences.  It reduces the adjusted gross income of the paying ex-spouse and increases the income of the receiving ex-spouse.  If this is news to you and you are of the plotting sort, you probably immediately leaped to a conclusion.  As long as the paying spouse is in a higher bracket than the receiving spouse, let’s call it alimony and we’ll figure out how to share the savings.  Much as we might hate one another, we hate paying taxes more.

If that is how your thinking went, you just ran afoul of Reilly’s Second Law of Tax Planning - Any clever idea that is fairly obvious runs into rules that make it hard. The rules in this case are in the Internal Revenue Code Section 71.  They are designed to not allow alimony treatment to payments that are in substance child support or property division.  If a payment meets all the requirements of alimony, the agreement can still state that it is not to be treated as alimony for tax purposes.

So if an agreement says that the payments are to be treated as alimony for tax purposes, that really means nothing.  What matters is whether the requirements are met, such as terminating on the death of the recipient and not terminating on an event tied to a child such as high school graduation.  If the requirements are met, a statement that the payments are not to be treated as alimony does have an effect.

Here is the part that is really interesting.  These rules were put into effect by the Tax Reform Act of 1984 and then modified by the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  They are a little tricky, but hardly rocket science.  Nonetheless, divorce attorneys still have not absorbed them.  People end up in Tax Court with agreements that say they should be treated as alimony for tax purposes, but fail on one or more of the requirements.

The case of Jana Renea Henson is a variation on this theme.  The “Settlement Agreement and Judgment” in her divorce from Michael Henson in 2006 did not say one way or the other whether the payments were to be treated as alimony.  Ms. Henson got audited on issues surrounding her cellular phone business.

Respondent’s Determinations Respondent selected petitioner’s 2007 and 2008 income tax returns for examination. Because petitioner was unable to provide records with respect to her business, respondent’s examining agent used petitioner’s 6087, 4077, and 5929 bank account statements to reconstruct her income. Respondent’s agent determined petitioner’s gross receipts for the years in issue by adding up deposits to these accounts and then subtracting the deposits that he was able to identify as nontaxable, such as loan proceeds, equalization of property payments, and transfers from petitioner’s other bank accounts.

The case is mainly about the deposits related to her cellular phone business.  She argued that some of the deposits were advance payments that might be refundable and other were loan proceeds.  She had no records to back this up, because of successive moves.  That is not the part that I found interesting.  Here is the interesting part.

At trial petitioner asserted that the $50,000 of alimony she reported on her 2007 tax return should be nontaxable. Petitioner argues that her divorce decree “even states that it’s not alimony, it’s just separating marital property, and *** [my husband's and my] money.

The Tax Court wasn’t buying it.

The settlement agreement does not designate the maintenance payments as not includible in petitioner’s gross income and not allowable as a deduction to Mr. Henson; petitioner and Mr. Henson were not members of the same household at the time the payments were made; and under the settlement agreement, Mr. Henson does not have to make any additional maintenance payments to petitioner after her death. On the record before us, we hold, consistent with petitioner’s reporting position on her 2007 return, that the $50,000 she received from Mr. Henson in 2007 was alimony and taxable pursuant to section 71.

Ms. Henson was representing herself in Tax Court and perhaps her argument might be viewed as something of a “Hail Mary” pass to extricate herself from her other problems.  Still, I think that the point is instructive.  Her argument had at least enough surface plausibility to avoid being considered frivolous.  We don’t learn from the case whether Mr. Henson deducted the payments.  The lesson I would take away is that people who are expecting payments to not be taxable as alimony should probably insist on an explicit statement in the agreement to avoid being blindsided.

You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.

This article is fromForbes.  It is rather complex but can help you avoid a problem with your tax.  You can read it at:-http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2014/04/30/alimony-that-does-not-look-like-alimony/