Permission Slips - Ep7 - Jenny Birz - Permission to get out of relationship that doesn't make you happy

Jenny Birz, a seasoned divorce and family law attorney, shares her expertise on empowering individuals to leave dysfunctional relationships and prioritize their personal happiness.

In this episode, Jenny and I dive into the emotional challenges and societal pressures that often keep people stuck in unhappy relationships. We discuss the difficult but transformative process of finding the courage to take action and the growing trend of women choosing to prioritize their own well-being.

We explored how to overcome feelings of being trapped or uncertain about the future, offering valuable advice on finding clarity, building support systems, and embracing self-discovery. If you’ve been searching for the strength to move toward a brighter, more fulfilling future, this conversation could be your first step.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Sign Your Own Permissions Slip Podcast. I'm your host, Anna Fishman. This is Episode 7. We have an amazing guest today, Jenny Beers. She's a family law and divorce attorney, and we will talk about some serious things today. We're allowed to laugh, and we're allowed to have fun, but we will talk about some serious things. I will preface this conversation before I'll give Jenny a chance to introduce herself, why we're talking about to Jenny, because the topic of today's conversation is permission to get out of the relationship that you're not happy in. Jenny happens to be a divorce attorney. We've known each other for several years, and we come in and out of each other's lives, mostly not about the topic of porn, on the topic of movies and kids, and being busy moms and being entrepreneurs. But in my life recently, since I started the last five years as I was doing group trips for women, I talked to so many women at different ages from mid-20s to mid-80s, and we're living this epidemic of unhappiness, of unhappy relationship, of depression, and I thought it would be very timely to talk about the permission to get out of that. So before we jump into that, Jenny, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. Jenny, I know that we talked a little bit about this before we started recording, but I'm sure you see this a lot more than I see. This epidemic of divorces and just people just throwing the towel, like, we're done. Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, I practice, I exclusively practice divorce and family law. I have my own firm. I practice mostly in New Jersey. I do a little bit of New York work, but most of my work is based in New Jersey, and I see this all the time. I see people who are coming for a divorce after a long time of delaying a divorce for a multitude of reasons. It's financial reasons. Sometimes it's easier to stay married and not deal with the financial consequences of what a divorce might look like. A lot of times it has to do with the kids. I definitely have a lot of, or I've had a lot of cases and continue to have a lot of cases where people wait until the kids are older because the mentality is, and look, this isn't right or wrong. This is what works for people at the time. The mentality is that we don't want to get divorced when the kids are really little. It's going to have a really big impact on the kids. And so we're going to wait until the kids are grown up. And so we have, I've had this sort of slew of divorces where the kids go to college and now it's time because a lot of people find themselves in this situation where they've made it work somehow. And again, making it work is a very subjective phrase, but they stayed together, let's say, somehow and put on this front or maybe didn't put on a front in front of the kids. And now the kids are out of the house and the kids aren't a distraction to all the problems in the marriage anymore, right? Because it's so easy to get lost in the responsibilities that every parent has when they are kids and you know you've got their activities and you've got just responsibilities. And so it's easy to put the relationship on the burner or dealing with the relationship on the back burner. And now all of a sudden the kids are out of the house and all of those issues and all of those problems are front and center and people realize that they either have to deal with them or now they're in a space where they want to deal with them because there's no other escape. And that happens a lot. We actually have a term for it. It's called great divorces when people are getting divorced later on in life when the kids are grown up. They've been married for decades and they're giving themselves permission to now not be married anymore. It's really sad but at the same time it's also I guess liberating. I'm lucky enough that I'm in a great relationship and I haven't had to go through those pains and tribulations of getting divorced. Knock on wood. Where's the wood? Everything is plastic. Everything is plywood. Where's the real wood in this house? But I run a big community for women, over 200,000 women from all over the world. And on the daily and on our Facebook group, I see people like these women post, I've been married for 30 years, 40, 50 years, finally walked away and they feel so liberated. I don't want people to take this podcast as we're encouraging people. Absolutely not. Not at all. But at the same time, my heart feels for them that they've been in this relationship for so many years and maybe it worked at some point and I'm sure they've had happy times. But to walk away from a 30, 40, 50 year relationship. It takes courage. It takes guts. It takes so much guts and so much courage and so much clarity and understanding what you actually want from your life. And to be clear, I think it takes courage and guts to walk away from a relationship or marriage at any stage of the marriage, right? Absolutely. It takes guts to walk away after a month, after a year, after five, after 20. I think regardless of when it happens, it takes guts because I once heard someone refer to a divorce as the death of a family. And I think that that's a very poignant way of putting it and probably a very accurate way of putting it because regardless of how old this family is, it is and at some point potentially was a cohesive family unit, especially when there are kids involved. This is a habit, a routine. This is something that everyone has kind of lived with for however long. And now suddenly, you're telling yourself, you're telling your partner and you're telling presumably kids that this will no longer be your reality. This is going to be something different and it's very hard. It's very hard for adults to deal with, let alone for kids to deal with. Honestly, it's sometimes hard for pets to deal with too because then you have a situation where someone wants custody of the dog and hey, dogs are living creatures too and they have their own routines and I've definitely had situations where clients have called and have said the pets are in distress because they're either away from potentially who was a primary caretaker or they're now being shuffled from home to home. So all of this is the death of a family as this family knew it. And so I think it takes guts at any point in time. And again, to clarify this is not saying everyone go out and get a divorce. It's just people feel a lot of shame in taking that step and there shouldn't be because it just it needs to be something that you decide that either you need for yourself or that perhaps is best for the family unit. Yeah, it's you're signing regardless if you're a woman or a man or two men, two women in a relationship, whatever it is, doesn't matter who you are. It's you're giving yourself that permission to do something for yourself to change the status quo. If you're not happy to change that. I spent last weekend with my friend. We were driving to Boston with the kids. We were in the car for seven hours. So we talked about everything under the moon and we were talking about relationships in general, how like, you know, how we change as we grow, like, we meet our significant others when we're like, almost in our teens, and then, you know, we're together for 20, 30 years, even though we're not that old, but we've been together for a long time. Yeah. And, you know, she she made this really interesting analogy that kind of like made me like pause for a second. She said, you know, you don't go to a hardware store for oranges. And I was like, what? You know, you have a relationship. And let's say your relationship, that's your hardware store, like, you know, your significant other is your hardware store, and you get really great hardware things, I don't know, nails and hammers and all the power tools and, you know, whatever like your relationship survives on that hardware store. Yeah. All of a sudden, you decided you wanted oranges, or maybe you've been wanting oranges for a long time. You've been getting a hammer instead. And it's been working. And I'm here, you're like, you keep going to this hardware store every time expecting to see oranges and you're disappointed or you ask for oranges and they're like, whatever the case may be. And she's like, you cannot expect to get oranges in a hardware store. You either learn how to live without oranges, maybe you don't need one, maybe you can get apples somewhere, like from a friend, right? Like, but you cannot expect to get those oranges in that hardware store. And maybe you can make it work without oranges for the rest of your life. And you'll be perfectly fine. You just forget about the oranges, you know, you can't. But maybe you can't, maybe you love oranges, maybe you need to have them every day. Maybe you're so deprived of vitamin C, to trade the hardware store for an orange. Yeah, orange store. Yeah, this was such a great analogy. Yeah. I was like, I never thought of it that way. And we have to think like where it's time to reassess our expectations, I guess, and like what we want from that hardware store. But also at some point, maybe like say, the hardware store is not for me. Maybe it is never my place to make that decision for someone. Sometimes I have people who come in to do consultations and they say, I don't know if I should get divorced. Tell me what to do. And my answer is always, I cannot answer that question for you man. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what's happening in your family. Beyond what you're telling me in this brief consultation that we're having, this is such a personal decision and a personal choice. And almost like you're, you're the only one who can decide whether it's time for your oranges. I can't, I can't tell you that. But what I am here to help with is once you do make that decision to then guide you through the process and take you through it and take you out to the other side because there is another side. There is kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. And a lot of times people, while they're in it and just getting started and like right in the throes of it, they're not seeing that light because some divorces are way tougher than others, right? In the sense that sometimes I have clients who come in and they get along fine with their significant other. Perhaps they're just not compatible anymore. They have the grounds, the no fault grounds for divorce in New Jersey is referred to as irreconcilable differences. Because sometimes that's just what it is, right? Maybe they've grown apart. They're just not compatible. They've decided they're not compatible anymore. And that's okay. You can go to court and you can say we don't, we don't want to be divorced anymore, but we're still civil. We're still friends. Nobody wants to screw the other side over. And those are, for lack of a better way, easier to get through in the sense, I'm not emotionally because I still think emotionally it's very hard, but because everyone's on the same page and everyone is working together and everyone is doing what's best for the benefit of, again, if there's kids involved, everyone is thinking about how can we best help the kids through this transition? And those are the divorces that will be, they'll go faster. They'll be more, you know, efficient. They'll probably certainly be way cheaper because you guys aren't fighting each other at every step of the way. And so there's, there's absolutely those kinds of divorces. It's possible to get divorced and still be civil. And I always encourage that because whenever someone says to me, well, how much is this going to cost? My answer is always, it is entirely dependent on the two of you, entirely. I am not here to, you know, make the flames even higher. I'm here to help you guys get to the other side. However, fast and cheaply, I can do that for you. But then it's not always possible. There are people who are getting divorced for a multitude of reasons who are hurt emotionally, physically, financially, whatever the case might be. There are emotions are running high, anger. And it takes, it takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of money. Honestly, nobody really wins in those cases. And if there are kids involved, they certainly aren't winning either. But it's, it's my job as the, as the attorney to kind of help you pull you through it and try to maintain some semblance of sanity and peace for every, for my client and, and, you know, by extension than the kids, if there are any involved. Right. Well, relationship is work and divorces work. So in either way is a cop out way out. Absolutely not. And I think it's also very hard when people start the divorce process. They're just, it's a completely, it's a whole new routine, right. And they're just not used to it. They don't know how to make things work. And there are a lot of what I like to call kind of growing pains, right. They don't know how to communicate with each other in a different way. And that's okay. It's completely normal. So long as everyone acknowledges that these are growing pains, and we just need some time to work out the kings. And there's definitely, there's definitely tools that we can implement to help that process. And there's definitely professionals that I work with as a, as an attorney that I recommend my clients work with when there are these kinds of growing pains. Because you don't know, you don't know how to do this. You only know what you've been doing for the last, you know, however many years, you also have been communicating a certain way. And you got to start doing it differently. And the kids have to start doing it differently. I always always recommend in addition to perhaps if the client needs to go to therapy to kind of deal with all of these issues, that kids should go to therapy also. And therapy also is kind of, I think in recent years, it's become obviously a lot more less taboo, I'll say. But a lot of times I'll have clients who say to me, oh, they don't need to go to therapy, they're fine. I'm not saying they're not fine. I'm saying that sometimes they need, they just need some help to figure out how to deal with all of these huge feelings. It's very hard on kids when they have to move potentially from a house that they know, when they have to now spend some time at one parent's house and then some time at another parent's house, it's very hard for them to deal with all of these feelings. So I'm by no means suggesting that they're not fine. I'm just saying perhaps they need some sort of outlet and some sort of mechanisms and tools to help them deal with all those feelings. A hundred percent, I can't agree more. I think it's for kids, it's probably the hardest to deal with because they don't know like how to, like you said, how to navigate those big feelings and they may not even know that they're not fine until like later on. Oh yeah. Yeah, very much so. And you know, a lot of times parents forget and use the kids as messengers and I always say, please never, ever use the kids as messengers, even if it's something like tell your dad to pack your jacket or tell your mom to pack your shoes or whatever the case is. The fact that they've now been given this responsibility to tell the other parent to do something, it weighs on them. And we as adults might think, oh, that's just like a throwaway thing. I just said, pack the shoes. But for them, it's this like responsibility that they feel this weight on their shoulders. And heaven forbid, they forget to relay the message. They now blame themselves and feel like they're to blame because you know, someone forgot the shoes. And so for no reason should the kids ever be messengers. And you have to try to do your best to, no matter regardless of what happened in the relationship. And I'm not talking about obviously abuse, your physical violence or emotional abuse. I think that that's certainly an entirely different conversation. But I'm saying in a household where there was no abuse, where the parents have to just, we didn't work, but that doesn't make him or her a bad parent. And I say this a lot of times, he or she may have been bad husband or wife, but that doesn't mean that they were a bad mom and dad. And it's very, very hard to get out of one mindset and into another. Yeah, I can see that. Going back to the topic of our overall podcast, permission slip and yourself permission to get out of this relationship, as hard as it may be, as damaging as it may be to the family, to the kids and everything. And you know, I'm looking at this from the lens of a woman, because I'm a woman, I can't speak for anybody else. And if any man are listening, you're more than welcome to stay and listen, maybe you'll learn a thing or two about us. But you know, going back to the permission slips, there is a point in time when it's time to sign that permission slip that it's okay to finally put yourself first and say, you know, I'm not happy, I really need those oranges, I cannot survive with those oranges. Like I live without oranges for the last 20, 30, 40 years, and now I want the damn orange. And I want it in Italy, I want it in Sicily, I want it in Croatia, whatever that may be. Like I see a lot of times, what breaks my heart, I see a lot of women who come across my trips and they say, you know, this is such an amazing trip. I've been dreaming to go to Italy, I've been wanting to learn to make pasta and drink this one. But you know, my husband like wouldn't let me go without without them. And I'm like, what year is this like 1985 or is it like 2024? Yeah, for accomplished women, women who have careers who like, I don't know, CEOs and like as sweet executives, and not to say that like, you know, stay at home, moms don't deserve that. But like to see someone who's so like accomplished and still goes back to Oh, look, I don't have permission from my husband to go on the trip, blows my mind. Yeah, I get it. And I, like I said, I see I see a lot of it where they were where women and men also say I didn't feel like I could, for whatever reason, I the kids were so little, I didn't think that it would be good for them. I didn't have the money. He or she was the primary wage earner. And so I, I knew that if we got divorced, I'd have no money to live on. These are all very valid reasons that a person may want to delay what they what they feel like they maybe should have done sooner. But at the end of the day, only only that person can decide for themselves, is this the right time or not. And yes, sometimes it's really about reaching that point where you say to yourself, I'm going to give myself permission and I'm going to deal with the consequences as they come. And I'm going to, and I'm going to work it out. And this, this is what I need to happen in my life now. Yeah, you know, I see after COVID, like we're talking about after COVID, there was like a definite like after point, but like, I talk about that all the time pre COVID, post COVID. Right. I remember my grandparents talking about before world war two and after that's called it, right? So I see this influx of people giving themselves permission to prioritize travel because they're like, you know what, we work too much, like it's always never enough money, it's always never enough. But now we're going, we're going to take the strip, we're going to spend this money, like it's, you know, we're going to prioritize it and give ourselves permission to do this. So I see this influx of travel demand. But I also heard that there is an influx of divorces because we're a scooped up, right? Like, yes, can you add something about that? Like, I'm just curious. Yes, there was definitely an upwards trend for a lot of reasons. Some as simple as people who perhaps were not seeing each other on a day to day, right? You leave in the morning, you go to work and you don't see each other at night until a nighttime and you have this kind of like limited interaction. That's the norm. And now all of a sudden, 24 seven, you cannot leave the house, you are next to this person, and everyone's breathing on each other. So that was, there was definitely an uptick where I had, where I had people call being like, this doesn't, this isn't working anymore. Like, I see it, it's right in front of my face that this just doesn't work anymore. Definitely a lot of that, where people were coming face to face with the fact that perhaps we're just not as compatible as we thought we were. And the fact that we were just not around each other as much was masking all, was masking all of those problems that we're having. So yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely an uptick in divorces. The beginnings of COVID were very, very hard for already separated families, whether they were like in the early stages of divorce or they were had already been divorced, it was very hard because we had issues with custody and parenting time. So you could potentially, and this was, these were a lot of cases of first impression, meaning judges hadn't had to dealt with these issues before, where one parent was coming into court and filing motions in court saying, I'm not being given permission by the other parent to see my kids, because of quarantining and safety concerns, right? And then it becomes a question of, okay, well, we're trying to keep everyone safe and we're trying to keep everyone, remember the social distancing and then early in the early days, everyone had to like quarantine for 14 days before they saw each other. And so you have the situation where a parent is saying, I haven't seen my kid in at least 14 days. And then you have the other parent going, well, you know, we're living with elderly people and immunocompromised people. And so, but you're out partying every single day. And I can't let you see the kids. And this is very, very hard. And it's very hard for judges to decide this, because everyone had their own ideas of what should have happened during these days of COVID. And, you know, when you have these two separate family units and you're living apart, perhaps the estranged parents had very different views on how COVID should be dealt with. And so perhaps parent number one was sitting inside and, you know, lysoling the food. And the other parent was out every night. And those two things, I again, I don't know which one was right or wrong. But they are just, they're not the same. And so you run into a problem of, well, I can't have you seeing the kids. And then the other parent going, I'm deserved to see my kids, neither one are wrong or right. And so the early days of COVID were very hard when it came to that. Because it was, how do you decide something like that? How does a judge who doesn't know the family, and who doesn't, and who himself or herself doesn't know what's going on with COVID and what COVID-19 actually is? How do they, how do they decide which parent is right and where the parenting time should go? It was a, it was a weird, weird time, honestly, where no one knew what's happening. And lots of case law was made. So I can totally relate because on my very first trip, my first group trip, we went to Scotland and we had several people who got sick with COVID. And at that time, and UK already dropped all of the COVID rules. So no matter who I went to, I went to the hotel, I went to the tour company, I went, I called like the state department, whatever the UK, and they're like, you can do whatever you want. And I'm like, but I have a few sick people and I don't know, put them on the bus, don't put them on the bus, tell them to do whatever you want. And I was like, Oh my God, I guess myself. But you know, like, luckily, we are like, I worked it out. And when I got home from that first trip, I said to myself, you know what, if I can deal with a group of 20, with half of them being sick and still like manage it, everything, like this was my, you can do anything. You can do anything. This was my bad sense. I'm fine. I'm like, I survived. I was like, I remember calling my husband, like, I wanted to be a big badass business woman while I'm like sitting on the floor of the bathroom, like crying, like, what am I going to do with that? Listen, that it happens to the best of it. But you know what, that was my way of like, I figured it out. And I'm like, now that when I'm in it, yeah, God willing, never the same situation. But like, whatever, you know, I can figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. COVID days, of course, that was like, I think about it. And it wasn't even all that long ago is what years ago, COVID started, and think back on it sometimes. And I'm like, that was a weird time, man. Like, we were wiping down all the groceries and it was masks. Oh, God. It was, it was just a crazy, crazy time. But hey, we, we got through it. We got through it. But yes, to answer your original question, there was definitely a rise in divorces for sure. For sure. There's also always a rise in divorces after Valentine's Day. That's just a little fun. I think I figured out the connection. I suspect it's because people get fed up if they like, you didn't even remember Valentine's Day death. But there is absolutely, there's been studies done, that there is a, there is a rise in divorce filings right after the holidays and right after Valentine's Day. Yeah. People get fed up. No, I can see that. I can totally. Get fed up. And then people kind of decide we're going to get through the holidays. Yeah. And then I'll do it. There's a, there's a rise in divorces, like beginning of summer, because kids are done with school. So, yeah, it's all practical reasons and practical scheduling. If you, I mean, if you really think about it, if you, like, if you look at the charts to see, like, when the filings are going up and down, it's, you can really, you can explain it because everyone's human. You can, you can figure it out as to why this is happening when it happens. Absolutely. You know, I went to finish on, on the later note, I was talking to someone the other day, a woman who wanted to come on one of my trips. And she goes, oh, you know, like, I can travel in the next three weeks because my son is with his father. And I was like, the light bulb. And I'm like, I need to get divorced so I can have four weeks to travel. That's the secret of the problem. Again, not an encouragement for anyone. No, no, that was a joke. I am not getting divorced. A lot of times this is what ends up happening. Because we, we implement a schedule of parenting time and a vacation time. And so a lot of times people kind of find themselves with free time, so to speak, right? Because the other parent will have blocks of time with the kids. And we call it parenting time. We don't call it visitation because grandparents visit, right? When grandparents visit, you can skip your soccer practice and go have ice cream with the grandparents. But when it's parenting time, you're not skipping soccer practice. It's the parent's responsibility to take you to soccer or to take you to whatever extracurricular activity that you have. So the idea is that if the kids have all of these activities and those activities fall on a certain parent's parenting time, it's that parent's responsibility to do it. And so a lot of times you have, you have a chunk of time, you have a block of time where you're like, I don't have any kids to take to any activities. Perhaps I'll travel today. So I absolutely see that correlation. Or especially when the parents take the kids on vacation. And if you've structured, if you've structured your vacation arrangement where a parent can take the kids for consecutive weeks, you now have potentially two, or like you said, three weeks of time where you can go do what you got to do. Like you said, oh, the kids are with their dad. I'll go travel myself then. Yeah. So for any of our listeners, first of all, if they're ready to get their oranges to call Jenny, Jenny, where can they find you? Yes, absolutely. So you can find me on beerslaw.com, b-i-r-z-l-a-w.com. And you can give me a call or email me at Jenny B at beerslaw.com. And I'm happy to schedule a consultation and discuss your options. And if you're ready to do it, I'm here to assist you with it. Absolutely. We'll put all your contact information on the link to your website in the show notes. If you're listening and you find yourself that you have a chunk of time coming up and you have nothing to do and you really want to travel, we'll put all our group trips in the link as well. And also, if you just want an amazing community of women who have gone through the wars or are in the process or just amazing credible women regardless of their marital status, you're welcome to join our Facebook group. We'll put a link in the show notes again. Jenny, thank you so much. This has been great. Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good seeing you. Take care.