The Mirror Effect: Breaking Divorce Cycles Through Self-Discovery with Lionel Moses
Looking in the Mirror: Finding Self-Awareness Through Divorce
Family law attorney Seth Nelson and Pete Wright welcome Lionel Moses, a Desert Storm veteran and relationship coach who helps people break unhealthy relationship patterns through what he calls "the mirror effect." This powerful episode of How to Split a Toaster explores how divorce can become a catalyst for essential self-discovery and growth.
The Mirror Effect in Relationships
Drawing from his experiences through two divorces, Lionel shares how seeing himself as the common denominator led to transformative insights about relationship patterns. As a self-described "people pleaser," he discovered that his tendency to fix others' problems masked deeper emotional needs that went unaddressed in his marriages.
Breaking Cycles Through Self-Awareness
Seth brings his legal expertise to the conversation, highlighting how emotional readiness impacts divorce proceedings. When clients focus exclusively on their former spouse's behavior rather than their own growth, it often complicates and extends the legal process. The discussion reveals how self-awareness can lead to more constructive co-parenting relationships and healthier future partnerships.
From Performance to Authenticity
Lionel's concept of "performative relationships" resonates throughout the conversation, as he describes moving from seeking external validation to developing genuine self-love. This transformation enabled him to build more authentic connections and achieve amicable co-parenting relationships—a goal many find challenging during divorce.
Key Insights
• Examine your patterns in relationships rather than focusing solely on your partner's behavior
• Develop emotional resilience by understanding your authentic needs versus performative habits
• Build self-awareness before entering new relationships to break recurring relationship cycles
This episode offers invaluable guidance for anyone navigating divorce or seeking healthier relationship patterns. Through Lionel's candid sharing and Seth's legal wisdom, listeners gain practical tools for self-reflection and personal growth during major life transitions.
Whether you're considering divorce, in the midst of proceedings, or rebuilding after separation, this conversation provides a roadmap for using life's challenges as opportunities for transformation and healing.
Links & Notes
Find Lionel on his website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram
Check out The Marriage Seed
-
'Pete Wright:
Welcome to How To Split a Toaster, a Divorce Podcast about saving your relationships from True Story FM. Today, when your toaster stares into the abyss, what is it that stares back?
Seth Nelson:
Welcome to the show everybody. I'm Seth Nelson, always. I'm here with my good friend Pete Wright. Today we're talking about the mirror. We sometimes avoid looking into the one that shows us not just the end of the marriage, but the patterns, blind spots, and habits that may have brought us right here. Our guest is Lionel Moses, a veteran, entrepreneur and coach who helps people break unhealthy relationship cycles, build emotional resilience, and plant the seeds for a healthier future. Lionel, welcome to the Toaster.
Lionel Moses:
I'm glad to be here, gentlemen. Glad to be here.
Pete Wright:
So, you know, it's a divorce podcast and people are confronted with a lot of stuff when they go through a divorce: the tangle of the law, the tangle of their emotional experience, the tangle of their own sort of tackling their own interpersonal demons and such. Lionel, set us up for a conversation on what you bring to us today, the mirror effect. What is it that you mean by the mirror effect?
Lionel Moses:
Well, what I mean by the mirror effect is simply learning from the things that I see when I look at life honestly, just seeing what looks back at me, acknowledging my mistakes, acknowledging the things I could have done right. I go to life with a constant self-assessment. It's a divorce podcast. I was divorced twice, unfortunately. But I've learned a great deal about myself. When I look back in the mirror at my relationships that I had, what the average person considers a successful marriage, the common denominator in my two marriages was me. So when I look back and when I look in the mirror, I see myself. I can't see my partners, I can't see my kids, I can't see anything else because the only one that's standing right now is me.
Pete Wright:
Okay. I want to unpack that process a little bit. Forgive me if I'm asking something that's too personal. You can tell me to wave off, but I do think it's important to at least recognize what is it that allowed you to make the turn to be able to see yourself in that mirror. Because a lot of people, when they are in the sort of mired in the divorce process, there's a lot of blame and that blame, I think, to probably butcher the metaphor, clouds the mirror, or they look through the mirror and they see their rage, they see their confusion, they probably see their attorney, maybe they actually see Seth. But there must have been something in your experience over two divorces to be able to get to the point of, well, I'll call it an awakening. That might be too woo-woo, to get to the point where you understand this about yourself, where you can see those pieces, and now be able to coach about it and write about it. Can you walk through that transformation?
Lionel Moses:
My awakening moment I would say would be just simply looking at my life, checking my emotions and feeling the anger, the bitterness, and the resentment that comes with relationships. Can I point out things that could have been better for someone else? Absolutely. But if they're no longer in the picture, I need to remove them from the equation in order for me to become healthy.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. There's nobody left.
Lionel Moses:
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
There's nobody left to act as a vessel of your frustration.
Lionel Moses:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Seth, I think about this and all I can see is dollar signs on the bill. The more we've talked about this before, the more people get in their own way, the more people refuse to take ownership, the slower they are to move forward in the legal process.
Seth Nelson:
Oh, absolutely. But really, I think what Lionel is saying is a point that happens with potential clients, is very often a potential client will call and talk about the other side, the other person. And what Lionel is saying is like, "Hey, look at what you are doing." So that's one of the basic things we do is we start with, "Hey, what's your goal for the conversation?"
"Well, I want him to stop behaving this way."
"Well, that's not going to happen in this conversation, because he's not even in this conversation."
"I want her to be more focused on the children and not going out with friends."
"Well, she's not in this conversation. That's not going to happen in this conversation." So what does happen in that conversation is potential clients and sometimes even just clients because calling because they're upset, because expectations haven't been met. And I'm not saying they're not proper expectations, but dad's doing something improper with the children. Dad is saying mom's doing something improper with the children. It's always outward facing. When people start saying, "This is happening, what's my best response?" And a response is different than a reaction. A reaction doesn't have thought, a response does, then I think we get to what Lionel is talking about is how can I show up and handle these difficult situations? And some of them are just difficult and they're hard, and there's the lesser of two evils, so to speak, decisions you might have to make, but at least you're being thoughtful and intelligent about it and mindful and deliberate and intentional in not being emotional.
Lionel Moses:
I agree a hundred percent with what Seth said. It's ironic, I had to come to a place where I separated the person I received my counsel from, from the person I received my legal advice from, because you tend to pour into anyone that's near you. You tend to just spew out your feelings, your emotions. And I'm not saying they're not valid, but the place where you do it, it makes a better seed. The seed will grow if it is planted in the best place.
Pete Wright:
Sure, sure. And it doesn't seem like you're growing a seed that risks sprouting resentment. If you're figuring out how to focus your attention and your grief and your confusion. So as we've set the table on the mirror effect, let's talk about how the mirror effect impacts the, we'll say the process of managing your relationships through the divorce. And in this case, we'll talk about figuring out how your former spouse and future partners are reflective, I'll say, of the mirror experience. Can you talk about that?
Lionel Moses:
One thing I love to say, and I have to say is that we have no control over how our spouse or our partners see anything. Our presentation of them and those that come along with me. As i.e., for me, I'm talking about my kids. If I move to another relationship, I don't want to say screen, but as I go through the courting and the dating within the next relationship, I like to see how they handle situations before I present them to them because I have have to be mindful and protective of my family.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, of course. When you think about moving from your first marriage to your second, when did you realize, and I should say post your second marriage, the fact that you have patterns that appear in your relationship to unresolved emotional wounds that drive you to pick the people that you are affectionate with. Did you have the sense? What enabled you to build the model of the mirror effect? Is it just the collection of your two marriages, two divorces after that or how did that work for you?
Lionel Moses:
My aha-moment came at, I want to say like a conference I was in. And ironically, it did not begin with my two marriages. It's something that I had prior to my relationships. Growing up with my parents in the military, everything built up to the same thing. Being in the military, you're taught and drilled on how to do what's right, certain procedures, and this is the mode and the model that you have to adhere to. With that came this thing that my counselor called a people pleaser. And ironically, I wanted to be a people pleaser, and I'm a Desert Storm veteran. In the military during the war, we had to work with what we had. It wasn't just I was trying to get parts to keep the aircrafts afloat so we can just win this war. It's the same approach I took to my relationships. "Okay, I'm going to fix this. I don't care what it takes, I'm going to fix it." Not assessing myself or my partner and trying to make it healthier, but I'm just trying to make it work.
Seth Nelson:
It's like you just keep putting band-aids on things, but you're not really getting to the root of the problem.
Lionel Moses:
Absolutely. And the aha-moment was sadly enough when I was alone by myself. I can do whatever I can do, but I have to treat the wound.
Seth Nelson:
I think that when you're alone, and I think this deals with a lot of people that get through divorce, for the first time in a long time, you come home and you get to decide what you want to do, and that can be very freeing for people, but it can be really scary. I'm not used to coming home to an empty home. I'm not used to cooking for one. Am I comfortable going out to dinner, eating by myself at a restaurant with a book or on my phone? So in those times of gives you a lot of opportunity for self-reflection, and some people get out of relationships that are very abusive, and the way they stay healthy is to go to the gym or work out because that gets the endorphins going and they feel better. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, but that's a common thing that almost everybody that goes through a divorce goes through is, wait, even if you wanted to be divorced, all of a sudden you have all this time, and how do you fill it?
If you had your kids every single day and now you only have them half the time, that's a lot of time to fill. Do you fill it with work? Do you fill it with self-reflection? Do you fill it with therapy? Do you get self-help books? Do you listen to a podcast? I mean, what are you doing with your time to make yourself better? Or are you just going to kind of go through life and not try to improve yourself?
Pete Wright:
I have friends who got divorced and the first thing that my buddy said was, thank God I don't have to play pickleball anymore. That was a real win. Huge win.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah. Recent divorce because that didn't happen five years ago.
Pete Wright:
No, very recent divorce.
Lionel Moses:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
All right. So it gives us an opportunity to talk about emotional resilience and the idea of emotional resilience also as a legal tool. I think it's worth reflecting on the divorce process and how not having a sense of your own emotional wounding can tangle the legal process. Do you remember fondly the legal process behind your divorces, Lionel?
Lionel Moses:
Unfortunately, yes.
Seth Nelson:
Fondly.
Pete Wright:
Fondly.
Lionel Moses:
Fondly, unfortunately I do. But one thing I learned between the two, I've learned that I was much more emotionally healthier after the second one because prior to the divorce I began to own was my responsibility. I began to just start taking steps to actually learn who I am. From a child to the military to marriage, that was my life. Everything was dictated. So with the time that I have now, and I am in a space of life where I call purposeful singleness, meaning I'm learning how to identify myself, who am I? What do I really like? And even now the friendship dating experience is completely different. Whereas when I feel myself trying to fix someone or put the bandages on the situation, I step back because I'm aware that if I put a bandaid on someone, they have a right to take it off and I'll be back in the same situation I was in before and they're beautiful the way they are. If I have to put a bandaid on it, then maybe the issue is me and I need to step away.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah. And the true thing is what are band-aids really for? They're temporary fixes. You want that wound to heal. And look, there's going to be a scar and that's okay, that's okay. But you're moving forward and when you move forward and you're going to make other mistakes in your life, people, you'll go out and meet people and you'll date someone that's totally opposite. And it's weird in all this stuff at first. And then you get through it and you're like, okay, I'm kind of over the fact of I'm on my own, I'm working on myself, and now I want to start dating again. But it's weird. And then it gets past being weird and then you just don't find anyone. And then when you kind start just really not worrying about it and focused on yourself, then you meet someone. I mean, I hear stories all the time about, I went on all the apps, it was terrible, and then I got off the apps and a friend of mine introduced me or I got set up by someone like the old-fashioned way.
So it's just really interesting. But a lot of that comes from self-healing. If you're going to be with someone different because maybe you don't need anyone that's going to be the people pleaser anymore. Maybe you don't need someone that's going to fix everything. Maybe you realize that, hey, you can handle your own finances and you don't have to depend on somebody else. So there's so much learning that goes on if you allow it to in the divorce process or soon thereafter in the next year or two, that can really set you up for a wonderful life in the future. And look, you're going to make mistakes in the future too, but then you've maybe learned how to process those and how to deal with them and accept responsibility for them and move forward. And that's all I think we can ever do.
Pete Wright:
Does it make you reflect a little bit on what you were attracting before you, and I'll say in quotes, did the work, worked on yourself? I hear this often from folks who say, "When I was a mess, I attracted the mess. I attracted people who also hadn't done work on themselves." And I think that's what you're getting at, Seth. As soon as you figure out how to be present in yourself, you'll start attracting people who are present in theirs.
Lionel Moses:
I agree a hundred percent with that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I attracted what I attracted was I was looking for something and someone to fix. I was looking for someone and something to please. If I met someone who had all their ducks in a row and had everything perfect and great in their life and no one had everything's perfect, I would not have been attracted to that back then because my value was in what I brought to the table and how I was able to play Superman and solve the problems and solve the issues and please them.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Superman, yeah. "I'll just take care of everything."
Lionel Moses:
I'm dating myself well.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Not anymore. New movie. You get to do this again. Tell us about the marriage seed, right? We've already introduced a bit the gardening metaphor. Tell us about the marriage seed.
Lionel Moses:
Well, the marriage seed is a concept that came to me, actually, I was writing it while I was in my second marriage actually.
Pete Wright:
Is that telling?
Lionel Moses:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Seth Nelson:
I wasn't going to, Pete.
Lionel Moses:
Yes. Well, I'm a firm believer and I've learned from experience and practice that everything that's required to have a good and healthy relationship, if the two people together are right, it will grow. You just have to work it. We have the capacity to do it, we just have to have a will.
Pete Wright:
Or you'll find yourself spending your time writing a book about how great it would be if there was a better marriage in your future.
Lionel Moses:
Well, it's in me, if the soil's wrong, we're not going to match. I cannot grow in sand. I cannot grow on asphalt or concrete. If the soil's right and my seed is planted and I put the work, well, something will grow.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So you end up with a book about it and now you're coaching on these concepts, you're coaching sort of even beyond obviously marriage. Walk us through nurturing the soil, emotional health, the steps of growing these relationships.
Lionel Moses:
I think the first step is what we were talking about all along is you have to assess who you are, where you are in the book, what I do, I go back and forth with gardening analogies as it pertains to relationships. You have a field you have to plow, you have to get all the dirt, everything out. You have to put your nutrients in, and then you won't know what nutrients to put in until you assess it. So I love my yard. I have one of the best yards in the neighborhood. I hope my neighbors are listening, but I have one of the best yards in the neighborhood, but that's because I do an annual soil test to find out what's in it. So I don't just go throwing stuff down. I need to know what's in it, so I know how to care for it.
Similarly to myself, once I figured out that, okay, I'm a people pleaser and I married the same person twice. The common denominator, again, it's me. So I had to find out what was in me that felt that way. And when I started digging deeper, I discovered the reason why I was a people pleaser is I was the next to youngest of six. We had some family tragedies, and during my formidable years, my parents had to focus on other things. I'll say it that way. And all my life, I just learned to do what I had to do to please everyone else because okay, I want to be accepted. I wanted to be acknowledged, but it never happened. So I discovered that once I figure out who I am and what I need, build myself up, then I can grow or something can grow with me.
Seth Nelson:
And when you do that self-analysis, and people have generalities, and it's easy for people to understand, but people pleaser and I just want to be a provider. So a lot of guys might think, "Well, God, I thought I was doing everything right in the relationship. I was out there working and I was building wealth, and we would buy a home and we would get nicer things, and then we got a better home and a better school district because the kids got older." They think they're providing, and then the spouse is like, "I just wanted you home for dinner. I just wanted to go for a walk on the beach." You got to be able to communicate and not just assume what you're doing is what your spouse needs.
And maybe you're killing yourself and you wish you could just go for a walk on the beach, or maybe you wish you could just go play golf that weekend, but you kind of create this image of this is what I'm supposed to do, but maybe that's not right for you, and maybe that's not right for your spouse. And certainly maybe that's not right for the relationship. So to your point, to the gardening analogy, it might not be the best place to plant a certain plant and a lot of sun when it needs shade. You have to know those things about you. And the hardest thing about it all is just coming back to communicate with your spouse and with yourself and figuring out those conversations you have to have with yourself to get there.
Lionel Moses:
Absolutely. I was listening to you speak, I think someone told you a little bit about me because that was me. I was the guy, I provided for my family. I mean, they had a great life. But one thing I've learned in my self-assessment and my growth is that our vantage point is different. I say provide. They say provide. My idea of providing was, okay, we're going to take some great vacations. My wife's idea of providing at the time was, okay, spend time with me.
Seth Nelson:
That's right.
Lionel Moses:
She wanted me to provide presence. I wanted to provide stuff and things.
Seth Nelson:
Right. What does that mean? How are you communicating that?
Pete Wright:
Seth, just a sidebar, may it please the court. How do you connect this, the emotional readiness to timing and readiness for legal commitments? How does not being emotionally ready fuel people in the legal process and get them tripped up?
Seth Nelson:
The difficulty in divorce is it takes two people to get married, but only one to get divorced. So people will be at different stages of the grief process when they're going through this. People will be in anger and negotiations and divorce lawyers all the time get calls. "I just got served with paperwork. I didn't know it was coming," or, "I knew we were struggling, but I don't want this divorce. I think we can get past these issues, but my spouse doesn't want to." These are conversations that divorce attorneys hear on a daily basis.
When they hear these on a daily basis, they have to think, "Where is my client in this process?" You're not settling that case in the next month because they're not emotionally even ready to get there. But part of your job as a lawyer and as an attorney and counselor at law is to move the process forward.
You can only go as fast as the slowest person or entity, and eventually that person might be in a courtroom because they couldn't sign a reasonable settlement agreement that their lawyer advised them to sign because they weren't ready to be divorced. So they might be going to a trial, not because they're really arguing. They might find things to argue about, and they might not even realize that the reason they're arguing about it isn't about the it. It's about, "I'm not ready to be divorced."
So you have to kind of think about that, and I think good lawyers know where their clients are in the process and try to help them move along as time permits and allows them to get to. And it's difficult because, look, if anyone comes up with a better way than paying by the hour, I'd love to hear it. It's terrible. The problem is then you have to spend a lot of time communicating with your client about process and about next steps. And if you can just take those little steps and get them to look to the future. How does a parenting plan look at the end? How does your living situation look at the end? And you start those conversations early and don't just start slogging through the discovery process and getting documents. That's a way to get people to move forward.
Pete Wright:
It brings me back to my favorite, known throughout the field as a party animal, Abraham Maslow and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, because everything we're talking about here has to lead to this awareness that we are whole people. But all of the stuff we're getting tied up in before that is I think, rooted in fear of the uncertainty that comes with loss. If we're not getting our psychological needs met, we are scared of losing our basic needs, our food, our water, our warmth, our rest. We figure that out. We think, "Okay, maybe I'll have enough money in this divorce to actually get a house." Okay, then, "Am I going to have my safety needs met? Am I going to have security and employment? Am I going to be able to contribute? Am I going to have food and healthcare? And then only then, once we get over that fear, we're sitting here looking into this mirror of, oh my God, am I lovable? Will I ever have a relationship again? Will I have my needs for belonging met? And then we get to our esteem. If I can possibly find a relationship, will I be able to contribute and have a mutually assured relationship based in growth?"
And then finally, we sort of get to the pièce de résistance, right? Self-actualization, self-awareness. Are we able to get the most out of the bed that we have made? Will we be able to sleep restfully in the bed that we have made? And I think that's where all of this comes from, and I think it's kind of important to step back. When you're looking at the mirror, what are you afraid of losing that is getting you tripped up? Because that's probably where it all comes from. That's my rant.
Seth Nelson:
Well, I think your rant is well taken because ultimately you have to be comfortable with yourself. And if not, you're going to really have a tough life. I mean, people with addiction struggle with that all the time. There's a reason that, look, some of it's genetic, some of it's biological, some of it is emotional, but it's about getting healthy. Divorce is hard enough, but it's an opportunity to get healthy because people feel this all the time. "I can't believe I'm here. I'm living someone else's life. This doesn't feel like this should be happening to me." So it's a hard, hard road, and go from there.
Pete Wright:
Well, in terms of lessons that you've learned, Lionel, I think this is a good one because you've come a long way, obviously through your two divorces, your experience with relationships. And I'm curious how you assess own ability now after going through this process to be self-aware, to make hard decisions in the middle of tense dynamics, co-parenting decisions. How do you approach the difficulties of living post-divorce now in the spirit of the mirror effect.
Lionel Moses:
One of the main things is that I've learned is I've learned how to love myself, which is something you mentioned when you mentioned my best friend, Abraham Maslow. I just snickered because yeah, he's brilliant. He's brilliant, brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant. But I have to look at everything through the mirror of, okay, no matter what I do, I have to love me. Because that was the missing link in my relationships. I wanted to please everyone, so I didn't feel lovable. I didn't think anyone would love or care for me if I did not perform. So instead of being the great husband that I wanted to be, I was a performer. So if they loved the performer, I would never feel the love because I wasn't there. That wasn't me. So even if they practice what they thought was love and they knew my love language, I didn't feel it because I knew I was performing. So it just went right past me.
Pete Wright:
That strikes me as important, and I want to call it out, the idea of performative relationships. The performative marriage. My hunch is we're not aware that we are performing until maybe it's too late. And it seems pretty important to get a handle on the signals or the triggers that we might become self-aware when we're performing.
Lionel Moses:
One of the triggers that I found is that I would see myself often doing what my wife wanted, seeing her happy, seeing her pleased, but I felt empty. And for me, that was where my assessing started. It's like, okay, why do you feel so bad when the one that you love and trying to love on is exceedingly happy and overwhelmed and overjoyed and doing the things that I wanted her to do? But again, I guess deep down the side, I always knew that I was performing. So the love that was being expressed, I put it in that bank, per se, in a performance bank and not in my heart, which would help and heal me.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. How would you rate your communication with your former spouses? I'm assuming that there is some co-parenting still going on for you. How do you find you're doing? If you're given a 360? Right. We're doing a 360 evaluation.
Lionel Moses:
I would say communication now is pretty good. We're amicable because that's what's required.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Lionel Moses:
That's what's required.
Pete Wright:
We talked to a lot of people for whom amicable is a bar that is tough to reach.
Seth Nelson:
Yes. But it's good to hear. Very good to hear. Really good to hear you've done. And here's the other thing is that part of being amicable is the healing part of being amicable is not letting the other person kind of get under your skin. Part of being amicable is understanding that you don't have to respond or react, I should say, the way that you used to. It's really, really great to get there. That's a lot of self-healing goes on with amicable.
Pete Wright:
Well, I'll tell you what, we sure appreciate you taking the time to come and join us and share your story and share the marriage seed and the mirror effect. We love hearing it. It's inspirational. I hope people who are listening see a little bit of themselves and see in you and your work a destination that might help them get there. So we sure appreciate. Lionel, where do you want to send people to learn more about your work?
Lionel Moses:
Well, the best place to find in my work is just lionelmoses.com.
Pete Wright:
Easy enough. It's in the show notes. Swipe up in those notes. Go learn more about Lionel Moses at lionelmoses.com. Thank you so much for being here today. We appreciate you.
Lionel Moses:
I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Pete Wright:
And that will do it for us. Once again, we appreciate your time and attention. Thanks for subscribing for being a member of this community. On behalf of Lionel Moses and Seth Nelson, America's favorite divorce attorney, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on How to Split a Toaster, a Divorce Podcast about saving your relationships.
Outro:
How to Split a Toaster is part of the True Story FM Podcast Network, produced by Andy Nelson, music, by T. Bless and the Professionals and D.B. Studios. Seth Nelson is an attorney with NLG Divorce and Family Law with offices in Tampa, Florida. While we may be discussing family law topics, How To Split a Toaster is not intended to, nor is it providing legal advice. Every situation is different. If you have specific questions regarding your situation, please seek your own legal counsel with an attorney licensed to practice law in your jurisdiction. Pete Wright is not an attorney or employee of NLG Divorce and Family Law. Seth Nelson is licensed to practice law in Florida.
