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Divorce — An Opportunity for Personal Growth or a Waste of Time?
by Jean Poppe, MA, LPC, NCC
The person who was just blind-sided with divorce papers, or one who has made the painful decision that his/her marriage cannot be saved, may doubt that anything good could possibly be ahead. However, there are ways to survive divorce as well as to heal and grow through the process.
Surviving the separation and divorce process in a healthy way often requires facing unresolved issues from your own family of origin that may be surfacing because of the divorce. This may be a good time to seek counseling to understand yourself better and create the healing necessary to establish the foundation of a new relationship. Parents may have difficulty meeting children's emotional needs during a divorce, due to the stressors parents are experiencing. Children also may benefit from a family counselor who can help the child sort through and validate her or his feelings, and the Counselor can help to educate parents about the child's special needs at this time. Children do best in divorce situations when parents are able to reduce conflict and cooperate in fair and equal parenting time agreements, at all times keeping in mind the best interests of the children.
Additionally, divorce recovery groups can give the support of peers who are experiencing similar situations and reduce feelings of loneliness, alienation, and shame that so often come with the divorce process. For example, see www.kzoocoping.com for information on the Kalamazoo Coping with Divorce seminar. The seminar is a speaker series and peer support group, which has been meeting since 1978. As a Co-director for the Coping with Divorce seminar for the past seven years, I consistently hear comments such as, "This group was exactly what I needed," and "It is so amazing to have others who really understand what I am going through," or even "This group helped me know there really is life after divorce." I see people arrive on the first night of the seminar appearing dejected, in pain, and in various levels of functioning. By week five or six the energy level picks up considerably, and by the end of our ten weeks, there is laughter, and I observe hope, new understanding, and many new friendships developing. While dating among members of seminar is prohibited during the ten weeks, we encourage members to act as supports to each other. These friendships, built on the safety of a healing environment, rather than a romantic or flirtatious one, often are powerful and long lasting.
This opportunity to grow through crisis too often is ignored and lost, however, and many divorces are emotionally a waste of time, particularly when people are still angry and berating each other years after the legal divorce. "Successful" divorce allows people move forward in their separate lives. Divorcing partners often need to express anger before real forgiveness (of self and others) can occur, but continued resentment hurts the person who holds it more than its target. Forgiveness allows moving on with life. Learning how to process anger, shame/guilt, and loneliness appropriately while moving toward forgiveness is a difficult process which may require some guidance and support. Experts often suggest that divorced people wait one to three years before entering another marriage. Depending on various circumstances prior to separation, it usually takes at least that long to complete a full emotional separation and work through legal and emotional issues. Until those legal and emotional processes are complete, choices in the area of romance and partnership are likely to be tarnished if not outright doomed.
People in American culture seem to be accepting divorce more as a normal life event, and as a result we seem to minimize the effect on everyone involved. While it is good to reduce conflict, helping step-families to work together—attempting to meet everyone's needs as best possible—divorcing families do not seem to want to accept that grief is involved in the breakup of a marriage or family. We seem to want to block out feelings with any means possible—alcohol, TV, work, a new relationship, pretty much anything in excess and right away will do.
Grief comes when something or someone important is lost. Divorce is the loss of connections, loss of the "in-love" times; loss of dreams for the future together; loss of possibilities. It maybe the loss of a family home; loss of financial stability; loss of husband/wife/friend/lover/extended family member/neighbor/pets/school... It is also the loss of your identity as husband/wife/friend/lover/extended family member/neighbor... After all, few people go to the wedding with the notion that this will be a five-year renewable contract with a provision that all important assets and friendships will be terminated at some point in the future. Yet it seems that's how we expect everyone to react. When the divorce occurs, families often lose very important connections, values, and possessions, but they seem unwilling to grieve those loses.
People often acknowledge the grief process when someone dies, but when a marriage or long-term relationship ends, families go through much the same process. From: Up To Parents, by Barbara W. Asher, M.S.W., L.C.S.W. and Charles A. Asher, J.D., some of the grief stages of divorce include:
Denial: "She just needs some time," or "He's acting out some midlife crisis," or "This only happens to other people"—these are some of the hallmark phrases of denial. It's a numbing response that often follows a refusal to acknowledge a loss as oceanic as divorce. But like all stages, denial is meant to last only a limited time.
Benefits from denial if experienced as a temporary stage:
Appropriately experienced, this protective reaction serves to blunt the initial shock and pain of the breakup. It can give temporary—but only temporary—shelter from the unthinkable until you gather your abilities to face the emotional, physical, and parental tasks at hand. Experienced in a healthy fashion, denial eventually gives way to a mature acknowledgment of the pain of the losses of divorce. That pain can then be a signal to you to take good care of yourself during your losses and recovery.
Risks from denial if experienced as a final destination:
Any refusal to acknowledge the necessary end of an intimate relationship interferes with making important decisions—for oneself and the entire family. More important, pain is part of the healing process, and anyone unwilling to feel and acknowledge the pain can't heal or move to better decision-making. Anger: As the numbing effects of the shock wear off, the intense feelings of pain, hurt, and fear rush in to flood your senses. Anger is a mechanism for deflecting these emotions. This is both a normal and necessary reaction to the enormity of the loss you may feel. Although you need to recognize and accept feelings of anger, it is essential that you avoid angry behavior toward your (ex) spouse and your children.
Benefits from anger if experienced as a temporary stage:
Anger can serve to energize you and help you begin to make the difficult emotional break from your partner.
Risks from anger if experienced as a final destination:
Anyone stuck in anger will likely be making poor judgments, expending unnecessary energy on futile conflict, and devastating the children. Although staying angry may feel like being in control, it actually renders one bitter, resentful, and unable to think or act in anything but the most uncontrolled and self-destructive ways. Bargaining: In divorce, bargaining is usually an attempt to avoid the end of a relationship by promising to act differently, or by imagining or asking for changes that one hopes could make the marriage work. Bargaining is another attempt to gain control over what may feel like an utterly out-of-control circumstance.
Benefits from bargaining if experienced as a temporary stage:
Bargaining is helpful when there is a chance your relationship can be saved. Counseling, a period of separation, or relationship renewal groups can help you see if such hopes are realistic. (And, by all means, if your circumstances are not dangerous ones, there is every reason to move slowly and soberly before ending a marriage.)
Risks from bargaining if experienced as a final destination:
Staying stuck in the bargaining stage is often acted out by a spouse trying to continue a marital connection. Desperate promises, unrealistic attempts at reconciliation, and inappropriate sexual overtures can be part of the pattern. Sometimes being stuck in bargaining occurs with "negative intimacy" where former partners behave as if they have a right to be "key players" in each others' lives. They can delude themselves into thinking they should (or can) tell their spouses how to clean their houses, how to spend their money, or how much macaroni and cheese should or should not be served to the kids.
While this kind of entanglement in a spouse's life can be motivated by an angry urge to criticize and diminish, often it's the product of a hopeless wish to remain connected, somehow or anyhow. Being stuck in the bargaining phase prevents achieving the emotional "clean break" necessary for healing, and very often lies at the heart of the expensive, destructive, and outright dangerous legal maneuvering that many couples repeatedly take to court. Remember, when either partner ends the relationship, neither has the right to be a major part in the other's life, except as they cooperate as co-parents to their children. Depression: This stage can be so dreaded that it keeps some people locked in denial, anger, or bargaining-or some combination of them. But inevitably with the realization of the loss of the marriage comes searing sadness and regret. This is also a normal and necessary part of grieving (and a critical time to be connected to a healthy support system of family and friends). As John Bradshaw reminds his readers, "He who grieves well, lives well." So know that deep sadness is not necessarily a sign that you are failing, but indeed likely a sign of your healing.
Benefits from depression if experienced as a temporary stage:
Sadness is necessary to grieving. To be able to grieve, heal, and then move on, you must acknowledge and accept this important but uncomfortable feeling. A wonderful treatment of the essential healthiness of temporary depression can be found in M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. Peck speaks of depression as the conflict between our conscious wish for cherished things to be "the way they used to be" and our wiser (but often unconscious) sense that it is time to let go and move on. It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that "the way things used to be" is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1978. pp. 70-71).
Risks from depression if experienced as a final destination:
Staying stuck in this stage may create a clinical depression in which deep and prolonged sadness interferes with daily living, disrupts sleep or appetite, and causes a loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities. Mental health professionals can help you relieve the depression and move toward acceptance. Acceptance: This stage is not one of joy and great celebration, but of acknowledging the reality of divorce and embracing the readiness to move on. This stage is accompanied by a newfound realization of your resilience, potential, and commitment to forge a new life. Although the five stages of grieving are necessary for healing, they are not always so clear-cut and concise. Most divorcing persons move through the stages more than once (and not necessarily in precisely the same order), sometimes experiencing more than one at the same time. However, you can be comforted by knowing the stages and by your ability to recognize what you're feeling and when. You should be heartened to know that with pain comes healing. If you feel yourself stuck, don't hesitate to seek some brief counseling.
John Bradshaw in his video "On Divorce" uses the acronym SURVIVING with good advice paraphrased as follows:
- S = stop denial
Denial is a defense mechanism; when reality becomes too difficult, denial protects you for a time, but to begin the healing process, one must face reality.
- U = understanding the grief process
You can only heal what you can feel. If you numb out all your feelings with alcohol, work, sex, a new relationship or work, your grief will go unresolved.
- R = remorse
What was my part in the divorce process? What did I do wrong? This stage may include feelings of isolation. However, you can use the alone times to grieve the in-love times, dreams, and plans for future.
- V = value yourself
Recognize any shame around divorce, religious prohibitions, family influence, judgment of divorce as failure, and allow yourself to consider lack of training or role modeling most of us had for intimacy, or for the modern marriage relationship. That lack of preparation and role modeling for modern marriage makes it a wonder many of us were able to stay married as long as we did!
- I = isolation
Allow some time alone to get to know yourself without the demands of others; discover you own likes, wants and rhythms, so that when you establish new connections, you can find others who fit with the "real" you. Isolation may trigger abandonment issues from your family of origin, and this is an opportunity for healing to take to your counselor or psychotherapist.
- V = voltage of emotions (Energy in Motion)
You are likely to be feeling emotions more intensely, i.e., anger, fear, anxiety, as well as disruption of life routines. Some people will do anything to get out of the feelings. It is important to experience and work through the feelings. You also can use pain to identify and heal early childhood wounds. This is the path to healing.
- I = initiate action
Support groups are helpful to process grief, or find a safe network to talk about loss, find needed suggestions and choices from others willing to help.
(For example—check out Coping with Divorce)
- N = nurture from self and others.
This is a time to seek out nurture in new and varied ways. If you have been a caretaker, this is an excellent time to allow others to care for you. Practice gracious receiving.
- G = God, as you know it, or your spiritual belief system is important.
While no religious practice is prescribed, a spiritual practice of some type is very helpful to keep your center.
The old saying goes, "The only one who welcomes change is a wet baby." Change comes slowly and for most humans only because we are motivated by discomfort. Even those who chose divorce struggle with loss and change. Few of us want things to change when we are happy and comfortable, even if we know it will be in our own or others' best interest. Change is more difficult when we are under the multiple stressors that accompany divorce. And life's most meaningful lessons often come out of pain and suffering. Divorce can be a crisis of opportunity to heal and grow. There are many fine therapists and support groups in the area to help you on your journey—you need not go it alone. Contact a PCC therapist.
References
- Asher, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., Barbara; and Asher, J.D., Charles, http://www.uptoparents.org/ (2007).
- Bradshaw, John, Videotape, "On Surviving Divorce, An Emotional Survival Kit." (1992).
- Coping with Divorce Seminar, Kalamazoo, MI, http://www.kzoocoping.com/ (2007).
- Peck, M. Scott., The Road Less Traveled. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.), (1978).
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Articles by Jean Poppe, MA, LPC, NCC
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