By Lisa Brick
While divorce does not determine whether your children will suffer negative long term effects of your family’s fracturing, the way in which you interact with your spouse while you are divorcing will.
You have the power to make your children’s experience of divorce a more or less neutral, healthy or unhealthy event emotionally.
While divorce is always upsetting and disorienting for children in the short-run it need not leave long-term emotional damage.
You have the power to minimize any long-term emotional impact your divorce will have on your children and maximize their chances to feel as loved and cherished as possible during and after the reconfiguration of their family. If you choose to utilize this divorce to expand your emotional intelligence and develop greater personal resilience your children will learn from example. They will expand their emotional intelligence and resilience too.
Your children need not be victims of divorce
There is an excellent TEDx talk by Tamara D. Afifi, Professor of Communications at the University of Ohio that highlights the influence a divorcing parent has on how divorce will impact their children. During her talk, “The Impact of Divorce on Children”, Dr. Afifi highlights the following:
- the impact that divorce has on children depends on a host of complex situations and circumstances
- children whose parents relate to each other contentiously are impacted negatively regardless of if their parents are married or divorced.
- parental fights affect their children’s’ physiology
- when parents have good communication skills during conflict children’s physiology is less impacted and they bounce back quicker
- children whose parents spring divorce on them have a more difficult time emotionally
- when children feel caught/torn between their divorcing parents the psychological impact of divorce is considerably more damaging
There are shifts that you can make in how you divorce that maximize your children’s emotional intelligence and resiliency and minimize long-term psychological damage.
Shifts for How You Divorce include:
- putting your resentment and hurt aside to create a strategy between you and your spouse on how to communicate your divorce to your children,
- communicating about your divorce with your children in an emotionally reassuring and age appropriate manner, even when you feel frightened and unhappy,
- creating guidelines for co-parenting together, and
- refusing to engage in verbally attacking your spouse or responding to verbal attacks from your spouse.
Robert F. Emery, PhD, author of The Truth About Children and Divorce, a superb resource for divorcing parents, puts children’s well-being front and center by reminding divorcing parents of the following:
All that keeps you and your ex involved now is your joint enterprise: your children. They are your ‘business,’ and you two are ‘business partners.’ Accordingly, your relationship should be businesslike, which means cooperative, formal, polite, structured, limited, and somewhat impersonal, or at least a lot less personal than it once was. (p. 51)
However unhappy you are with who your spouse turned out to be and how he/she treated you during your marriage, if you have children together it is time to redefine your relationship from spouse to co-parent, begin to learn how to effectively and responsively manage YOUR emotions, and observe and respond to changes in your children’s behaviors with compassion. Your children may not be able to communicate how divorce is impacting them with words yet with awareness you will be able to detect how they are being impacted through their behavior. Your children are not the cause of your divorce and it is unnecessary for them to be the victims of if.
Love your children and yourself by learning to put their well-being over your understandable pain, anger, and resentment. Search out and utilize articles, books, videos, supportive and emotionally healthy friends and family, and your divorce coach to discover ways to learn from and discharge your emotions in ways that make your life easier rather than adding to your suffering. The many articles on our website and our team of coaches are here to support you in finding and following a healthy, life-affirming path through and beyond divorce for yourself and your children.
Lisa Brick, Journey Beyond Partner
Our team of coaches at JBD is passionate about helping men and women navigate the emotional difficulties of relationships, breakups and divorce. We work together with you to open the possibility that your current relationship challenges can lead to a rewarding voyage of self-discovery and an immensely more pleasing life experience. Together we create a path to clarity. Find out if Coaching is right for you, and accept my gift of one FREE session.
