Grieving Your Parents’ Divorce
“For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing. “Many a mage of great power,” he said, “has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing—one single lost or hidden name.”
I’m fifty-five years old, and up until recently I spent most of my life after my parents’ divorce in pain and not knowing why. I also spent my life running from that pain—into the arms of men, towards the bottle, and literally running for exercise, all of which gave me a brief reprieve from my problems. A song I discovered recently, “Running for so Long” by Parker Ainsworth, really resonated with me for this reason. Running, surfing, and nature were my therapy. Many of the poems I wrote in my twenties had a common theme of “freedom.” I was desperate to be free of this unknown pain.
Naming Your Pain
The parent I had the most anger at and the worst relationship with after the divorce was my father, but it was during his death that I discovered a name for my pain: Grief. Certainly, I was grieving his death, but more to the point, I discovered that grief is experienced in many ways, large and small, and is not just associated with death. I discovered that I needed to grieve my parents’ divorce, too. Grief can come from losing a pet, losing a job, the ending of a friendship, or even the loss of the world as we know it, as we experienced during the coronavirus pandemic. Grief is a deep distress or trauma caused by a death or similar circumstance of loss. So why is divorce so traumatizing? Why is it worthy of grieving? Because it cuts to the core of our existence and disrupts everything we once knew about ourselves, our parents, and the world around us. I have often compared it to an earthquake that can make the ground heave and roll in waves, totally defying our understanding of the earth as being the solid ground we stand on.
There’s Nothing Wrong With You
It sounds strange now to say that I didn’t know I had grief from my parents’ divorce or needed to grieve it, but unfortunately many of us are unaware of the lasting impact divorce has had on us. Or if we are vaguely aware it has affected us, we don’t realize how profoundly we have been wounded. I knew I had abandonment and trust issues that affected my relationships with men; I wrote about that in another blog piece. But for a long time, I didn’t connect the dots to all the other areas of my life that were being affected, from my thoughts about myself, to my instinctive reactions to situations, to my fears and failures. I just felt broken, out of control, and like there was something wrong with me. I had what I now know are common struggles for adult children of divorce: depression, low self-esteem, drinking problems, promiscuity, trouble making and keeping friends, troubled relationships with men, job and career woes, and identity issues. Not one area of my life was unaffected by the divorce. This is not the case with everyone. There are many children of divorce who function extremely well, for example excelling in their careers. But even they might struggle in other areas, like with trust and relationships, for example.
“There's a grief that can't be spoken, there's a pain goes on and on.” — Les Miserables
In Life-Giving Wounds, we talk about the Wound of Silence—the feeling that it’s taboo to talk about the divorce, in part to protect our parents’ feelings and our relationships with them. The Wound of Silence affects our ability to address our grief. Often, we are simply not given the space or encouragement to do so. If we can’t name or acknowledge our grief, we can’t heal from it; it just festers inside harming us and those around us. Catholic priest and spiritual writer Richard Rohr said it best when he said, "Pain that is not transformed is transmitted." Before I began healing from some of my childhood wounds, I felt stuck and felt like my life just wasn’t working for me. My recovery so far has largely been a product of God’s grace and my willingness to participate in it. Besides turning back to the Church, another big break in my healing came when I picked up the book On Grief and Grieving by David Kessler, finally found a name for my pain, and discovered that unresolved grief keeps us stuck. (Providentially, my dad’s last name is Kessler.)
So Many Losses
What is it that we need to grieve as children of divorce? The loss of a whole family; the loss of a coherent identity, which is thrown into confusion through relationships that shift and change in divorce; the loss of our innocence; the loss of time and attention from one or both parents; the loss of feelings of safety and security; the loss of being the most important thing in our parents’ lives; the loss of time with siblings as families are torn apart, with children sometimes choosing different households; the loss of trust in adults and authority: The list goes on and on. As a four-year-old, I felt scared and insecure and was plagued by nightmares, frequently sleeping in my mom’s bed. I lost my status as daddy’s little girl as I was the youngest and got extra attention from him. Lately I’ve been thinking that I lost the father my dad would have been if my parents hadn’t gotten divorced. I wonder if he would have been less angry and impatient and hard on us. At his funeral I heard many glowing characterizations of a man I didn’t know in that way, and feel I was deprived of knowing that father. I’m convinced he was a different person after the breakup, and forever changed by the divorce.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
In the Gospel of Mark (10:46-52), Jesus asks the blind man Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus must name his pain before he can be healed. There are practical and spiritual reasons why this is true. When you go to a doctor, he can’t begin to heal you until he can diagnose or “name” your ailment. In the world of spiritual physics, it’s the same: You can’t receive healing until you name your pain, clarifying it to yourself and to Jesus. What do you want me to do for you? There is a grace that flows from admitting your weakness and asking for help. Addressing and working through your grief is hard and painful, but also rewarding. There are many reasons I’ve heard for why people resist healing. One is that their grief, or more accurately the coping mechanism from that grief, has become a strength helping them in their careers or garnering praise and esteem from others. They are afraid that healing will come with a loss in productivity or excellence. Another reason is we fear that if we crack open that Pandora’s Box of pain and fear, we will completely fall apart and never recover who we think we are. We’ve already experienced identity crises because of the divorce and don’t think we can handle another one. And finally, many of us have learned how to tough things out and ignore our feelings for the sake of others, and we value survival over wholeness. But Jesus meets us in our brokenness; it’s where his mercy lies. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
Naming Your Fears
As important as naming my grief has been on the path to healing, naming my fears and automatic behaviors that helped me cope as a kid have proved just as impactful. It’s helpful to identify these coping behaviors since many of them no longer benefit us as adults, and can actually hinder us. If you think about our development as babies, objects in our world literally don’t exist for us until we have a name for them. And once we learned the name of something, it came into sharper focus and we couldn’t stop saying its name. Naming and accepting our fears can help us overcome them. I partly overcame my depression when I stopped running from it, faced it head on, and stopped being afraid of it. That is what the protagonist in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea did. He pursued his demon, running towards it rather than away from it, and he sought its name. The author dedicates an entire section of the book to the importance of naming things. And in the story’s climax, when our hero faces his unseen and un-named enemy, he is only able to defeat it after learning and speaking its name.
“Do You Want to Get Well?”
So name your grief, name your losses, if you dare. Jesus asked the paralytic at the pool, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6). It’s a good question to ask ourselves because if we do, we must take the difficult but necessary steps to heal. No amount of time will heal these wounds on their own, as I discovered. Jesus is waiting for us in the pain, he wants to heal us, but we need to participate. Unite your pain with his on the cross and trust that he can transform it. Don’t be afraid that healing your wounds will change you, because God is all good and all loving and any changes that come about through His mercy will be for your good. When I falter in my trust in God, and lose courage and hope for the journey, I remember His words to the synagogue leader’s child, whom He resurrected from the dead. “Talitha koum!” Little girl, get up!
Intercessory Prayer:
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, patron saint of grief, please be with us in our grief and help us to allow Christ into our past hurts and experiences.
About the Author:
Sandy grew up in Southern California where she spent her time camping, surfing and horseback riding. She earned a B.A. in journalism from Cal State, Long Beach, and has written for Black Belt and Boys’ Life magazines and various community newspapers. She has been married for twenty years and now lives in Minnesota with her husband Mark. She has a blended family with two stepsons, one earning his Masters in Theology, another who is a talented musician, and one son in his first year of minor seminary.
Sandy rediscovered her Catholic faith upon moving to Minnesota nine years ago, and in the last two years has begun the healing process from her parents' divorce. She has been retired since 2019. She is a Life-Giving Wounds online retreat leader, and works part-time for Marriage Material, a pro-life organization.
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals
What is it that you need to grieve as a child of divorce?
Can you name your pain? Can you name your fears?
Like Bartimaeus, what do you want Christ to do for you?