If you are like most parents you want your children to be successful at school, in their extracurricular activities, and socially with their friends. Prior to your family reorganization you probably spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money attempting to ensure your children's success. You may even have had the tendency to try to provide those things for your children that you wanted when you were a child. You have spent time helping your children with their homework and school projects; you have taken them to soccer, baseball, dance, swim meets, and other activities; and, you have probably spent a little more than your budget allowed to ensure they had all that you could provide. A divorce will change all of this.
During and after your family reorganization you generally will not have the time, energy, or money that you once had to spend on your children. This fact alone can produce feelings of guilt and inadequacy. However, you do not have to subscribe to those feelings. Some in the mental health field believe that the typical time, energy, and money that are spent on children by their parents is really
over-parenting. Therefore, if you are not now able to do what you once did for your children you might be a
right-where-you-need-to be parent.
What many of us as parents do not realize is that when we load up our children with all of the goodies, all of the little extras, we may be also loading up pressure and stress on both ourselves and our children. It is pretty well established that the financial commitments and time requirements to provide all of the goodies, all of the little extras for our children also adds financial pressure and time stressors on ourselves as parents. Likewise, if our children do not live up to our expected standards of appreciation for the financial commitments we are making and an acknowledgment of the time we took to provide all of the goodies and extras, it can provide them an opportunity to see themselves as not being good enough, not measuring up to our expectations of them, not trying hard enough to be more mature, or simply developing a feeling of failure. These types of pressures are extremely fear-filled because a child's normal desire is to please us as parents - to gain our admiration and acceptance, to make mom and dad proud, and to prove to us the kind of "adults" they are becoming.
Normal day-to-day pressures of an intact family are hard. When you add to those "normal" pressures the stress, financial strain, and emotional upheaval of being engaged in the adversarial family court system, you can readily imagine the pressure cooker that is about ready to explode. And in many families it does explode. Almost every day you can read in the paper or see on TV the outcome of the pressure on a person going through the family court system - outcomes such as suicide, murder, kidnapping, and similar abhorrent behaviors from a parent previously considered being simply "normal." The neighbors are almost always shocked and can't believe it has happened in their quiet neighborhood to this "nice family." When you put "normal" parents into the adversarial arena with the daily stressors, the confusion, frustration, anger, and hurt that the adversarial family court system exaggerates and exacerbates, it becomes very understandable why a proactive "normal" parent can become a reactive "abnormal" parent.
The adversarial family court system survives and thrives on exaggerating and exacerbating the pain and suffering of the reorganization and restructuring family; and they do so with almost total impunity (meaning they do so without punishment and with almost total exemption from any punishment for the harm they cause families - financially, emotionally, physically, psychologically, and the divisiveness between parent-children, a divisiveness that can last for years, sometimes even a lifetime between parents and children).
The adversarial family court system repeatedly defends itself by blaming the divorcing parents for the pain they have caused and are causing their own family. This ego-centric system tells itself that it is the attorneys and the court system that lessens the trauma on the family. How? By making decision for the family, a family about which they know practically nothing; that is, nothing except the hearsay and mean-spirited allegations and accusations made by both parents against each other (allegations and accusations about each other is the backbone of the adversarial system). The primary myth about the adversarial system is that only when both parties' tear apart each other as adversaries can the court "ferret" out the truth and make an honest and good decision about what is in the best interest of that particular family. This system sound eerily similar to another system used during World War II doesn't it?
Repeated studies and the consistent outcomes of both the mediation and collaborative models clearly indicate there are more family friendly, less divisive, and more compassionate ways to handle families in crises. The mediation and collaborative models promote peacemaking, cooperation, equitableness, parity, and the education, information, and provide the family with tools to make the reorganization and restructuring process a less traumatic and more growth producing event.
Your action steps need to include engaging the services of a good divorce therapist to help you stay in control of your emotions; hiring an experienced divorce coach to assist you in making sound, practical, realistic, and family-centered decisions; and, retaining a reputable divorce attorney who is as concerned for your family's long term emotional and financial well-being as he or she is about you individually.
The purpose of this article is to help you understand that the stresses, pressures, hurts, pains, suffering, confusion, exasperation, and all of the other feelings you are or will experience as you go through the divorce process are very real feelings. You need to do something with these emotions and feelings before they take over and do something to you. The time to do something is now.
Marvin L. Chapman, PsyD, MFT, CFC, BCPC