Archive for April 2nd, 2012
Adult Child Parents Divorce
Jerome wanted to know why he still felt so badly about his parents’ divorce. He couldn’t understand it. It was a mystery to him. He was ten years old at the time. We begin our search for the answer to this mystery with a focusing question:
Therapist: “What is the worst thing about it?”
Jerome: “It feels like it was my fault, like I should have done something to prevent it. I let it happen.”
Therapist: “Your answer tells me that you are feeling responsible for what happened. You are feeling guilty of the crime of ‘irresponsibility,’ or ‘negligence.’ You feel guilty of failing to prevent this disaster and it’s too late now. You feel out of control even after twenty years. Your bad feeling is very complex; it has all of these components going on at the same time. It creates a painful problem that you cannot solve and your failure to resolve it makes everything worse for you.”
Jerome: “How did I get into this mess in the first place? I had nothing to do with their problems.”
Therapist: “You can see that now as an adult. As a child, you were too close to it. You got caught up in it as anyone would. You specifically had the feeling that you were the center of your little world as you perceived it. Everything that happened in it was somehow on your shoulders, and you were obviously doing a lousy job. This feeling is called ‘egocentrism,’ and it sets us up for a whole constellation of mistaken perceptions, convictions and attitudes.”
Jerome: “Why didn’t I outgrow it?”
Therapist: “These attitudes were built into your system at an early age and never thrown out. They became part of your personality, and they predispose you to think, act and feel in certain ways. As a child, you compounded the pain of your parents’ divorce by taking it personally, as if your ‘failure’ to prevent it were a reflection on your worth as a person. You blamed yourself unjustly, as if you were guilty of a crime. You may have imagined that if you had gotten better grades or were quieter or were more loving, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. But you didn’t, and it happened. You cannot respect someone who fails in his imagined responsibility for preventing his own heart from breaking. You lost your self-worth, and that was the most painful and damaging loss of all.”
Jerome: “What can I do about it now?”
Therapist: “Taking it apart helps you to see the individual components of the problem. You can choose to use your adult judgment to put these ideas in a more realistic perspective now. You can replace your guilt feelings with regret, which is the wish that things were otherwise. You can choose to let go of your responsibility as the oldest child for what happened. You can relieve the pain of taking this loss personally by respecting yourself as a worthwhile human being in spite of your faults and imperfections. There is still one more piece of the puzzle to be identified. Are you angry at yourself for failing to prevent the divorce?”
Jerome: “Yes.”
Therapist: “Could it be that this lump of frozen anger is turning into painful symptoms and keeping you from getting on with your life?”
Jerome: “How can it do that?”
Therapist: “Anger is a powerful emotion. It stimulates the secretion of all kinds of biochemicals that make you uncomfortable in ways you do not identity. Our experience is that when we identify and remove the residual anger, these processes stop. The healthy ones are free to start up again. Your malaise goes away.”
Jerome: “How can I get rid of my anger at this late date?”
Therapist: “It’s too late for your parents but it’s not too late for you. How do you feel when you don’t know what to do:”
Jerome: “Bad.”
Therapist: “That general bad feeling is often depression and anxiety. Not doing anything doesn’t help. Doing the wrong thing doesn’t help.”
Jerome: “What does help?”
Therapist: “Doing the right thing.”
Jerome: “Such as?”
Therapist: “Can you write yourself an anger letter and relieve the pain of these pent up emotions.”
Jerome: “Yes, I can. I think it will help to actually do something about it in the real world. It’s liberating to have a choice that I never knew I had before.”
Jerome, too, did his Homework, at a time and place of his own choosing. He, too, felt relief from the pain of his pent up grief, anger and discouragement. He wrote his anger out in front of him where he could see it and put it in a mature perspective. He wrote his mother an anger letter for breaking his heart and tore it up. He wrote his father a seething letter and sent it. He didn’t experience anxiety or guilt. It was all just terribly regrettable and sad. He called his mother in Las Vegas. They had a nice reunion over the telephone. It was the first time they talked in seven years.
Jerome told us that his nightmares had stopped. We didn’t know he was having them. They were a symptom of his out-of-control anger which made him feel anxious even when he was sleeping. We understand dreams as a way of solving unsolved problems from the day so as to keep the sleep from being disturbed. Jerome could not find ways to solve his anger problems from the past, dreams of a burnt out building with dead bodies on the floor. This was a pretty fair representation of his parent’s loveless, joyless marriage. There was nothing he could do to repair this fatal damage. The marriage was dead. It would stay dead.
Jerome’s solution was to let it go. The problem didn’t have to be solved. He was a grown up now. He could live in the present and solve current problems as they arose, just like everyone else.
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