Divorced Parents

Divorce, even under the most amicable of circumstances, represents a trauma for the family system, having an impact on  not only the couple, but all members of the family.

Many parents in therapy describe their experience of divorce as a kind of death.

It is a loss of shared dreams and goals as well as a loss of the third "person" in your partnership that was the partnership itself.

Most of us don't get married with any intention of divorce; as such, and because of the traumatic impact of divorce on all family members, there is likely no such thing as an easy divorce.

Couples can aspire to a good divorce by managing the process and its outcomes consciously and compassionately. The following tips for managing divorce can help mitigate the trauma that you and your children experience. As you pursue a good divorce, it might be helpful to remember that:

The vast majority of children with divorced parents and/or stepfamilies develop into competent individuals well within the normal range on all measures of adjustment (Kelly, 2007).

To help the divorced parents or couple as well as any children, it's imperative that we form a "but for you" list.

This is a list of things that each would have never have had in their lives, all the good things, that they would have never been able to do or have or feel, without that other particular person in their lives. 

In effect we are making of list of keeping the good and burying the bad.  Thus the good goes forward helping us with each and every relationship to come.