By: Arthur Hall
Submitted: 2010-06-29 10:28:45 | Word Count: 367
From my own experience I know that divorce of parents is one of the most painful and stressing situations in life of every child. Divorce does not necessarily demonstrate personal failure, of course. In many cases it is a courageous and healthy step forward in life. Many divorcing parents need to become more forgiving of themselves and allow themselves to be humanly imperfect. The true measure of people is not how often they stumble or make mistakes but how they recover afterward. This event has changed my life forever and showed the human relations and unity inside the family is the main value in our life.
This event changed my life as after the divorce, I feel the fear of losing my parent to the new spouse. I have already suffered a loss through the family breakup, and I will be highly sensitized and reactive to further losses, whether real or perceived. From my perspective, the remarriage of my mother may pose a threatening loss of her rather than the gain of a stepparent. Only after he began to deal directly with his own conflicted feelings did he stop encouraging my reunification fantasies and the inappropriate belief that my brothers and I had the power to control parents' marriage (Regan 1999). Before long, my parents were able to tell me convincingly that the divorce would occur and that I could not change that fact. Although this news made me sad, I also looked visibly relieved and my behavior problems improved markedly. I understood that it was very difficult for my parents to talk about their divorce so directly and to end my wishes to reunite the family so forthrightly. Often these words were as painful for parents to say as they were for me to hear.
In sum, my p
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arents were realistic and acknowledge to themselves, that the divorce was going to be hard and make everyone felt sad sometimes. Seeing the parents' sadness—coupled with the parents' confidence that they will successfully cope with this crisis—showed me that I did not have to be afraid of their feelings and gave them permission to mourn their own loss.
