Time For Serenity

A husband asked his wife, "How do you control your anger so well? You never fight back when we disagree?"   The woman answered,  "I work out my anger by cleaning the toilet." To which the husband said, "But how does that help?"      "I use your toothbrush", she said. As an adult child responding to my parents divorce, anger was and still is a reoccurring emotion.   My sense of loss and it being at the hands and decisions of one of my parents made me very mad.  My anger caused feelings of wanting revenge at times , and I wish I could say that the worst thing I thought of was using my father's toothbrush to clean the toilet.  I thought of worse things I could do to embarrass him,  shame him,   and hurt him, as he was doing to me.  I am grateful that I didn't act on those ideas.  In fact, I probably had to become more comfortable expressing my anger , than holding it back. Anger tells us that something IS wrong and we can resp

                      "I want to yell at my parents".  "I am resentful".  "I hate them". These are just a few words that express the deep feeling of anger that adult children have when their parents divorce.   Just as we have talked about Grief and Sadness, our new topic for adult children of divorce is Anger.  Or ANGER!!!  When adults learn of the plan of a divorce of their parents, the feeling that there is something wrong, terribly wrong, is at the surface of our emotions.  I remember being so angry that I couldn't even truly express it for a while. When I finally was able to say the words " I am angry", then many other verbal expressions of anger came out, too.  Many of the discussion boards I have read include people's stories of how they are handling their anger. We will talk about normal responses to our anger and also about healthy ways to handle those feelings. Usually ACODs are angry because of the abuse of trust, the li

Hope and healing for adult children of divorce is the purpose of this blog. Today my intention is to show you that your pain is not for nothing if you are experiencing all the feelings of loss and sadness that come from our situation. There are lessons to be learned and personal growth that can occur. Here are some lessons learned ,  so far. After one of my dear friends invited me over to talk, she gave me a little card with a quote on it.  As I mentioned before, I had amazing friends who really tried to support and encourage me the best they knew how.  The quote spoke to me because after I had talked and sobbed, all I could think about was how things would be different from now on and I was grieving that.   The quote said "  I can be changed by what happens to me.  But I refuse to be reduced by it."   Maya  Angelou The pain I experienced and still feel teaches me that it is important to think about how I live and interact with others.   I grew in my understanding

In a counselors office:   Growing old is mandatory, growing wise is optional   and                                               P ain is inevitable, misery optional

When parents divorce in your adult years many tight connections unravel.  The strength of relationships that you have learned to trust become weak and sometimes broken altogether. Marriage is described as a cord.  Individual strands are woven and twisted so closely together as to give the rope more strength and a sense that all strands are actually one unit. A cord of three strands is likened to a marriage where God is intertwined as well.  The more strands and the stronger each one, the more sturdy and useful the rope. Marriage is a deep, thorough connectedness with another human being , and with all the others that are in relationship with that person. The circles of personal interconnectedness are almost unending. So, in divorce, many people are affected.   Their reactions to the pain of an adult child of divorce is unpredictable.  Suffering is difficult to watch in others and is tried to be explained somehow.   In the book of Job in the Bible,  Job was suffering from some

What is the pain of an adult child of divorce like?   It begins something like this : "Honey, do you have time to talk right now? Because I have something that I need to talk to you about".  Your heart begins to race, you feel emotions from fear to anger, a need to take flight or to fight, and at the end of the conversation you hang up the phone and realize by the deep physical feeling of sickness in your stomach , that nothing will ever be the same again. Adult children of divorce are expected to be able to handle their parents divorce.  It is imagined that they are less impacted than younger children.  In an article in the Huffington Post from May of 2011 by Erica Manfred, that thinking is referred to as a myth.  In her article The Kids Are Never Grown , Erica says  " The notion that divorce is easy once the kids are grown is a myth. Divorce is never easy and the kids are never grown." Divorce is likened to open heart surgery and death for the people actual

When I first became aware of the stages of grief, I assumed that I would experience it firsthand when someone close to me died,  not when my parents divorced in my adulthood.  As I cried my way through the first days and months of the shock of what was about to happen to my family of orgin, the pain was deep and unbearable at times.  Before the tears came readily and daily I seemed to walk around from task to task while hours ticked away in my day, as I functioned on auto-pilot, but my thoughts were consumed with the surprise and disbelief that my father had another love and would leave my mother and what we knew and loved of family to be with her. I reasoned that he would reconsider, that the affair wasn't as serious as it seemed, and that all would eventually be OK.  Little did I realize that I was experiencing the Stages of Grief due to the great pain and loss that I was experiencing.  The Stages of Grief are expressed by various words in different grief literature.  I wil

Creating a place for Adult Children of Divorce of every age to come for a bit of hope and help has been a desire of mine as I have navigated the rough waters of finding my place within the aftermath of my parent's divorce.  The counsel I have found and from which I have benefited in the past few years is what I will share with all of us in an effort to encourage us that we are not alone and there is hope. May this place be where we can all go to move us toward times of serenity and peace within our circumstances.