MENTAL HEALTH MOMENT
MENTAL HEALTH MOMENT
September 8, 2000
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"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in
your mind." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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HealthPsych.net
http://www.healthpsych.net
This site provides a resource center and a meeting place
for graduate students in health psychology. Visitors can
access information on jobs, licensing requirements,
pre- and postdoctoral internship and fellowship positions,
and links to relevant organizations. They can also consult
with other students in the site's discussion areas.
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Violence and Injury Prevention Program
http://www.fmhi.usf.edu/amh/homicide-suicide/index.html
This site seeks to help forensic examiners, law enforcement
officers, health professionals and family survivors prevent
and respond to homicide-suicides. It offers advice on the
steps relatives can take to prevent homicide-suicides and
how they should deal with law enforcement officers and
each other if one happens. The site also offers online
tests of depression and impaired judgment and describes
the research of Donna Cohen, Ph.D., and other University
of South Florida psychologists involved with the site.
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China Tour Information
https://www.angelfire.com/biz3/odocspan/china1.html
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RESULTING BEHAVIORS IN ADULT CHILDREN OF DIVORCE
The effects of divorce on children can be devastating.
As parents pull away from each other they become
increasingly preoccupied with their own survival. Although
their thoughts and plans may include the children
(especially for the custodial parent), the process of
planning is generally solitary or takes place in
conversation with other adults. Most children have
little understanding of why their parents are getting
divorced. A child's sense of security and well-being can
be terribly threatened by the prospect of a divorce. The
knowledge that they will be able to see only one parent
at a time and the loss of a sense of family are very
frightening. The process of both parents becoming more
self-absorbed as the divorce develops brings a painful
sense of reality to their fears.
Living in a heightened state of anxiety and fear can
seriously damage children's self-esteem. Their ability
to stay on task, concentrate, and persevere diminishes.
They are frustrated easily. They become more vulnerable
to the pain of disappointment, broken promises, failure
at school, and the many fluctuations in peer relationships.
All these conditions erode their self-esteem and increase
their fear and anxiety. The people they depend on the
most to help them cope and feel better about themselves
are not available. This negative spiral and the incumbent
damage to the child's self-esteem system can last from
a number of months to many years. In fact, some children
never fully recover from the devastating effects of their
parents' divorce.
Divorce's long-range impact most often affects three areas:
an individual's anger, dependency-trust issues in relation-
ships, and sense of self-esteem.
Anger
Anger is often the result of an individual's inability to
cope with frustration effectively. Divorce creates a
situation in which all family members are frustrated more
easily. Children are especially susceptible. They are
angry for many reasons:
* Their sense of family is destroyed.
* They can no longer see both of their parents at
the same time.
* Two people that they love very much no longer love
(perhaps don't even like) each other.
* Children of divorce don't spend as much time with
their parents (even custodial parents) as do children
of intact families.
* They don't get enough guidance as they attempt to
become more independent.
* They are often left to their own devices or are
overburdened with adult-like responsibilities.
* Their parents' divorce is often embarassing socially.
For example, the warring parents may both attend school
conferences. The child may have to explain to friends
that they can't be involved in an activity because it's
their Dad's weekend. If Mom remarries, they must explain
why their mother's last name differs from their own.
This anger often begins when the tension and conflict,
which ultimately leads to divorce, begins within the
family (between the parents). The anger intensifies
through the divorce process and often continues during
the postdivorce adjustment. It may be expressed overtly
in acting out against parental authority. It may be
expressed more covertly through other acting out behaviors
(alcohol, involvement in drug use, vandalism, premature
sexuality) or through depression and withdrawal (often a
defense for intense anger). Most clinicians are experienced
in dealing with the acting out effects of divorce. Anger,
however, often lasts for years, even into adult life. More
easily frustrated and especially vulnerable to the normal
ebb-and-flow of adult relationships, many grown children
of divorce continue to be affected by the earlier break-up
of their parents marriage. In essence, anger stops becoming
a reaction to their parents' divorce. It starts becoming
a part of their personality. It becomes a part of who they
are and how they are defined as a person.
All of us are familiar with bitter, cynical, easy-to-anger
people. We comment that life must have treated them poorly
for them to be so sour. Divorce is one of those life
experiences that can help to create this type of adult
personality. If the divorce's aftermath is filled with
ongoing parental discord and conflict, this type of adult
personality is more likely.
Relationship Problems
Another long-term result of divorce is the young adult's
inability to form healthy, trusting adult relationships.
With the destruction of the family unit, the child loses
the primary group upon which is placed demands for his/her
basic needs and his/her psychological needs. The preadolescent
may worry about such things as enough food, clothing, and
other necessities for a comfortable life. The adolescent,
however, may find him/herself without healthy adult role
models who would normally offer guidance, attention, and
help in solving peer problems and emerging sexual problems
at a time when these psychological issues are critical to
development. In an atmosphere where they cannot trust their
environment to meet these basic and/or psychological needs,
the children can become suspicious, jaded, and callous in
their relationships to others. An existence filled with
broken promises and unmet needs will eventually harden a
youth to the extent that as an adult he/she may find
trusting relationships and intimacy difficult at best.
Two results are common.
Feelings of Separation
One possibility is that the adult child of divorce, so
traumatized by the disappointment of unmet needs, closes
him/herself off from other people and is never again able
to be vulnerable and/or reliant on others. Friends are
superficial and transient. Love relationships lack intimacy
and trust. He/she complains frequently of being misunderstood
in relationships. In fact, these adult children of divorce
often don't understand the subtle nuances in loving
relationships: cards, flowers, quiet dinners, conversations
about nothing important, doing the dishes for her,
preparing his favorite meal, and other things that
make the other person feel good. As a result, their
own marriages are often distant and unsatisfying. If they
last, they are convenient sanctuaries for both adults who
lead independent lives. If they dissolve, it is the divorce
that may become the impetus for the adult child of divorce
to finally get the psychotherapy he/she needs.
Feelings of Dependency
Another possibility is that, as adults, children of
divorce will become overly dependent. They really can't
tolerate living alone. In relationships they are overly
sensitive, frequently getting their feelings hurt and
becoming almost paranoid about their loved one's
relationships with others. They often have difficulty
with rather simple interpersonal responsibilities such as
talking to service people, making reservations, arranging
for babysitters, and so on. Their marriages work if their
spouses need and enjoy being dominant and having complete
control in the marriage. If, however, the spouse wants
more mutuality and support in decision making, the
marriage will not last. Unfortunately, the adult child of
divorce will interpret this failed marriage as their
spouse's lack of love and commitment. If only this person
loved them more, the marriage would have worked. It is
the other person's fault. Overly dependent adults will
go through several relationships before they are likely
to look to themselves for answers.
Sense of Esteem
Perhaps the most intractable and permanent result of
divorce is a lowered sense of self-esteem. Psychotherapy
may be helpful in helping angry people or people
struggling with dependency-intimacy issues. These are
both identifiable and have behavioral correlates that
can be recognized, addressed, and altered. Lowered
self-esteem is less tangible. It is a feeling. In response
to that feeling, individuals will interact with their
environment in such a way as to portray themselves as
less competent and less worthy than they really are. As
adults, they feel unfulfilled and often unhappy, yet
they are unable to point to specific things that bother
them. They may complain about relationships, jobs,
activities, and/or interests, but their complaints are
usually transitory. Basically, they don't enjoy life and
don't feel good about themselves. Often they describe
feeling somehow incomplete. They suffer from low self-
esteem.
It is the family that provides a child with a sense of
belonging. Wanted, supported, played with and cared for,
the child feels valued and hence of value. The
family unit is more than the sum of its parts. A child
can't have a mother and siblings during the week, a
father on the weekend and feel the way he or she would
if this family were complete. Two important changes
occur to the family system when parents divorce.
Devaluing of the Family System
First, there occurs a subtle questioning about the real
value of the family. If the family support system was
really all that the child thought it was, so special and
caring, how could it disappear? With this thinking, the
value once placed on the family depreciated. Ultimately,
the family as it once existed begins to feel like a myth.
For some children, their parents' divorce is not quite so
destructive. Perhaps because some parents have the
capacity to go beyond their own pain to support their
children through this period. Perhaps some parents
reconstruct a sense of family by bringing a grandparent
into the home as a caretaker or through getting remarried.
However it is accomplished, the child again has available
the support, love and acknowledgement needed for the
development of positive self-esteem. If, however, this
repairative process does not take place, then the
devaluing of the family system and the lowering of the
child's self-esteem continues.
Loss of Sense of Belonging
This devaluing process is compounded further by the fact
that the child sees less of both parents following
the dissolution of the marriage. The necessities of work,
caring for their households individually, and leading
separate and independent social lives makes the parents
less available to the child. So the child first loses
the sense of belonging to a family unit and then must
cope with reduced parental support and attention. For
some children, this process is exacerbated even more by
the continuation of their parents' conflict. The children
may be caught in between their parents' war. Children
cannot possibly satisfy what they perceive to be the
needs of their parents. Unsuccessful, their self-esteem
suffers even more. Finally, as some children of divorce
reach adolescence, they are thrust into such adult-like
responsibilities as cooking, cleaning, car-pooling, and
offering child care. These activities are undertaken so
that the child can help a beleaguered parent. The parent
soon takes the completion of these tasks for granted and
frequently does not demonstrate enough appreciation for
what the adolescent has accomplished and for what the
adolescent may have given up to perform such tasks. When
children strive to satisfy the emotional needs of their
parents, it is almost always unsuccessful. It is
consequently a detriment to their self-esteem.
The Myth of Divorce
It has been an adult myth for decades that children are
better off with parents who are separated but happy
than they are with parents caught in an unhappy marriage.
The myth is that life after divorce is somehow automatically
more happy. The reality is that life after divorce is
harder and filled with more responsibilities, less time,
and less financial security. Life after divorce is clearly
a bumpy journey for the majority of children. Anger, unmet
dependency needs, and lowered self-esteem are the
inevitable consequences.
The magnitude of the divorce impact and the duration of
the effects of the divorce will be determined by the
child's environment. Supportive, attentive, loving parents
and extended family involvement are key. Alone, however,
these may not be enough.
Our educational institutions must offer the opportunity
to help children cope with their changing lives. Such
help will not only help adolescents cope with their parents'
divorce, but will also heighten the awareness of educators
to the problems that childern of divorce face. Through
such awareness, children of divorce can learn to cope
more effectively and lead more fulfilled and enriched
lives.
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For further information search for books, etc at the
following URL. Start by trying the following descriptors
in the search engine: divorce, children, adults, self-esteem,
dependency, separation, feelings, anger, belonging, families,
relationships,etc.
https://www.angelfire.com/biz/odochartaigh/searchbooks.html
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Contact your local Mental Health Center or
check the yellow pages for counselors, psychologists,
therapists, and other Mental health Professionals in
your area for further information.
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