CHAPTER 1

HOW DID I GET HERE?

Most of us grow up with dreams, fantasies and plans for an idyllic life, complete with a happy-ever-after picture of a loving, intact family, with a spouse we honor and adore and healthy, thriving children who mean everything to us. Those images make us feel safe and secure. But as we know, approximately half of the time, our best intentions don’t quite work out. What most often begins as a lovely marriage can turn into a most difficult divorce. Even in the best situation, splitting up a family affects everyone involved and may cause feelings of guilt, insecurity, anger and abandonment—just to mention a few.

For children and parents alike, divorce can threaten our desire to be listened to, included and loved. At best, these basic human needs are compromised when a family splits, and everyone, no matter what their unique personalities might be, is rendered vulnerable by the consequences of a divorce.

Children of any age often feel powerless, as if there is no longer stability, security or a place they can call their own. Parents encounter their own pain and confusion while simply trying to survive, and unfortunately, good parenting often becomes an almost secondary consideration. This mix of needy, troubled children with chaotic, anxious and depressed parents can become toxic and takes time to settle and adapt. It certainly does not offer the best foundation for picking a new partner or starting a new relationship.

It goes without saying (almost) that parents should re-examine their long-term goals before they actually break up a family, but realistically most of you reading this book have already made that leap and are trying to start over the best way possible.

But most of the time, that’s quite a challenge.

“I was devastated,” my wife, Donna, says, referring to her first marriage ending. “It was like a death. What was I going to do? I was alone with two children; nobody loved me anymore, and I hadn’t really worked in more than fifteen years. I had to depend on someone with whom I had shared dreams and hopes, but who I knew I couldn’t depend on any longer.”

Donna’s situation was not unique. I’ve treated countless patients over the years who have struggled with identical issues. Divorce marks the demise of a family as originally intended and can really feel like a death—for everyone. While there is nothing that compares to losing a child through actual death, the alienation a child (or parent) feels as a result of non-inclusion in a second family can remain an ongoing issue with life altering affects, no matter when it occurs or what the child’s age may be.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I continue to see people making the same mistakes I’ve watched others, including myself, make over and over again.

A divorce attorney once told me, “You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.” How depressing but true! Since I know from first-hand experience how bad the fallout from a divorce can be, I have committed myself to making sure that everyone I come in contact with—in my own family, in my practice and through this book—may reach their best potential for a happy and fulfilling life.

COPING WITH THE FALLOUT OF A DIVORCE

The realization that your marriage is over may occur gradually or abruptly. Weeks, months or even years of soul searching and perhaps multiple attempts at therapy and/or marriage counseling can lead to the knowledge that there is no viable chance for the two of you to remain together. Or it may happen out of the blue, as a result of a fight or when one person decides to leave.

We all know from watching too many soap operas and talk shows on television how crazy and irrational two people can behave inside the parameters of a marriage. While I always recommend that both parents make every effort possible to stay together for the benefit of their children, sometimes when the acrimony is too severe, it is best for families to break into two units, offering children a more peaceful everyday existence. But in any case, whether you are divorcing amicably or with rancor, whether it was a long time coming with multiple clues and hints along the way or an overnight and shocking calamity, it’s happened. Your divorce is really happening!

You have to face a litany of evidence: the unexplained telephone calls, the credit card receipts that you didn’t want to ask about, the curt explanations and those quick efforts to hide something on the computer. Or maybe it was all a gradual process of growing apart and the emotional distance kept growing bigger and bigger until you couldn’t avoid admitting how unhappy, and frustrated and even angry you were, but didn’t know how to talk about it, let alone make it better.

But through either of these scenarios or any variation you’ve experienced, you very well may have held onto the fantasy that your previous closeness, that spark you felt and shared when you first married, would magically return all by itself, without doing anything in particular, with no ugly confrontation or long, drawn out process of healing and reconciliation.

Like I said, some of us have been watching too much TV. Because as soon as one person talks to a lawyer and subsequently files for divorce, the train leaves the station as you once knew it and starts down the track, into territory that you could never have anticipated.

No one ever thinks he or she will have a severe car accident or become terribly ill or get a divorce. We always think it’s something that happens to someone else—until it smacks us directly in the face and turns our lives upside down.

Despite the fact that attorneys are supposed to talk with their clients, and encourage them to try and work things out, either directly or through counseling and/or mediation, they invariably seem to point out everything negative that they possibly can about what can happen to an unhappy couple. While hardly knowing you and without ever having met your spouse, the person you trusted with everything—your life, your finances, your future, your children, and your hopes—he or she is portrayed as the villain, the one who has betrayed you, either directly with someone else, or emotionally, through ignorance or some other form of abandonment.

That is a worst case scenario, but it happens all too often. The attorney will point out that your spouse may have hidden the assets, is involved with someone else, will take the children, or that the new person he or she gets involved with later will somehow turn your children against you. Or worse, that your spouse not only doesn’t want you, but doesn’t want the children that you both planned for, cared for and shared either.

It’s a horror show, and that’s before you pay the retainer. Whatever your deepest fears were or how well you thought you knew your spouse after living with him or her for months or years, once the divorce process starts, you are suddenly shaken to the core about how little you knew. You start to wonder how he or she could do this to you, after you promised to cherish and be with each other forever. Those fears are often compounded by an attorney, trying to do his or her job by attempting to protect you fully, even though he or she does not know you, your spouse or your children, and your lives together.

Your fears may very well be enhanced by friends and relatives, some of whom may have been divorced, who start telling you stories about people they know or have heard of who were essentially left homeless, penniless, and childless by their ex and the lawyers.

This nightmare has nothing to do with the fantasy you had as a child or the happiness and hope you felt on your wedding day. Divorce is often worse than you could ever imagine. All the choices you make, or have made for you have real and lasting consequences—most of which seem less than optimal.

When it comes to anger, frustration, insecurity, paranoia and hopelessness, divorce is an equal opportunity devil. In many traditional home settings, women often feel unable to satisfy their children while struggling with their own need to make a living—forget trying to start a new life or relationship.

Men, by virtue of the court’s natural bias towards mothers, suddenly realize that their involvement with their children can become very limited, and they can no longer pick and choose when and to what extent they will be involved, aside from providing financial support.

Pressures on both parents can pile up quite quickly with new schedules, fewer financial resources available, a compromised social life, and a whole new set of priorities for maintaining a positive relationship with your children.

THE BLAME GAME: ACCEPTING FAILURE

Divorce can render even the most secure person a mess. It creates vulnerability where it may not have ever existed. This often leads to feeling an unreasonable amount of guilt in doses that seem almost too much to bear.

“It’s all my fault.”

“I really messed up.”

“I’m a failure.”

Regardless of whether you are the leaver or the person left behind, it is hard not to accept some, if not all, of your part in the failure of your marriage. That acceptance may also lead you to consider yourself a personal failure as well. No matter how difficult your spouse is, no matter what you did, and no matter how hard you tried, clearly it wasn’t enough to make your marriage work. At that point, as much as you may have tried to reconcile, agreed to go to counseling again, and give things one more try, you eventually realize that one of you isn’t into it anymore, doesn’t believe it will work, or just doesn’t care enough anymore. And someone has to be blamed!

Even when you try to blame your spouse or focus on his or her shortcomings, of which he or she suddenly seems to have many, you know deep in your heart that you’re only looking at half of the picture. In the middle of the night or in your truest moments, you admit to yourself that you bear a significant amount of the fault or blame. After all, when a marriage is over, it is your failure, too.

It can feel so bad, you don’t want to leave your house and face the world. What will you tell your friends and colleagues at work? What about your family? Once you start sharing your situation, they may point out that they told you not to get involved with that person in the first place, that they knew he or she was not the right person for you. Seeing someone close to you being so unsupportive can often make it harder for you to try and work things out with your soon to be ex-spouse, whether it concerns complicated issues like money or more simple ones like visitation schedules.

It is incredibly sad when a child who loves both parents has to listen to a grandparent or a cousin disparage or criticize one parent because he or she left the marriage. Even if that child has been abandoned, it serves no purpose to compound the child’s pain by badmouthing his or her parent.

The blame game does no good!

Alternately, if you, the self-anointed wounded one, are critical of your spouse, who is also the other parent, your friend or family member who may have liked him will see you as the difficult person, the one who could not be pleased or is at fault, and blame you for the divorce, or even push you to try and make it work. That may cause you to push back, and where will that leave you? Exhausted, divorced, and with fewer friends.

Marriage and divorce are very personal choices, which means you are the only one who can be responsible for them. It also means that trying to get others involved, to understand, or take one side or the other doesn’t usually help—except of course when you need a supportive ear so you can talk about how badly you feel.

It’s vital that you find a friend or family member you can talk to. Many people, regardless of whether they were the one leaving or the one left behind, consider their life to be markedly worse alone than it was when they were married. That feeling comes from much more than the financial hardships a divorce creates. Marriage provides a certain level of comfort in life when each of us feels that we are sharing our struggles, no matter how daunting they may become. So when a divorce occurs and you suddenly become a single parent, your stress level can shoot through the roof. The normal pressures of life become magnified, especially compared to what they were when you were married. Being a single parent can be overwhelming. For many, working all day and then coming home to take care of the children and the house, without another adult to help or the financial resources to get even part-time assistance, can easily be too much.

Someone has to be to blame!

I once asked a newly divorced single parent what she did for fun.

“Fun? What is that? On the nights and weekends when my ex gets the kids, I just relax or sleep and try to do catch up on all the chores I don’t get to do when they are there. I may have dinner with a friend, or go out with another single mom and her kids to some kid activity, but I often don’t have the energy for anything else.”

Her answer was typical of the single mothers and fathers I see in my practice.

Their stress and fatigue is often increased if they are the primary caretaker, either by court order or by the de facto neglect of the other spouse. In either case, they have less and less time for themselves and have to do more and more as a result of their new role as head of the household. This can easily cause the primary caretaker parent to behave badly, to become angrier, more demanding and resentful of the other parent, and more abrupt and impatient with the children.

It can make you want to blame someone!

When it comes to gender, men and women may struggle with similar issues, depending on their circumstances, leaving them with the equal possibilities for blaming each other.

In the short run, men seem to fare better financially, as they tend to be the primary wage earners, but meeting the financial demands of a divorce is never easy. Newly single men often need to learn how to take care of the basics, like cooking, shopping, house cleaning and laundry. When you add trying to integrate confused, unhappy part-time children into the mix, it’s no wonder that their patience can be pushed to the max. They become angry with the kids, blaming them for small inconveniences they would normally overlook, and mad at the ex for things she did or did not do in preparation for their time with the children. Like most of us, they are often clueless about how to reward, discipline or deal with an unhappy, demanding child. That’s not easy, even in a happy marriage. When it’s the dad who leaves, there is often a flurry of super-parenting, as if dad is campaigning to be anointed “Father of the Year,” to prove once and for all that he is a good guy and doesn’t want to neglect his children, despite the fact that he may have already done so. Gradually, it gets to men like this: the demands of paying child support, the new lifestyle of a single parent, and dealing with whiney, upset children who want to punish their parents for leaving. Taken together, this can often cause fathers to regress and emotionally withdraw, followed by spending less and less time with their kids or continually changing schedules to accommodate their own life.

And it’s all so easy to justify when you can blame your choices on the divorce.

“He always tried to control me.”

“I left because I couldn’t be me.”

“I just couldn’t live the way I needed.”

“She always did what she wanted anyway.”

These are just some of the reasons people give for leaving their spouse and family in the process of a divorce. Unfortunately, once they have left and moved on with their life, many of these same people come to realize that they still haven’t done any of the things they thought the other person prevented them from doing, or that they could have done many of those things if they had just communicated and asserted themselves, rather than blaming, or asking permission from the other.

“It was not until after we split that I realized that I could have gone out for lunch with girlfriends, had the occasional girl trip, or really done many of the things that I blamed him for not letting me do,” said Jane, one of my clients not long ago. “Since the divorce, I didn’t do those things at first, but I didn’t have anyone to blame for my choices but myself. Now, I realize that if I had just put my foot down, I could have done those things anyway, maybe even in the context of a healthy, evolving marriage.”

You can’t play the blame game anymore once you’re alone, looking in the mirror.

“I was shocked when I realized after the divorce that I could have just disagreed,” said Peter, trying to describe to me what happened. “Or if she started to carry on, I could have just hung up the phone and called back later. By that time we both would have cooled down, and life could have gone on, but somehow, I didn’t think I could live with her at the time, and it took living alone to finally get it.”

The blame game has to end before it affects your kids.

Despite your attempts to reassure your children that the divorce is not their fault, the effects of your split will last a long time. Sure, you and your ex may go to great lengths to reassure yourselves that your children will be better with two divorced but happy parents rather than growing up in an unhappy household, but this mind game is more for your benefit than your children’s. No matter how chaotic, unhappy or disinterested their parents may have been, children, particularly younger ones, prefer an intact family. For them, that was the norm, which means that when their parents split up, despite their comments to the contrary about how they expected it, or wanted you to do it, they’re still surprised by the news. More than that, it almost always comes as a shock to them, and one that they will always remember as an event that changed their life.

I have heard many middle-aged adult patients tell me, as if it were yesterday, what they were wearing, which room they were in, and what they were told, when it happened—the divorce, the thing that rocked their world as a child. In my practice, I can often date the onset of an individual’s loss of self-esteem, lack of motivation or poor performance in school to this point in their life, when a divorce changed everything.

When we consider this triangle of two parents and the child (or children) affected, we can equate it with a three-legged stool, trying to offer stability on at least one unsteady leg. How can anyone trust using that stool to sit on? Conversely, how can either parent or the children honestly trust each other, once a divorce has begun and the blame game begins?

There is another way.

DEFINING SUCCESS AND MOVING FORWARD

Success is relative in any endeavor and is not always obvious. But human nature dictates its necessity. In fact, our egos require it, no matter how reasonable it may or may not be to expect it, especially in challenging situations that are not entirely in our control. In remarriage involving children, success may not be easily defined or measured, and when it does occur, it’s usually in small increments. But I have discovered that what can often be the elusive nature of success doesn’t necessarily stop most people from hungering for it, in some cases, almost demanding it.

For example, among the many patients I’ve seen in my practice over the years, many of them believe that within weeks, if not months, of remarrying, the children involved should love everyone the same, and in some instances even call the new parent Mom or Dad.

Truthfully, that is naive and unrealistic. Personally and professionally, I evaluate success by how children of blended families are doing themselves, independent of their parents. Do they function well without us? Do they have positive relationships with each other, among themselves?

The answers to these questions will vary according to a host of factors, including the age of the children, geographic proximity to the divorced parents living away from home, and the length of time it took to blend the families together.

For me, as I view my family evolving, I see success among our children continuing on many levels. We all live in different parts of the country, look forward to family get-togethers, and are very appreciative that our grown children, who have limited time and a host of obligations, still choose to spend time with us. Donna and I are particularly happy when one of our children visits in a city where another one lives, and they choose to spend time together. In that moment, the sibling labels that society assigns just fade to nothingness and one can safely say that success has been achieved in a very real way. Each of our children has a strong relationship with us as well as with one another and has found his or her place in the world—in spite of us!

But I know I am lucky. Not everyone can claim success in this respect. Being a psychiatrist may have helped me sometimes to understand particular conflicts and given me the tools to create a supportive family environment, but when it comes to your own blended family, training in psychiatry is not a prerequisite to personal success, and at times it may even be a liability.

Our children have told me on numerous occasions, and will tell anyone who asks, that when I over-analyze a situation, I cause as many conflicts as I solve. Who am I to argue? I’m sure my children are right. Multiple degrees, certifications, advanced training and awards do not guarantee a thing when it comes to dealing with my own family. I am just like anyone else I know—flying by the seat of my pants, hoping to achieve an inkling of what I can safely call success.

However, I have found that occasionally, even after a family has been together for quite some time, something that seems to be a minor disturbing event can trigger off an emotional avalanche. It can happen suddenly, for no apparent reason, after months or even years of smooth sailing. You may be cast as the one to blame, but that doesn’t mean you have failed, or that you are no longer appreciated. It could very well be a matter of lingering scars, and everyone needs to go back and clear the air, so that you can move on.

In spite of our best efforts to move on, every one of us who has been through a divorce carries at least a little bit of baggage. It’s how we carry it that matters. If we at least acknowledge our mistakes and commit to working on ourselves, we can improve our chances of finding a better relationship. Along the way, we can do our best to be civil with our ex. Each of us has to realize that we will be involved with that person—the mother or father of our children—for a long, long time.

It also helps to remember that things can get worse and no one will really bail you out except you. There may be a knight on a white horse waiting around the corner or a princess in your future, pining just for you, but you won’t find them sitting in your apartment, feeling sorry for you there. You need to pick yourself up and move on, one step at a time.

Listen to everyone along the way. Appreciate their feelings even if you don’t agree, and then act with that understanding, rather than just out of your own idea of how things should be or how you think people should behave.

Don’t let success or failure define you.