This is an article in my Catholic Healing Series, where I talk about the most prevalent mental health issues of our time, who the best thinkers are, what the theory is, and how to heal the issue. If you enjoy this, feel free to check out other articles or videos!
The Issue
About one quarter of Americans are adult children of divorce, and divorce is unfortunately on the rise. Nearly one third of American children today are experiencing their parents’ divorce prior to reaching adulthood. Divorce is a traumatic experience. Symptoms of being an adult child of divorce include feelings of grief, sadness, anger, blame, loneliness, confusion, guilt, trust issues, relationship difficulties, post traumatic stress, and damaged parent child relationships. Sometimes, parents rely on children for emotional support in healthy ways and children are parentified during divorce. This can have lasting negative effects. Also, sometimes, infidelity sometimes is the cause of divorce. This can give children betrayal trauma. Finally, some parents move on after a divorce and act like the children from the first marriage are irrelevant. As one can imagine, this is quite scarring. Adult children of divorce are more likely to have attachment related issues than children from families where parents stay married. The varied problems faced by adult children of divorce present significant issues for themselves and their spouses, but there is hope! There are many effective tools for healing from the trauma of divorce, and I will share them in this article. However, first, I will discuss the Thinkers who are having an impact on the field.
The Thinkers
Dr. John Bowlby, MD, who died in 1990, offers the concept of attachment theory to the world of healing. Bowlby did studies on rhesus monkeys, noting that the monkeys who were close to the Mother flourished and did well socially. Conversely, monkeys who were separated from the Mother tended to be outcasts. In the studies that he did, as well as studies that others did later, it was proven that the same phenomenon exists in humans. From birth through age five, the Mother’s body is the primary social teaching tool of babies! What an endorsement of Theology of the Body! This realization has given rise to the attachment parenting movement where closeness with both parents is encouraged, along with lots of affection and emotional expression.
Dr. Dan Siegel, PhD brings us neuroscience studies that demonstrate the power of attunement. Attunement is a phenomenon where the brains and bodies of two people form a special connection over time that profoundly impacts attachment.
Kelly McDaniel is the author of
Mother Hunger. Focusing primarily on the relationships between emotionally immature Mothers and their Daughters, she accurately demonstrates the profound impact of emotionally immature Mothers on their daughters. McDaniel documents not just the attachment wound, but its long term impact and practical solutions.
Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD is one of the primary experts on emotionally immature parents. She is engaging and excellent at connecting with people, which I am sure does much to help with the healing of attachment wounds. Gibson helps people to identify what issues are with emotionally immature parents. Often, emotionally immature parents use their children to meet their needs, instead of focusing on meeting the needs of their children. Healing attachment wounds and developing healthy boundaries in relationships is pivotal.
Dr. Janina Fisher, PhD is a former Harvard Professor who likely has done more to help people understand and to heal from shame than any other figure in the field. In the world of psychology that is full of surprising and eccentric figures, Fisher could be the most surprising and most eccentric. A good friend of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, who also is known for his personality, Janina Fisher is soft and gentle in affect. Very importantly, she giggles a lot. At the same time, she makes jokes of all kinds of situations that can be darkly humorous. Then, she giggles more. What she is doing is, in fact, extremely therapeutic. Fisher has discovered how to help people laugh at themselves and situations so that they can confront them with courage and a healthy sense of experiment. She specializes in working with people who struggle with perspective, and laughter is the medicine that provides a healthy sense of objectivity. In terms of Borderline Personality Disorder, she artfully uses Internal Family Systems Interventions to help people understand parts of the self and to partner with them. This is particularly helpful in terms of helping people to bond with parts of the self that have good intentions but that offer destructive strategies as solutions. After people connect with these parts in curiosity and understand them, they are able to collaborate with them to pursue healthier strategies.
Dr. Richard Schwartz, PhD is the creator of Internal Family Systems therapy, which often is used to heal trauma. He began as a systematic family therapist and discovered that many of his techniques were effective with a person’s “internal family,” when a client is seen as having a series of parts or members. Richard Schwartz is calm, subdued, and thoughtful. Much of his approach has to do with creating a sense of safety and relaxation where parts of a client’s self are able to unburden and reintegrate. It is possible to see his sessions online, and the results are eye-popping. Internal Family Systems represents the greatest breakthrough that I have seen in therapy in the course of my life.
Healing for Adult Children of Divorce
Disclaimer: these are just some of the tools that can be used to heal for Adult Children of Divorce. Also, I cannot guarantee healing or benefit. This entire article represents my opinions and applications of the tools, nothing more and nothing less. This article does not constitute medical, psychological, mental health, or any other advice.
Mindfulness and Relationship as Exposure Therapy
Mindfulness presents a healthy awareness of what is going on inside oneself and within one’s relationships. Spiritually, Ignatius is the founder of a lot of Catholic mindfulness. It is good for each of us to become aware of what we are thinking and what we are feeling. Journaling and tracking, as well as a daily Examen, can be good vehicles for developing mindfulness. A person should keep an eye out for triggers. Are there moments where anxiety spikes? What are those moments? What is a person doing to respond positively in those moments?
One of the most powerful ways to heal attachment is in relationship. A person’s relationship with God and a person’s relationship with her or his therapist can be two outstanding foundational relationships to aid in the healing of attachment wounds. In a sense, attachment issues often are phobia situations involving relationships. So, doing exposure therapy, which is the recommended therapy for overcoming phobias, can be quite helpful. A person can identify experiences that are stressful and then rank them from lowest to highest. It is helpful to do a graded exposure. So, starting with the least stressful situation, a person should try to go through the situation and replace the triggered response with a non-triggered response.
Many adult children of divorce have disorganized attachment. This means that part of them desperately wants closeness and affection and part of them is absolutely terrified of it. This requires a lot of courage on the part of the individual, and it can help significantly if a spouse is supportive. Often, an adult child of divorce experiences a sense of internal chaos when in relationships. It is helpful if the person learns to move slowly in a dating relationship. If a dating partner proves trustworthy, the person should move closer in a slow, steady pattern. If a dating partner proves untrustworthy or there are red flags, it is important to take a big step back. In this manner, a person is reconditioning by understanding how securely attached people have relationships. In a Marriage, it is important for an adult child of divorce to overcome either avoidant tendencies where there is too much distance and focus on needs meeting outside of the marriage or anxious tendencies where there is a sense of clinginess, control, and an insatiable desire for affection and reassurance.
Existentialism and Pattern Awareness
Viktor Frankl’s Existentialist approach offers a focus on story in order to give us a sense of meaning. Frankl identified that finding deeper meaning was the key to himself and others surviving the Holocaust. In the case of attachment, people need to return to the story that unfolded when they were younger to identify both meaning and pattern. Often, key pieces of meaning include discovering that parents were emotionally immature. They used their children to meet their needs instead of meeting their children’s needs. Also, lies were told to children about themselves, sometimes explicitly in conversation, but often implicitly through actions. Rejection and abandonment are common themes. Parentification of children sometimes occurred. This results in the lies, “you are not worthy,” “you are not good enough,” “you are not capable,” and “you are trapped.”
Pattern is another key theme. Often, there is a pattern of children either sacrificing their own needs to meet the needs of parents or a pattern of total abandonment. The pattern of shame is common. That is the pattern where children take on all problems and responsibilities in a family system in order to be able submit to inhumane circumstances. An important thing to note is that issues with parents are systemic. That is to say, a person might think that they have Mother Wounds or Father Wounds. The truth is that most people have wounds from both parents in these situations. The most common parental dynamic is that one parent has toxic behavior and the other parent is an enabler. The enabler often is overlooked, but plays a central role. Also, there can be a profound negative impact on people’s spiritual lives. Our parents are the emotional face of God to us when we are young. How has a parental relationship impacted the way that a person views God? It can be very helpful for someone to go deep in prayer to seek the Truth.
In the case of divorce, important points to look at include patterns where: the child blames herself or himself and takes it upon herself or himself to fix the Marriage; places where the child is parentified; and places where the child is abandoned and left behind. In each of these cases it is important for a person to identify how she or he was impacted, as well as whether any patterns are occurring in current relationships now. What is the deeper truth of the past and what is the key to relational health in the present?
Internal Family Systems and Deep Trauma Healing
Often, deep trauma healing needs to occur in the case of divorce. To heal his or her inner child, a person struggling with attachment issues is able to use internal family systems. Internal family systems takes a parts approach to the self. It identifies that people have different parts of the self that have different roles and intentions. The key parts of the self to look at are the Conscious Self, the Wounded Exile, and the Manager/Guardian.
The Conscious Self is the best part of a person and the leader of the internal family system. It is the logical, virtuous, reasoning, and emotive self. Its job is to dialogue with the Wounded Exile and the Manager/Guardian to achieve healing.
The Manager/Guardian is the part of the self that keeps the person safe. It likely exists in extreme form. It likely fears rejection or abandonment and uses either avoidance in the case of an avoidantly attached person or control and manipulation in the case of an anxiously attached person. The Manager/Guardian needs to identify more moderate strategies that allow the person struggling with attachment to enter more deeply into relationship with others. Examples of effective strategies are taking accountability, making healthy judgments about being vulnerable, negotiating needs, and meeting the needs of the spouse. In the case of anxious attachment, it is particularly helpful for a person to realize that the person is able to receive love in a wide range of ways, and not just through emotional expression and affection. Very significantly in the case of divorce where there is resultant disorganized attachment, it is likely that a person’s Manager/Guardian is anxious and controlling in some areas and avoidant in others, so it is important to analyze how the Manager/Guardian behaves in a wide range of situations and to develop better Alternative Strategies.
The Wounded Exile originally was wounded in the person’s childhood. The Wounded Self is carrying negative emotions. The key negative emotion in many people struggling in the aftermath of divorce is shame, although sometimes there is loneliness, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions. The person needs to identify the shame and all negative emotions and then unburden these emotions. An example of an unburdening ritual is going to prayer and envisioning giving these negative emotions to Jesus, or going to Mass and envisioning all negative past experiences being taken to the altar where they are redeemed and received by the individual with the Eucharist. After an unburdening, the person can talk to the Wounded Exile and comfort her or him.
Conclusion
First of all, to reiterate, divorce is a traumatic experience. Second, many people in the aftermath of a divorce, especially children, feel like they have been smashed like a mirror into a multitude of shards of the self. Healing this damage takes time, sacrifice, and courage. If you are going on your journey and you need help, please feel free to reach out. But regardless, know of prayers in my Rosary and my Chaplet! May God the Father love you in all the places that your human father did not and may Mary, our loving Mother, love you in all the places that your human mother did not.
Psychology Today has good resources regarding attachment:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/compassion-matters/201802/healing-attachment-issues
Are you an adult child of divorce looking to heal? Feel free to reach out to the Catholic Healing Institute and Tom Weishaar for assistance from a professional with special training in healing Attachment Trauma, Mother Hunger, and Emotionally Immature Parent Wounds.
www.catholichealinginstitute.com
tom@catholichealinginstitute.com
Tom Weishaar, MA LPCC CCTP-II is the Founder and CEO of the Catholic Healing Institute. He lives in Steubenville, OH with his wife and three children.
