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Adult Children of Legal or Emotional Divorce
by Jim Conway

Table of Contents

1.    Who Are These Adult Children from Legally or Emotionally Divorced Families?
2.    A Growing National Awareness
3.    What Has the Adult Child Lost?

4.    Cheated out of Life
5.    Damaged Self-image and Blurred Boundaries
6.    Dysfunction Breeds Dysfunction
7.    Missing: Normal Life Development
8.    Distrust and Role-Playing
9.    Unsuccessful Marriages and Fear of Parenting
10.  The Outside World

11.  Step One: Deciding to Be Healed
12.  Step Two: The Spiritual Link
13.  Step Three: joining a Recovery Group
14.  Step Four: Remembering Your Past
15.  Step Five: Grieving Your Losses
16.  Step Six: Shaking Off the Victim Mentality
17.  Step Seven: Forgiving the Past
18.  Step Eight: Working on Your Problems
19.  Step Nine: Maintaining and Enjoying Your New Life

20.  How to Help Adult Children of Divorce

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©1998 Midlife Dimensions with portions © 1995, 1998 True World Access, Inc.

Adult Children of Legal or Emotional Divorce
by Jim Conway

an excerpt from Chapters one and two

    The long tentacles of pain from a dysfunctional family reach deep into the adult years and beyond, into the next generation and the next--until finally someone decides to take the ax and chop off the tentacle. Only then will the suffocating influence of divorce--emotional or legal--finally stop distorting, crippling and sucking life’s joy out of everyone it touches.
    The key is that someone must make the decision to become healthy, to have healthy relationships, to pass on health to the children and grandchildren. This issue is a choice--a decision to be healed.
    Many people are afraid of the choice to be healed because it hurts too much. When we choose to be healed, we are choosing to look through adult eyes at our childhood, our parents, their dysfunction and their divorce--whether legal or emotional.
    Two days ago I talked to Marie, a woman age fifty-three, whose last child had recently moved out of the home. Shortly after that, Marie went to her doctor for a physical check-up because she felt "run down."
    The doctor said, "Everything seems okay, but how are you feeling inside?" The doctor's kind words opened the floodgates, and Marie sobbed and sobbed uncontrollably. Then she confessed that she had cried constantly for the last several days. Her life was totally out of control. She didn't know what was happening to her. Wherever she went and whatever she did, she experienced a deep sadness. Her grief poured out in what seemed like an endless flow. After they talked for forty-five minutes, the doctor encouraged her to seek counseling help, which she did.
    The counselor gently helped Marie walk back into some frightening and shameful childhood experiences. They were terrifying, She loved her mother and father, yet she had to face the reality that they had been emotionally divorced from each other most of their lives. How could she accept the fact that her mother really loved another man?
    Her hatred for her mother's lover produced intense violent feelings. Even as we spoke on the phone, Marie was seething with rage as she remembered coming home from school and finding the other man in her mother's arms. Marie hated that man! "My parents' marital mess and my problems are all his fault!"
    Marie had kept a picture of that horrible man on the back of her bedroom door when she was a girl. Each day after school when she was confronted with the sickening sight of him with her mother, she would go to her room, lock the door and throw darts at his face. She thought, "If only he would die, then my mother would be free."
    Now, as a grown woman, Marie was beginning to face several frightening realities. Perhaps her mother had been equally at fault in the affair with the other man. Maybe the emotional divorce between her parents was not totally the man's fault. And perhaps Marie's own failed first marriage and poor choice of a second husband were directly tied to her dysfunctional childhood.
    "No, my parents would never get legally divorced--they were Christians," Marie said. "What a joke!" The shattering effect on all of the children in Marie's family was the same as if their parents had gone to court and split up.
    It has long been accepted that young children are negatively affected by parental divorce. Recently, however, we have learned that the long-term effects continue even after those little children become adults.
    In this book I’ll help you walk through your painful past--but the major part of the book focuses on the steps toward healing.

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©2002 Midlife Dimensions with portions © 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002 True World Access, Inc.