The much-anticipated film “Marriage Story” premiered on Netflix recently. It was hard to get through. Depressing in enough parts that I watched it in piecemeal. The divorce mediator had the good sense to at least attempt to get the couple – who are parents – to remember the reasons they came together in the first place. The hoped-for outcome was that the now co-parents would get to a place of enough peace and acceptance that they could have a healthy divorce for the sake of their child.
Understandably, one parent just wasn’t having it. That was the first frustration for someone like me who has worked 27 years with a singular purpose: to be part of creating more healthy childhoods and therefore, more healthy human beings on the planet.
Pain gets in the way; of course it does. We need to forgive ourselves, and one another, for that. We need to give ourselves time to be angry and vengeful and jealous and insecure and desperate. AND… when children are involved, we have to remember that we are the adults in this life-altering, potentially devastating scenario and that our children’s wellness throughout their entire lives depends upon our capacity to put our big boy and girl pants on and do the right thing.
I’m not referring to some right thing in the moment because of its benefit in the moment, but because there is always the potential of those moments to feed the possibility of wellness in the future of our children throughout their lifetime. How have we not learned enough and healed enough, with all the awareness and resources on the planet available to assist us, to do what’s mature and right? I understand that pain and suffering and fear and anger get in the way of doing what’s right for a period of time, but how are we still not getting the help we need to channel and resolve those feelings in order to put the well-being of our children first?
You know I work hard for the elimination of shame because it can interfere with our capacity to do the right thing, AND…sometimes, in order to do the right thing, we need some appropriate shame in just the right dose, to pull ourselves out of our need to be right, to prove something to our ex, to save face, to have the upper hand, to be more in control, to shame or humiliate, and/or to win. What are we winning? If our children are experiencing us as angry and stressed and/bad-mouthing their parent, what do we end up winning? There may be an immediate battle that has been won, but not the war. The war is lost when we prevent the nurturing of the relationship between parent and child, no matter how challenged or even unhealthy it might currently be.
TIP 1: Get the big picture. We win the war when we raise healthy children that want to have a relationship with us throughout a lifetime. We win the war when we have helped our children to have a relationship with their other parent, no matter what that has to look like for a while.
TIP 2: If you need to vent, vent privately. Never vent in front of your children, when you are on the phone and children are anywhere in the vicinity – car, house, building, AND… (I can’t believe I have to say this in 2020), never vent to your children! If you need help to learn how to contain that, there are plenty of professionals that can train your nervous system into mastery of containment. YOU CAN CONTAIN IT.
TIP 3: If you need to channel justified hate, vengeance, suffering, anger, judgment, any of it, please hire the right person to help you to do that to its conclusion. Someone who will help you fully heal and recover from your experience, because I’m here to tell you, it is possible.
TIP 4: PLEASE share with your children what you remember you loved about your co-parent, regularly, when there is a natural moment to do so and there will be plenty. That parent is a big part of WHO YOUR CHILD IS. When you badmouth your co-parent, you bad-mouth your child, period. (Another thing I can’t believe in 2020 is still necessary to say.) If you find that impossible to do, start journaling out your memories of better times, keep a gratitude journal, make a list of what you loved about your ex when you first met and when things were better between you. THIS IS WHO YOUR CHILD IS!
TIP 5: Want your children to have a full relationship with their other parent no matter how unhealthy that other parent is. There is so much for your child to gain from learning to navigate whatever goes on with that other parent. Your child will ALWAYS deep-down love and identify with that other parent no matter what your child is saying now or saying out loud, and no matter what you think of that other parent. Start accepting and supporting that and you will balance out who your children are by being you.
I understand the fight for custody in some cases, but custody cannot confine or define or decide a lifelong relationship that will always have another chance for connection. We just need to keep working on being the kind of person with the kind of energy that our children want to be around.
There is no minimizing the pain and suffering of divorce and all of what led up to it. Every one of the dark emotions associated can be justified for many different reasons, on many different levels. We go through hell, those of us who fought for our marriages and lost, as well as those of us that may be in custody battles right now. AND… our children do not deserve to have their lives made that much more difficult because we can’t contain our feelings, or because we fail to go for help to learn how to target them in the healthiest direction, or because we need to win.
