Sharing the Children

Surprisingly, from among these many unhappy people, one group stands out as among the most confused, the most trapped, and the most hurt and helpless. These are divorced or divorcing parents caught in a seemingly endless pattern of resentment, animosity, and pain. The months or years that have passed since they separated have not healed their wounds. The shock of betrayal, the humiliation they felt, their sense of loss and victimization, remain as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. They continue to seethe with anger, leading them to avoid all contact with each other or to make every meeting a tense, hostile standoff. For some, periods of uneasy truce are punctuated by explosive exchanges of criticism, threats, and, all too often, violence. These parents and their children are trapped in a continuing struggle, a hot or cold war that has taken on a life of its own, poisoning years of their lives.

When parents divorce, their family does not die; like a living cell, it splits in two. At its best the result is a new kind of family with surprising structure, a healthy, thriving organism with two separate, equally vital centers. No matter how severe their initial problems, most families do achieve this kind of transformation over time, allowing parents and children to go on to live fulfilling lives on their own terms.

Although the details of their custody arrangements vary greatly, those divorced parents who go on to lead fulfilling lives share several key traits: they have let go of the past and are busy and involved with new people, activities, and relationships. They have developed independent lives and have stopped trying to control and interfere with each other. They have shown their children that it is safe and acceptable to love both of them. As a result, the children have a loving, realistic relationship with both parents. Finally, these parents, despite their divorce and their continuing differences, have developed a businesslike, workable way of dealing with each other when it comes to the children.

Many families, however, do not make it across the divorce and child custody minefield safely The statistics vary, but experts report that one-quarter to one-half of all divorced families continue to live with destructive levels of friction, hostility, and bitterness, even years after separating. Their lawyers call them "hostility junkies." Psychologists describe them as entrenched in intractable disputes. Teachers find their children troubled, depressed, and prone to school failure and antisocial behavior.

When I first started working with families like these I was sure that the root of these severe, chronic problems had to lie in psychological flaws of one or both parents. I thought that horror stories like those I heard could never happen unless one or both of the parents were seriously disturbed. To my surprise I found that these men and women could not be distinguished from parents who had worked out their custody problems far more successfully, or from parents who had never divorced.

As I learned about their backgrounds and how they were managing other aspects of their lives, I discovered that most of them were neither bad people nor emotionally disturbed. They differed not so much in who they were, but in what had happened to them and in how they had gone about trying to solve their problems. It was the specifics of what they had experienced, said, and done while trying to separate and divorce that had gotten them in trouble, not the kind of people they were.