As with all posts, materiel changes to descriptions are made for reasons of confidentiality.
Heard recently in my meetings with clients:
"He's willing to travel from Chicago to see his nephew's college graduation, but won't set aside to visit his daughter," said a mom, now happily remarried of her ex's relationship to their daughter.
"He yells at me, no matter what I say or do," referring to his father, says a college freshman who's received a full scholarship to an ivy league college.
"All he does is yell at my kids," says a mom of her second husband.
I've been aware lately of angry parents expressing anger to their kids. Anger can be active, in the form of yelling, swearing, intimidation, actual physical abuse or passive, in the form of cancelling of visitations, non initiation of visitations (for which the children thirst) or putting the children in the middle of parental struggles.
Despite divorce decrees that almost uniformly instruct parents to insulate the children from their often ongoing disputes, parents so frequently disparage their former partner to their kids. Kids come into sessions describing their parents' hurtful antics, their pain poorly disguised. And this despite parents' almost universal denial that they'd ever speak poorly of their ex or put their kid in the middle.
The examples would curl your hair, but are, I believe, actually symptoms of other maladies. Yes, when parents misbehave with their children it is usually symptomatic of their fatigue, their depression, an expression of their own lack of skills to cope with the loss of their marriage and of their children to whatever time the children visit their ex, the seduction of gossip and their denial of the import their parenthood has.
What are the stresses parents have?
Financial: child support can be a burden, particularly when parents are jealous of their ex's ability to collect monies that, despite legal mandate, feel unfair. It galls a parent who believes they have been betrayed or worse to pay money to the person who hurt them so deeply. Indeed two do live more cheaply than one, and while a couple might share the financial/home duties with one being the primary earner and the other not earning at all, or earning a modest wage, those norms are often shattered with divorce, creating two individual single parents who have to learn to juggle both income generation and the full responsibilities of parenting.
Single Parenting: Being a single parent can be stressful, financially as well as emotionally. Trying to date while having primary responsibility for children is a complicated matter with parents trying to balance the needs of their children with their own emotional needs to create deep and loving attachments. Being remarried might not bring the relief desired, as children often resent the "new" parent and/or the step parent is often hesitant to become embroiled in what is obviously a complex process between biological parents and the children.
Mental Health: The frequency of mental health challenges of adults is well documented elsewhere. It's hard enough to cope with things like depression, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, addiction with the support of a partner. Coping with them alone or with the combination of the variety of other stresses mentioned here and elsewhere is difficult beyond what can be described. One of my personal beefs regards the number of men who are surly and irritable, firmly denying or minimizing that they might be depressed, when irritability is a classic sign of depression. Men are no less vulnerable to mental health challenges than are women. Period.
Legal: Just as marriage is a legal relationship, so is divorce. Everyone has a legal right to representation, as it should be. But the stress of legal actions regarding modifications of visitation and claims of contempt due to extreme distortion of relatively minor incidents are thinly veiled aggressions against one another. People spend absurd amounts of money on these actions (see finances above) and the amount of energy and time spent as well invariably leaks its emotional sludge down onto the children.
Gossip is a seductive and subtle way that hurts children. Gossip is hard for almost all of us to combat, but when one parent gossips about their ex, the child learns so many lessons - all of them bad - about relationships. Gossip severely harms, even when it is factually based. How many kids "learn" of a parent's extra marital affair? It's bad enough that these things happen and are hurtful to a marriage. Revealing them to children creates hut that is unlikely to ever fully resolve. Further, it instructs children that this sort of behavior is, essentially, normative. Remember, "normal" is whatever happens to you. Children growing up in hurtful settings, whether dysfunctional homes or war zones (they can really resemble one another) learn that their situation is "normal." In those cases, what do those children bring to their adult love relationships? What have they observed and learned about how adults manage their stress?
A short digression about the power of gossip is told: In teaching a student about the danger of gossip, the teacher ascended to the top of a tall building holding a feather pillow on a windy day The teacher instructed the student to rip open the feather pillow, allowing the feathers to be taken by the wind, swirling them around as far as the eye could see. The teacher asked the student to assess how difficult it would be to collect the feathers and stuff the pillow again. The student looked at the teacher incredulously, as collecting the myriad of feathers now scattering through the neighborhood would be impossible. The teacher responded that gossip is like the feathers. Once they are out, there's no getting them back.
Our society has come to view divorce, addiction, extra marital affairs and the accompanied varieties of pain and suffering as normal, as they all happen so often. Yet invariably, the children suffer the most.
