Getting an Emotional Divorce

For many years a significant focus of my clinical practice was working with patients and families who were dealing with terminal illness and grief.  I consulted for hospice programs, and trained hospice personnel.  I did a great deal of teaching and writing in that area and one of the books I wrote, Families Facing Death, is still used in many graduate and hospice programs.  But I’m basically a family therapist and I began to shift my focus in the latter 90’s as I encountered more and more couples divorcing and doing terrible damage to their children in the process.  It felt like a natural shift to begin advanced training in mediation and parenting coordination, even though the latter was barely on the radar in New York (and still, to a great extent, is unknown to many judges, attorneys, and divorcing parents).  I joined the AFCC (Association of Family and Conciliation Courts) the premier interdisciplinary and international association of professionals dedicated to the resolution of family conflict, took its extensive training, and met all its practice guidelines. 

So why have I begun this blog post on “emotional divorce” by referencing my background in working with death, dying and grief?  And I have been asked—and not a few times—how did I get from there to here?  Reflecting on that question I realize that in many ways the work I do today in parenting coordination has many parallels to the guidance I offer to people grieving the loss of a loved one. While there are a myriad of issues that I deal with in my parent coordination work I’ve come to the conclusion that the overriding common denominator responsible for high conflict divorce is most typically the fact that one or both parents, while already legally divorced, or working toward that end, are far from having achieved an emotional divorce from each other. On occasion this may be true of only one parent, but in my experience if it is true for one it is most likely true for both.  Further, I often find that the more one vehemently protests his/her having emotionally disconnected from a former spouse the more one has not yet arrived at an emotional divorce.  

The great thanatologist, Elisabeth Kubler Ross, is perhaps best known for her having formulated a five stage adjustment to the death of a loved one.  It is striking that her five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are entirely applicable to the emotional dynamic inherent to the end of the marriage.  And just as we understand that one does not simply “march through” the five steps and automatically arrive at resolution and acceptance, so it is in divorce: the “stages” re-cycle and it takes time and work to come to resolution.

Are all divorces high conflict?  Are there amicable divorces?  No and yes.  Since most of the parents with whom I work in parenting coordination are engrossed in active, ongoing conflict, these are seldom the parents who have sat down calmly and thoughtfully to decide to end a no longer tenable marriage. So, yes, there indeed are amicable divorces but they seldom need to make use of parenting coordination.  Most commonly the divorcing or divorced couples that I see are refugees from a marriage in which one of them feels very much victimized or misunderstood, or alternatively feels blamed and villainized. Most commonly, one of the parents has concluded that a divorce is the only solution to an impossible problem; the other may not agree. But regardless of how the marriage ends, what is nearly always true—particularly in high conflict situations—is  that rarely anyone is prepared for the end of a marriage. And this is no less true for the spouse who initiates the divorce, as it is for the spouse who is being left.

The failure to achieve an emotional divorce – to pass satisfactorily through the stages – inevitably leads to ongoing conflict whose results are devastating to children. I recently met with a couple who have been legally divorced for a number of years and have a eight-year-old boy with whom they share loosely defined joint access. Mom had been the primary breadwinner in the family, Dad worked as a free-lancer from home and did much of the “primary” childcare.  Dad had an extra-marital affair, and this, along with mutual irritability and an extreme divergence of their interests and differences resulted in the ultimate breakdown of the marriage.  But both left angrily and resentfully, Mom feeling that despite their original agreement that Dad would be the primary caregiver because of her high-powered career, he had lost the privilege of maintenance which he was legally entitled to – and which she resented paying to him – because of his affair; Dad remained no less angry and resentful that he was expected to continue being the primary parent while having to tolerate her overt verbal abuse and condescension.  Their son’s therapist, with whom I am in regular contact, informs me that the child feels very much split between his parents and that this is expressed in anxiety and difficulties in school adjustment.  When I last met with parents I told them that the therapist had said to me that their child had complained that all Mom and Dad do is fight all the time. The parents were flabbergasted!  Both offered that they never fight, and in fact they barely ever exchange a word except through emails, texts, and phone calls, and never when their son is around. What they fail to understand is that their not having achieved an emotional divorce and the lingering enmity between them is entirely palpable to their child through body language, their refusal to look at each other during exchanges, and in many ways that they perceive as covert, but which their child is entirely aware of.  It has been said many times: children always know.

I don’t recall two parents ever having come in and told me that their problem was that they had not as yet managed to achieve an emotional divorce. It’s hardly a way in which we think about the kinds of problems we face on a daily basis when we’re trying to raise children in the aftermath of a breakup.  So, what is a successful emotional divorce?  Basically it involves separating yourself from the emotions that sunk the marriage and the belief that you were the victim—and the other needs to pay a price for his/her villainy.  Rather than accepting that one’s divorce is best understood as an unfortunate but inevitable detour from what was an expected life cycle trajectory, the human impulse to look for someone to blame is hard to deny.  It shouldn’t have happened!—but it did.

Perhaps this is why it is similar to the grieving process for the death of a loved one. This traumatic experience frankly looks very much like grief: one feels shock, fear, relief, impatience, resentment, guilt, doubt, betrayal, loss of control, low self-esteem, insecurity, anger, depression and helplessness—to name just a few of the emotions common to both.  This powerful array of emotions can be nearly paralyzing, and because divorce is not a single event but rather a process which continues over months, years, and, arguably, even a lifetime, it is my belief that it needs to be identified, it needs to be “owned”, and it needs to be worked on – often most effectively in individual psychotherapy.  Because no matter how much one wants and needs a marriage to end I will say again: rarely is anyone prepared for the end of their marriage.

Because divorce has become increasingly more normative a fixture in the family life cycle thinking of it as a detour on the road map of the family career is a helpful formulation.  I frequently suggest to divorcing parents that they read the book The Good Divorce, in which Constance Ahrons discusses the notion of the emotional divorce and aptly characterizes it as “letting go while holding on”. What she means by this and what I think is the essence of achieving emotional divorce is that one accepts the end to the marriage and marital relationship and accepts a new lifelong co-parenting relationship. It may take many years to entirely transition from one aspect of the relationship to the other; the challenge for both parents is to maintain focus on the need to co-parent their children without the interference of the emotional baggage that they bring from the conflict of their marriage.