Some phenomena in life are difficult to think about, write about, and work with in psychotherapy practice.
It is divorce.
I have always had a position on divorce that can be defined as follows. If there is no violence between people, the marriage can be saved. The presence of violence has always led me either to refuse to work with such families or to take a strict attitude toward involving the relevant state authorities in violence management.
However, what to do if there is no violence and the relationship has reached a dead end, the only way out of which is the destruction of the family, i.e. divorce?
The question also remains difficult as to why this relationship is subjected to such repression by two people who once needed each other, destroyed by themselves, without considering the weighty arguments for its possible preservation.
Let’s try to figure it out.
When two people create a project called “marriage and family”, they hardly understand one significant thing – the relationship is progressing, and the peak of this progress is acquiring the status of a parent. We are always in a relationship moving from hormonal love, that is, love that is romantic for the psyche and physiological for the body, to a love relationship, in which the fundamental thing is the setting up a symbolic order of the relationship. At this stage, there are two such symbols: family and marriage. And the highest level of the relationship between two people will be the inner instance, parenthood creation. This instance is the reason for a significant turn in the relationship – gaining the status of a parent. This status is often the only argument in favour of preserving the family. If you ask yourself what is so meaningful about this status, the answer is one. Two people in love who marry and start a family are not related by blood. Their relationship may acquire intimacy and kinship status, but it will never become a relationship of blood kinship. The only person who will unite these two people in kinship is a child, who will be related by blood to both. And as we know, the most irresistible bond is blood kinship. Think of Antigone. Consequently, it is the children who will suffer most in divorce. Divorce projects the emergence of complex content and difficult-to-live mental conditions, which may be called the “inner rupture.
Externally, nothing seems to happen to a child going through a divorce. However, over time, actions, traits, and actions begin to appear in his behaviour, and it is possible that something completely new emerges, some “formation” that has not been observed before. For example, before a smiling little man and such are the children under the age of 15 becomes gloomy, anxious, tense, and often vengeful. The palette of symptoms associated with this mental breakdown is so broad that it is not even worth attempting to describe them all. What is worth paying particular attention to is the nature of the child’s experience of his inner break-up. It means trying to see exactly how the child begins to relate to himself in the living process through the divorce and, later on, adapting to a completely different status – that of a family in divorce. For now, he will have to do the impossible for his perception and the unthinkable for his child’s mind – to live with two people on opposite sides of what was once a commonplace of life and love. That is, a child. Do not be under the illusion that this condition will go away quickly. The shortest hourly interval of its weakening is a year. In the presence of other adverse conditions, this condition stretches for years or even for life. The longer this condition lasts, the more serious the disruptions in the life activities of an adult who has gone through a divorce.
The problem of the attitudes of adult survivors of divorce in their family life is no less complex. It is a complex relationship that sets in motion a destructive program: Children who have experienced divorce are readily divorced when they are adults. With the arguments that they have already experienced, they readily give up their children as well.
And the worst part. Children who survive divorce are successful adults who will have one “inner grey area” – their relationship with love and their relationship with themselves in love. In these relationships, they will have bad luck or always fail there, always trying to start over.
If you ask at what age divorce is easier to go through. The answer is the same – it’s hard for all ages. Only the degree of the aftermath is different. The earlier the divorce occurs, the more the child’s inner mental world is affected, completely reconstructing it for the divorce situation. The later the divorce takes place, the greater the amplitude of the experience, the higher the level of stress and the more powerful its temporary consequences. A late divorce will not damage the inner world but will significantly weaken the mental well-being of the adult experiencing his parents’ divorce.
In this whole complex situation of life, there is only one way out – the meeting of two people, the hormonal drive, the sexual attraction mean absolutely nothing if there is not what is called between people – a relationship in which there is affectionate intrigue, partaking and parenthood. Due to these qualities, family and marriage relationships, undergoing all kinds of cataclysms, can self-create.
After all, the family is the guarantor of love, and marriage is the law for this guarantor, whose purpose is to preserve love.
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