Why Adult Children of Gray Divorce Have Mixed Feelings

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This post is the fourth in a series about why some adult children of gray divorce may be sad, relieved, and happy when their parents' divorce. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Adult children of gray divorce are those whose parents are 50 and older. They may have many different experiences and feelings. A primary reason is due to their relationships with their parents.

It's All About Relationships

Daniel Siegel, a psychiatry professor at UCLA and founding co-director of its Mindfulness Awareness Research Center, has said, "Relationships are the most important part of our having well-being, in being human. It’s that simple. And that important."

Psychologist and neuroscientist Louis Cozolino has written, "The research supports that being in all types of caring and meaningful relationships with family, friends, marriage partners, co-workers, and others can alter the structures and biochemistry of the brain.^"

In my last three posts, you met George and Laina, both adult children of gray divorce. Each had a parent who was often cruel to them and their other parent. When children experience such cruelty, it can affect them into adulthood, inhibiting their ability to form healthy attachment bonds with the cruel parent and creating trust issues with both. The lack of healthy attachment bonding and establishing trust in one's parents can cause minor and adult children to have difficulty trusting others in various relationships including with friends, co-workers, and significant others.

How Attachment Theory Helps Us Understand

Attachment theory is one of the most influential and widely researched theories for understanding children's emotional and social development and adult relationships. Following is a simplified description of attachment styles:

• Secure attachment describes children whose parents or caregivers are available and responsive to their needs. As children, they are confident and feel safe and secure. As adults, they feel secure and look for relationships with trustworthy friends, co-workers, and relationship partners.

• Insecure attachment describes children whose parents or caregivers are generally unresponsive to their needs or outright reject them; they're anxious, neglectful or abusive, or both. Children with insecure attachment learn not to depend on their parents and do not expect others to meet their needs. As adults, they may be autonomous and dismissing, seek only to care for their own needs, fear rejection and criticism, have anxiety in relationships, be defensive, untrusting, detached, and angry, have dysfunctional relationships at home and work, and require a lot of attention.

An additional concern for children with insecure attachment is that throughout their childhood and adulthood, they can suffer from unresolved grief about their loss of healthy attachment and trust. Both Laina and George said they had difficulty trusting others.

There is some good news for George and Laina, though: Each had a secure attachment with one parent. George had a secure attachment with his mother and an insecure attachment with his father, who was abusive to George and his mother. Laina had a secure attachment with her father and an insecure attachment with her mother, who was abusive to Laina and her father. George and Laina are working in therapy to heal their insecure attachment and grief and become strong, self-confident adults. They are also engaging in mindfulness practices, which can help them avoid what some students in the research below experienced years later in adulthood.

How Painful Child-Parent Relationships Can Affect Health

In her book Wired to Connect, Psychiatrist Amy Banks describes two research studies that indicate how relationships can benefit or harm health. Beginning in the 1940s, a study of 1,100 medical students at Johns Hopkins University, who were all healthy at the beginning of the study, found that 50 years later, those who had developed cancer in the intervening years were less likely to have had close relationships with their parents than those who did not have cancer.

Banks shares another study that began in the 1950s that asked male Harvard students, all of whom were healthy at the beginning of the study, to describe their parents, specifically their warmth and closeness. Thirty-five years later, 29 percent of those who had described their parents in positive terms and had good parental relationships had developed illnesses, while 95 percent of those who described their parents in negative terms and had poor relationships with their parents had developed illnesses.

If you had a painful, toxic relationship, find a therapist who offers trauma-focused approaches.

Copyright 2023 Carol R. Hughes, Ph.D.