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Divorce

I'm an Adult Child of Divorcing Parents. What Will Help Me?

Two sisters share what helped them cope during their parent's divorce.

Key points

  • Adult children of "gray divorce" face identity crises, strained relationships, and emotional turmoil.
  • Coping strategies include intense physical exercise, therapy, writing, and setting clear boundaries.
  • Strong family support and understanding between siblings can be crucial for physical and emotional healing.
DALLE-E / OPENAI
Source: DALLE-E / OPENAI

This is the third in a series of posts about the experiences, feelings, and healing journey of two sisters, who are adult children of gray divorce. Read the previous post here.

For over 30 years, couples over 50 have been divorcing in record-setting numbers worldwide. Researchers have named this phenomenon "The Gray Divorce Revolution" and predict it will triple by 2030. The adult children of these divorcing couples frequently say they are unprepared to handle what is happening in their family and feel painfully alone.

I spoke with Sophia and Eleana* (not my patients), two sisters who were adults when their parents began their divorce process. Sophia is a 27-year-old journalist based in the UK, and Eleana is a 30-year-old talent management/development expert and a career coach living in Germany.

Carol: You refer to the "limbo phase" of your parents' divorce journey. What was the most significant for you during that phase?

Eleana: The most significant way that the limbo phase impacted me was in my relationship with our father because it made it even harder for me to rebuild trust with him. It was a phase of almost promises. Those were either communicated promises or promises that I would try to derive from a situation. It often led to situations of disappointment. That made it harder for me to rebuild a neutral relationship with our father.

Carol: What other difficulties arose for you at that time?

Eleana: Another significant difficulty for me in the limbo phase was that I could tell how much our mother was struggling as the person who was left behind in the relationship and was having to rebuild trust in someone who had an affair. My mindset of "I need to build new relationships individually with our parents" was impossible for me to do. Honestly, I was aware as an adult that I was in a situation that was extremely emotionally loaded and full of emotions, anger, and sadness. It was tough for me to build a neutral relationship with anyone.

Carol: How did the closeness of your family affect you?

Sophia: We are fortunate to be so close as a family. Not everyone has that. And especially as third-culture kids, having moved around for so many years, family was very important to us. Holidays and traditions became even more important to us when we were living abroad. So, our mom was always trying to keep that alive. We're Germans and love Christmas, which was a big thing every year in our household. But at the same time, we were very codependent and up in each other's business all the time. When that broke apart, there was that feeling of, "Who am I now? What role do I play now?"

This was not just in relation to our family members, but also to ourselves. I had a full-blown identity crisis afterward of really questioning my roots because family means stability, it means safety, it means home. And when that broke apart, I had to rethink everything. It's even more vital as an adult because you're so aware of everything.

Eleana, this has been going on for a very long time, and you and I have been on a similar journey of trying to deal with it. There are a lot of things that I did with you or shared with you. What helped you cope in the last few years?

Eleana: It varied from phase to phase. The first phase for me was trying to let go of a lot of anger that I had when it came to coping. I did that by going to the gym. I went to the gym seven days a week and did hardcore, high-intensity training. I was almost purging everything in my head as I was doing intensive exercises, trying to get out physically what I wasn't verbalizing. So, one way of coping was physical exercise, getting out there, being active, and getting that emotion out that way. That was one of the main ones for me.

Carol: What else helped you cope?

Eleana: After around two or three years, I decided to start seeing a therapist because I felt like I was very stuck in how I was progressing with things. I noticed that many things related to our family started drifting into my life, even my professional life and my life with my now husband. I decided I needed to seek some help, and I started with more psychotherapeutic work. Then, I transitioned into somatic therapy and even reiki, which is more on an energetic level. I tried everything out there to see what would work best for me. It was a nice holistic approach that really supported me.

Another thing that helped me was learning how to communicate my boundaries, learning how to communicate when I needed space and why I needed space so that it wasn't passive-aggressive, but a very clear, "This is what's happening for me, and can we please not talk about X, Y, Z, so that I can be at my best for you." That was the conversation. So, open communication and boundary setting were very important.

And finally, my relationship with my sisters really helped me cope throughout the whole time because my friends didn't understand. They hadn't gone through it, and other family members didn't understand. They were always curious about how our mother was doing or how our father was doing. They weren't ever asking about us. So, we sisters were the only people who understood what was happening and what was going on. Even though we had vastly different reactions to the situations, we had the preexisting relationship to respect what the other person was going through, accept it, and listen. I count myself really lucky that we had that. And I'm aware that not everyone has that. So that was a huge one.

Sophia: For me, there are a lot of similarities: the holistic approach to therapy, and a lot of podcasts and books. I'm a journalist, so I love to write. Writing down my feelings, journaling, and writing letters to people, even if it didn't mean I sent them off to them, was really a useful tool. We always recommend trying different things to anyone. Even if you don't think it would help you, you'd be surprised by what approach can support you.

© 2024 Carol R. Hughes, Ph.D.

* Names and details changed to protect patient confidentiality.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

References

Susan L. Brown and I-Fen Lin, “The Gray Divorce Revolution: Rising Divorce Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults, 1990-2010,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 67, no. 6 (2012): 731–41, doi:10.1093/geronb/gbs089.

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