Jen Cox was 7 years old when she learned
her parents were getting a divorce. They were standing in the doorway. She was
playing in the cul-de-sac with her neighborhood friends. Her mother was crying when
they called her over and told her. Missing the point, she quickly returned to
the game. “We’re getting divorced,” she told her friends.
In the coming months, Cox learned what
that really meant. Her dad moved into the guest bedroom, and then moved out to
live with his girlfriend. She and her mother moved into a smaller house down
the road.
“I remember going to my dad’s for the
first time, and I was very sad to leave my mom, but so excited to see my dad. I
remember feeling very torn. That’s the reality of a kid going back and forth,”
she said. “They’re constantly torn. It doesn’t really go away.”
Sarah Hart was also 7 years old when her
parents got divorced. “I kind of had a sense that things weren’t going well,”
she said. “My dad was moving in and out — it was a tumultuous relationship.”
After the divorce, her parents tried to do as many family activities together
as possible with her and her brother.
“But it was always like walking on
eggshells,” said Hart. “Always living in a state of uncertainty, wondering when
the next fight was going to happen.”
Dan Meola was in sixth grade when his
parents separated. “My dad, trying to comfort me, would say, ‘I did this for
you.’ That really created a neurosis in me,” he said. “I felt that I somehow
showed him with my body language, with my actions, that I wanted this, and I
didn’t.”
The wound of silence
“From the outside, it looks like I was
not impacted by my parents’ divorce,” said Cox, a parishioner of Blessed
Sacrament Church in Alexandria. She has a good relationship with her mom and
dad. She graduated from Marymount University in Arlington. She bought a home.
It took her a long time to realize she had hidden her pain from herself, and
her parents.
Fearing the loss of their parents’ love
and acceptance, many children of divorce are unwilling or unable to talk about
how the split has hurt them. “Even (as a child) if I was allowed to say
something, I probably wouldn’t have because I didn’t want to hurt my mom or my
dad. I took that responsibility on,” said Cox. “You just stay silent.”
“Parents need the children to be OK,”
said Meola. “Kids pick up on that and (they don’t) talk about it with their
parents or peers. We didn’t have time to think about our own feelings.”
Divorce is so commonplace that people
have stopped thinking of it as a trauma, he said. Cases where abuse, addiction
or abandonment force separations are noticeably traumatic, but even amicable
divorces take a toll, said Meola. After the
separation, children can feel like they’re in survival mode. “As my one friend
says, you just freeze,” he said. “Trauma freezes you — sometimes for decades —
and you have to thaw out.”
Some children of divorce stay silent
because they are filled with guilt and shame, believing they contributed to
their parents’ separation. “A friend of mine told her dad, ‘Good, I’m glad
you’re leaving.’ She felt great shame for so many years. That can wreck a kid,”
said Meola. “It took her a long time to realize this, but she said it because
she wanted her dad to fight for her.”
Even once they grow up, adult children
of divorce can feel pressure to stay silent. Meola remembers the first time he
talked to fellow Catholics about the pain of his parents’ divorce. After he had
finished speaking, a woman told him that if he spoke out he would make
divorcees feel bad.
“I wanted to crumple up into a ball,” he
said. “I had a million and one reasons to be silent. No child of divorce wants
to make anyone feel guilty.”
Finding the pain
The more Hart grew in her faith, the
more she realized the wounds she carried from her parents’ divorce. “We are the
physical incarnation of the union, and when the union is broken, it hits the
center origin,” said Hart, a parishioner of St. John the Baptist Church in
Front Royal. “It touches the deepest part of our identity.”
As with many children of divorce, Hart
felt a sense of homelessness — that she was growing up in two different worlds.
She felt a loss of her childhood. She felt doubtful that God could love her unconditionally.
In high school, Cox felt proud that her
parents’ divorce hadn’t affected her. But over the years, she experienced
depression and anxiety. She never felt good or capable enough. She feared she
couldn’t be loved. And eventually, she understood her struggles were scars from
her parents’ divorce.
“I carried a lot of shame for realizing
it had affected me. It (seemed to) prove I wasn’t strong enough,” she said.
“When my therapist told me I was allowed to grieve the loss of my parents’
marriage, my mind was blown. I had never heard that before. It's a loss of your
family life up to that point, what you thought your life was going to be and
who you are.”
Meola, along with staff from the
Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, created a retreat for adult
children of divorce called “Recovering Origins.” The retreat will be held for
the first time outside Washington at the San Damiano Retreat Center in White
Post in September.
As he’s met more and more adult children
of divorce through the ministry, he’s seen the resulting pain manifest itself
in different ways. Some people stop believing that marriages can last. Some
people become cynical when things start to go well in a relationship. Some
avoid parenting.
“At the core it’s a crisis of identity,
which then becomes a crisis of faith,” he said. “It becomes a question of, why
did God bring these parents together for me?”
Healing through faith
In the Gospels, Jesus visits his disciples
in his resurrected body, still wearing the scars of his crucifixion. “The only
way I think you can make sense of it is that those wounds, too, glorify God,” Meola
said. “There’s a secular way of thinking to see wounds as a mess, as an
impediment. They can be life-giving.”
The “Recovering Origins” retreat focuses
on bringing healing through the sacraments, through Christian community and
through the simple truth that God loves all his children. “In the natural order
of things, God wants his love to be mediated by parents. But they are only an
image of God’s love — there’s a deeper love,” said Meola. “You are God's
beloved.”
The journey of healing is one of constant
forgiveness, said Hart. “There is a choice to give a new beginning to the ones
who have failed us, to open your heart even wider to God’s love acting through
us. It brings such unexpected joy and fruit and freedom,” she said.
The pain of a parents’ divorce rears its head
at every milestone, at every holiday, said Meola. “(But) each time, I get a
little better at it. I build up the virtue of forgiving, and I become a little bit
more healed.”
The culture runs away from its wounds,
or anesthetizes them, he said, but through faith we know that a wound can help
us better serve those who are suffering. “God doesn’t want our wounds to have
occurred in the first place, but through grace they cannot just be healed, but
can become a resource of love.”
Find out more
Recovering Origins: A Unique Healing Retreat for Adult Children
of Divorce, will be held Sept. 7-9 at San Damiano Retreat Center, 125 Old
Kitchen Road, White Post. To register for the retreat, go to
arlingtondiocese.org/healingretreat or call 703/841-2550.