Divorce statistics can be fascinating and alarming.
Did you know the average global divorce rate is now more than 45%? And that honeymooners’ paradise, the Maldives, is the divorce capital of the world?
Supposedly this is because in this culture, sexual relations outside of marriage is frowned upon. It’s also quick and simple to get married, and just as quick and simple to divorce if things don’t work out.
More women are entering the workforce in the Maldives too, with more financial empowerment meaning it’s easier for them to leave a marriage when they feel it’s not working for them.
Each country is likely to have their own unique reasons for their divorce rates. (If you’re interested in global divorce statistics, this is an interesting read.
Whichever way you look at it, far too often divorce is a very messy business, with kids often facing the brunt of it all.
Post-divorce recovery with kids
With my two divorces, I’ve contributed to the statistics in the UK. I know, both from personal experience and from my client work, that referring to divorce as ‘messy’ is an understatement.
In particular, when leaving emotionally or physically abusive relationships, the impact on one’s mental health can be carnage.
You are likely to need a period of intense recovery, and where children are involved, both you and the kids are likely to need significant mental and emotional health maintenance.
This may be required for many years, and normally until the toxic parent no longer has any legal rights or responsibility for the kids.
This doesn’t mean you should stay in a toxic relationship. The evidence is clear: for the kids involved, leaving the relationship is invariably the best of a bunch of bad options.
This obviously doesn’t just apply to married couples. A significant number of people in committed relationships aren’t married, and many of them have kids. The same applies to these relationships.
So, regardless of the parents’ marital status, a breakup can have the same impact on kids.
Loving myself out of toxic relationships
We tend to enter relationships with rose-tinted glasses. I used to think we needed to be sure the relationship was perfect. But of course, perfect relationships don’t exist.
When I fell in love the first time at the ripe old age of 25, I thought the relationship – which turned out to be toxic – was perfect.
I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like then, or for many years after.
I stumbled through relationships, often falling pretty hard as a result. My final fall took me down a deep, dark hole, and I thankfully discovered that the only way out of this spiral was building self-love.
Until this time I had thought that self-love was a load of mumbo jumbo fluffy stuff. If only I didn’t need to reach rock bottom to realise, that ‘fluffy’ it most definitely is not! But rather, how essential it is to make healthy choices, choose and maintain healthy relationships and to develop an emotional resilience to deal with whatever life throws at you – and still thrive. If only I’d chosen to do the self-love work before I became, as I felt at the time, completely ‘broken’. The journey would not only have been far shorter, but also way, way less excruciatingly painful.
The four elements of healthy relationships
The work I do is to help individuals have healthy relationships, not only with others, but with themselves.
Healthy relationships, as a general rule, require the following essential elements:
- Mutual honesty
- Mutual respect
- Mutual trust
- Mutual affection (romantic relationships)
But the key to healthy relationships is a healthy level of self-love. When we have this, we don’t need to reflect on each of the four elements of a healthy relationship; we then have the skills to automatically make the right choices – most of the time.🙂
When you love yourself and know your values, it will be clear to you what needs to happen for you to feel happy and fulfilled.
Where couples frequently argue, it is often the case that their values aren’t aligned or through their own personal journeys, they’ve just grown apart. And choosing to stay in these relationships will normally represent a lack of self-love.
And even when they know it is not what is best for them, many choose to stay in an unhappy relationship “for the sake of the kids”.
But when a relationship isn’t working, and no amount of work is going to produce a relationship with healthy levels of the four essential elements, staying for the kids is very seldom the best option.
I believe that as parents, one of our most important roles is being committed to demonstrate to our kids how to live a fulfilling and happy life. Staying in an unfulfilling relationship will make it very difficult to lead by example.
The guilt of creating a broken home
I ended up with a partner who was not respectful, considerate or honest.
I spent many, many years putting myself on a guilt trip for creating a ‘broken home’ for my daughter.
I had such a strong belief in the nuclear family AS WELL AS the belief that as long as you’re willing to work at something, aka my marriage, it can be fixed.
I had failed at ‘fixing’ the relationship and seeing the red flags so clearly in hindsight, there was the constant “I should have known better” going on in my head.
All the lack of self-forgiveness and self-compassion caused the shame and guilt to fester, leading me to end up in another particular toxic relationship – and feeling completely broken.
At this time I still felt that self-love was a bunch of mumbo jumbo fluffy stuff. But isn’t it funny, that when you feel you no longer have anything to lose, you’re willing to try just about anything. That was my saving grace for which I stay forever grateful.
Developing kids’ resilience in divorce
Divorce unsettles kids because there is an element of self-recrimination and fear of losing the love of their parents. But another significant reason can be the simple breakdown of a child’s known environment and routine.
Kids are known to thrive when they know what to expect. Staying in the same school, home, and community allows them to have a safe place to develop. But the problem with this is that this approach doesn’t encourage our kids to build resilience which is going to serve them later in life.
I’m not suggesting parents should just do what they like and expect their kids to adapt. But one of the certainties in life is uncertainty and I do believe there is an element of resilience that can be developed from an early age.
Here are some ways to nurture resilience in our children that are not limited to times of a relationship breakup:
- Reflect and validate their feelings – kids listen better when they feel they have been heard.
- Ask questions instead of giving advice – this helps kids to start making better choices as time goes on.
- Encourage them to focus on the positives – there is a gift in every situation. The sooner they can recognise this, the easier life will be for them. BUT remember to validate their feelings!
- Be generous with hugs – there are several studies that show the benefits of physical comfort.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a good start.
There are loads of ways to be in a relationship. Kids have grown up just fine with parents who openly practiced an open relationship. Kids grow up well-balanced where parents take turns in spending time in the family home where the kids live full time.
I’m willing to put my money on it that in all of these circumstances, the ability for a child to grow up successfully in these relationships is all about the parents communicating in an honest, open and loving way.
There are many people who choose to stay in unhappy relationships “for the sake of the kids”. But ultimately, unhappy parents do not tend to raise happy children.
Keeping our kids in mind, those of today and those that are to come
However, there can be no denying that divorce impacts kids negatively. And this can be for a number of reasons. Here we have a poem by Abigail, describing the confusion around the divorce of her parents because it came out of the blue.
You can read Abigail’s explanation of this poem here. She was 11 when her parents divorced and was 16 at the time of writing this. It is clear that the experience has produced resentment and a victim mentality. One takeaway from this is that we can see that trying to protect our kids from an impending divorce by hiding it from them, is not helpful.
But it is also not unusual, for even those where divorce has helped them to escape the particularly toxic, abusive environment, for kids to struggle with the separation.
Although there will be feelings of relief, there are also likely to be feelings of unease. If they have spent any extended length of time in that environment, that toxic environment is most likely to have become their comfortable norm and they will unconsciously miss the dysfunctional dynamics for which they very likely developed some unhealthy coping mechanisms. Coping mechanisms that are unlikely to serve them well in developing healthy relationships into adulthood.
But it is never too late to start helping our kids build their emotional resilience.
And there is no perfect answer, or one size fits all, in helping our kids navigate a divorce. But if we can commit to compassionately nurturing resilience in our kids, there is a strong likelihood of the long-term outcome being positive.
For those of you who have not yet entered the maze of parenthood, I ask you to consider, not necessarily whether the relationship you have with a prospective co-parent is healthy, but rather, whether the relationship you have with yourself is healthy. Because a healthy relationship with self is what enables us to have healthy relationships with others.
A moment of self-reflection
I encourage you to reflect on your present relationship.
- Does your relationship meet the four essential elements of a healthy relationship?
- If it doesn’t, are you going to be self-loving and commit to doing something about it to create a longer-term positive outcome – for you and your kids?
- Are you encouraging your kids to build their resilience to be able to deal with uncertainty so that they can feel confident in making the most of opportunities throughout their life?
Whether you’re single because you struggle to maintain healthy relationships, you’re divorced and still struggling with the aftermath, you’re considering separation or divorce, you know you’re in a toxic relationship but can’t see a way out, or . . . you recognise you just need a good dosing of self-love, click HERE to get in touch.
And look out for my next blog which shares the story of Nina and Jakob, a young couple, both having experienced their parents divorcing, and the impact it has had on them.