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Abbas recommends managing the many memory triggers that occur during the holidays. A smell, a place, a song can bring you back to your past.

"If you recognize that those triggers will come up, you can acknowledge them, then choose your response," she says. "If people are aware of a trigger, they'll do something different. Maybe if cutting a tree is too painful, you get an artificial tree and make it special in your own way.

"My mom's favorite carol is 'O Holy Night,' so when I heard it I would think about sad things. Now when I hear it I've reclaimed it for myself. I tie it to new memories," she says.

With 33 million adult children of divorce and a million children affected by divorce each year, Abbas has a ready audience.

Generation EX has highlighted the controversy over the long-term effects of divorce. Many believe divorce does not affect children throughout their lives

"People ask when is the best time to get a divorce. But divorce is always horrific, traumatic," says Abbas. "Your life will never be the same again. Just like a child who loses a limb can live a full and happy life, you can't deny there is still a loss. So it is with divorce."

Abbas wrote Generation EX, her first book, because she wanted to read a volume like it. She found plenty of books on how to get a divorce, books for children and teens on coping with divorce, but not many books on how divorce affects us over a lifetime. She also saw it as a way to process her own parents' divorce.

"It's not a book about blame or saying that your parents should have stayed together, because that's their issue. The book says that divorce hurts, that you must accept that, and then asks what you are going to do to heal. It's about what I've learned."

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Generation Ex is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More about Jen Abbas is available from her website.

More information is available from the publisher.

Preaching the Christmas Gospel | More than a semi-annual crack at irregular churchgoers, the Christmas sermon has traditionally invited us to worship and wonder. (Dec. 20, 2004)

The Nativity of Christ | A Christmas sermon preached by Jerome. (Dec. 20, 2004)

CT Classic: Whose Child Is This? | "The Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual," says Newsweek. Oh really? (Dec. 22, 2000)

Advent's Spiritual Pilgrimage | The birth of Christ is only the final stop when meditating this holiday season. An excerpt from Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality Through the Christian Year. (Dec. 10, 2004)

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December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48