In her book Primal Loss, author Leila Miller explores the thoughts of 70 adults who watched their parents divorce. They still have negative feelings about it and have experienced significant impacts into their adult life as a result. Here are some excerpts:
I believe [the divorce] instilled a fear of abandonment in me with regard to all of my relationships. I developed problems trusting people to be there for me, believing that when the going got rough, people would leave me. I never learned any skills for solving conflict in relationships. As much as I desperately craved intimacy and love, the closer someone came to me, the more terrified I was of getting hurt, or worse—abandoned. I unconsciously sabotaged relationships, as I didn't know how to receive and accept real love …
I'd want people to know and understand that people with divorced parents see the world differently. It's just how it is. Even with the "best" divorces like mine, a seven-year-old should never be in a position to somehow take the responsibility of her parents' emotions. She should never have to think about which parent gets to hear or see something from her first, for fear of hurting the other parent's feelings. She should never have to feel like she doesn't belong in the home of her parents. None of these things were done on purpose. My parents did the best they could to keep me at the center, to keep me as the focus, so that my life could have minimal turbulence.
A parent might be able to totally start over with a new spouse … [but the children's] worlds will forever be fundamentally split. Forever. There is no starting over with a clean slate; things are now complicated and fractured. Divorce starts a family onto two different paths that, as the years unfold, grow further and further apart. It's not a onetime event, but rather an ever-changing and ever-widening gap that only the children are really tasked with straddling and reconciling, season after season, change after change.
Bottom line: even the best divorces have profound, apparently life-long negative effects on the children. Parents who rationalize their divorce as somehow better for the children are engaging in denial, plain and simple.
