Mental Health: Take Positive Steps to Constructive Divorce — and Healing
For most people divorce is a time of great crisis and devastation. In many cases, both partners feel like failures and blame themselves and one another. The children’s lives are shaken and many decisions, with long-ranging consequences, have to be made. The sense of loss, fear, and anger can become enormous, creating difficult consequences. Unfortunately, some divorce processes intensifies the crisis, escalating differences, penalties, and financial costs.
There is truly no other period in life where it is more crucial to have fair, positive and clear guidance and to focus on the larger picture. However, divorce can be a successful and even healing process when the couple grows as a result of it, learns more about themselves and the other and discovers new, creative ways of relating which are healthy and constructive.
Conflict can be viewed in a different manner. Couples can look beneath their entrenched positions and discover what is truly fuelling their upset. They can discover the difference between their needs and wants and take time to examine the long-range consequences of the choices they make; not only the financial consequences, but the emotional, and practical ones.
Although a marriage may be ending, the couple’s life together as parents is not. Not only is it necessary to agree on the fundamentals of child rearing, but to define the new relationship between the couple. At this point in time it is easy to see that relationships do not end, they simply change form. It is highly desirable to create a blueprint for this new form, to carefully and positively re-define the relationship. As the couple does so, they discover specific steps which can be taken which will transform the relationship into one which is workable not only now, but into the long range future.
At that time it is easy to see how the best outcome for each of them lies in the best outcome for all.
