If you are the adult child of divorce, your parents’ divorce has an ongoing impact on you into adulthood, even if you think it was no big deal or that you have healed from it. Unfortunately, coping with your parents’ divorce is something you will likely deal with your entire adult life.
Identifying how the divorce still affects you allows you to be aware of the influence of this past event and seek help to overcome it.
Trust Issues
Having experienced the breakdown of your parents’ marriage, you are likely to have difficulty trusting that your own relationships can last. You may believe that love and marriage don’t ever really work. You’re more likely to have a negative view of marriage and are less likely to commit yourself to a romantic relationship.
If you experience difficulty in a relationship, the trauma of the divorce may also influence you to end the relationship rather than try to work on it because you don’t really believe it could last anyhow.
Abandonment Issues
No matter how hard your parents tried to help you cope with their divorce, this trauma may have created abandonment issues for you as an adult. It is not uncommon to feel as if one or both parents abandoned you, even if they remained part of your life.
Because you felt this abandonment, you may have a fear of abandonment in your own relationships. You may find it hard to believe that the people you care about will stick with you, and because of this, you may not be able to put forth a lot of effort into those relationships, almost guaranteeing they will fail.
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Grief
The breakup of your parents’ marriage can manifest as unresolved grief in adulthood. As a child, you lost your first family, and you may have had to move or at least deal with spending time in two homes. You may also feel grief for your lost innocence, lost trust, and the nuclear family experiences you never had.
No matter how amicable the divorce was, it drastically changed your life as a child, and you may have never truly grieved the loss.
Even though the divorce may have happened years and years ago, if you never addressed these feelings, they can become problematic as an adult, resulting in sadness, depression, or a sense of emptiness.
Fallout From Your Own Decisions
Children whose parents are divorced are twice as likely to drop out of high school or have poor academic performance. Teens with divorced parents are more likely to be sexually active and daughters whose fathers left the home are five to eight times more likely to experience a teen pregnancy.
Any of those events may have impacted your development, your college prospects, and your career path. This can cause resentment and frustration.
Insecure Attachment Style
Studies have shown that if your parents divorced when you were a child, this has an impact on your attachment style. Your attachment style is the way you connect to people in relationships, and it is primarily influenced by how you connected with your parents as a child.
Adults whose parents divorced when they were young are more likely to have an anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, or disorganized attachment style. Whatever attachment style you developed as a child, you carry through to your adult relationships.
For example, if you have an anxious attachment style, it means you have difficulty with trust or may appear clingy. An avoidant style means you are guarded and don’t let people in.
A disorganized attachment style means you push people away when they give you affection. Attachment styles can be changed, but it takes help from a professional to rewire how you connect to people you care about.
Your Own Divorce
If your parents divorced, you are more likely to get a divorce yourself. If you are divorced, it is important to remind yourself that your parents’ divorce may be part of the reason so that you do not blame yourself.
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Parental Estrangement
If the divorce resulted in one parent disappearing from your life or if you decided to shut them out of your life because you sided with the other parent, this can leave you as an adult who is estranged from one parent.
Even if you are the one who chose to place the distance between you and a parent, you may still miss that parent, feel resentful that they didn’t try harder to get close to you, and regret all the years you missed out on.
Your feelings don’t have to be logical to be valid. If your parent caused the estrangement, it can impact your feelings of self-worth and cause ongoing sadness.
If you remain estranged from a parent when you are an adult, you may feel that you have lost a big piece of yourself, your family history, and your development.
Coping With Divorced Parents as an Adult
Throughout your life, there are events at which you likely want your parents to be present. These include college graduation, weddings, funerals, birthdays, holidays, the birth of your children, and life events for your children.
If your parents are not able to coexist and attend events at the same time, this can create a lot of difficulties as you try to juggle who will come when, or you have to schedule separate events for each parent to attend.
You may constantly worry about hurting one parent’s feelings or drive yourself crazy with complex scheduling and balancing.
Parental Remarriage
It’s likely that at least one of your parents may remarry, creating an entirely new dynamic involving a stepparent and their own family. You may have mixed feelings about a parent remarrying, even if you like the new partner.
The new marriage may awaken feelings about the divorce you thought you had resolved or never realized you were experiencing. You may feel grief for the marriage that ended and anger that your parents couldn’t make it work for you.
Adapting to this change in your parent’s life can cause feelings of resentment, as you might feel that the new partner and their family have taken precedence over your own needs. And it might just be plain weird to see your parent married to someone else, setting up their own traditions and life.
A remarriage changes many dynamics in your family and can be challenging to deal with, no matter the circumstances.
Recommendations for Overcoming Challenges as an Adult Child of Divorce
There are a variety of ways you can cope with the ongoing challenges you face due to your parents’ divorce:
- Awareness. The first step is simply being aware that the divorce continues to affect you. It is difficult to take steps to heal until you acknowledge it is an issue for you.
- Seek individual therapy. Individual therapy can help you discover how the divorce is affecting you and help you learn to heal.
- Attend couples therapy. If the divorce impacts your own relationships, couples therapy can help you work through the problems you are facing as a couple.
- Get support. There are formal support groups for adult children of divorce, but support can also mean joining a Facebook group with others in the same situation or talking to friends who have gone through this.
- Talk to your parents. Talking with your parents about the divorce, its reasons, and the events that transpired can be helpful. It is possible that your childhood perceptions were skewed or even wrong. You might also find it helpful to share your own experience with them.
- Ask your parents to call a truce. If your parents are still hostile to each other and it’s making your life difficult, ask them to find a way to coexist so that they can attend events simultaneously.
- Prioritize self-care. Taking care of yourself through methods such as meditation, hobbies, relaxation, exercise, yoga, and more places your needs first and ensures that you are cared for.
Final Thoughts
No matter what age you were when your parents divorced, it is likely to have an ongoing impact on your life as an adult. Identifying how it affects you and seeking help allows you to move forward and heal.
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