Program: FamilyLife Today

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, October 24th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.

Man: And I would wake up at 1 or 2:00 in the night to these shrieks. They were shrieks of my mother sobbing and crying in her room because my dad still was not home. And I would go in there and just sit with her and, you know, I can still hear those cries. But my dad, because of his decisions, chose to drag his family through this hell for several years basically so that he could find pleasure in another woman and, you know, it made no small impact on his children.

Bob: And you wonder how many young adults are walking around with that kind of emotional pain, and yet we don't know it, we don't see it, it's not obvious.

Dennis: I've said for years that if you had some way of measuring the emotional pain that has been created by this culture of divorce, it would be like a megaphone, a megaphone that that one young man described his mom shrieking. I think there is an agony that is ? a quiet agony that is occurring in the souls of adults today who grew up in broken homes.

I want to ask our guests on today's program, Elizabeth Marquardt and Jen Abbas, what you all thought about that young man's testimony. Jen, your parents divorced when you were 6 and again when you were 18 you experienced divorce. What did you think about that?

Jen: Well, it was interesting, because I identified ? when I was 17 my mom was having an affair, and so it just brought back a lot of memories of my stepdad and I being in this house, and mom wasn't around, and we knew that she wasn't being honest with us about where she was, and being 17 and about to be launched off to college, you know, this is a time where, from my perspective, my parents should really be here for me and helping me pick out colleges and giving me a safe launching pad, and it was like my mom was already gone, and the message that she sent me was it was more important for her to find what she wanted than to be there for me.

Bob: You know, the young man we heard from at the beginning of the program reflected on that same theme. He talked about his dad being fundamentally caught up in what was ultimately selfishness, but he was caught up in his own world, his own circumstances, and he wasn't there for his son.

Man: During one of the times when my dad had moved out of our house, and he was staying with his parents, and my sister had been over there visiting him and my grandparents, and my mother hadn't heard from her; wondered where is she? When's she coming home? So I drove over to get her, and just for some reason, just seeing my dad there, just the weight of the separation and all that just overwhelmed me, and when dad came out, you know, to tell me goodbye, we were getting in the car, and he came out to tell me goodbye, I just started weeping bitterly, and hugging him and said, "Dad, please come home, please come home."

And I remember my grandmother and my grandfather coming out on the porch and watching all this and watching me just sobbing as a 17-year-old boy, and my grandmother said, "Do you not see what you're doing to your children?"

Dennis: Elizabeth, you experienced divorce multiple times growing up ? at the age of 2, again at 9, 13, and 22. What were you thinking as you listened to that man talk about weeping bitterly. I was watching your face, and your head kind of dropped. You're bound to have heard that story time and time again as you've interviewed people all across the nation.

Elizabeth: I have. We've both talked to so many grown children of divorce, and the topic of infidelity comes up so often, and it's not only an enormous struggle and pain for the children of divorce just to see what it's doing to their other parent and what it does to them, but it's a huge moral issue for them and a huge stumbling block, often, in their faith journeys because if they've spent any time around a church at all, they know they know the word "adultery," they know there's a commandment against it, and yet their own parent has done this, and they see it ? sometimes it's their fathers have done it; sometimes it's their mothers who have done it.

And, frankly, there's a double standard here. They're devastated when their fathers are unfaithful, but they are just leveled flat when their mothers are unfaithful. One young man looked at me, and he just said, "You don't want to think your mom's an adulterer." It really hurts them, and it hurts them not only because of what they it doing in their families and how it makes them question their faith but also they worry about that parent.

One young woman who was very strong in her faith said to me that, growing up, she didn't worry so much about whether she could forgive her father, but she worried about whether he would be forgiven.

Bob: When you have adultery and divorce both happening, is that a one-two punch. I'm thinking of divorces where adultery is not present. Is that somehow less traumatic than if you have adultery and divorce taking place?

Elizabeth: There can be a lot of traumatic things ? broken promises ? and sometimes infidelity, as we know, happens in marriages that stay together, but I don't think the kids find out about it as often.

What happens in divorce is the "truth" comes out and suddenly a lot of things that children otherwise might be protected from, they are no longer protected from, either because their parents are confiding in the child, which they shouldn't do, or it's just chaos for a while, and a lot gets revealed that nobody really intends the children to know. Or children can put two and two together, just like they can do the math and figure out, "Hm, was I conceived before my parents got married?" or whatever.

They can do the math, too, on when this new person appeared in their parent's life, when the divorce happened, if their parent was seeing them before they got divorced, and they're paying attention.

Dennis: Elizabeth, what were you thinking as you heard him talk ? you personally?

Elizabeth: I'm trying to think back, now, I want to answer you as honestly as I can. I mean, I was ? I'm moved when I hear young men sharing these stories of pain, because you don't hear young men talking about this pain very much, and you could think that maybe they don't feel it as much, and they do, of course, they do. And hearing that young guy, he sounds like a tough guy, a good guy, you know, breaking down and crying like that, and you realize how much is there. It's just very moving.

Jen: I was going to say one thing that creates an additional kind of struggle is that a lot of times when it happens, especially in the case where one parent leaves their spouse for this other person, and they marry that person. Then, all of a sudden, you have this situation where you need to honor this person because they're your stepdad or your stepmom. So this person who broke up your family and life as you know it, all of a sudden, you need to make nice with them, or you're being a disobedient little kid. And, as a kid, you don't have the emotional ability to really said, "Wait, this is wrong. Mom, you're wrong," because, you know, Mom's the boss.

Bob: And you stop and think about the emotional impact of that, but then, beyond that, to ask what does that do to how a child processes moral and spiritual and ethical categories? I mean, children are growing up trying to make sense of the world and morality; they're trying to learn civilized behavior, we're trying to teach it to them. You throw something like this into the mix and not only does it jumble up my feelings, but it messes up my thinking, too, doesn't it?

Elizabeth: It does. The children of divorce are handed a really big job. When parents are married, it's their job to do some of this work, this hard work of making sense of your different values, your different beliefs, your different backgrounds. When they get divorced that job doesn't go away, it just gets handed to their child instead, who is 4 or 8 or 12 years old. Their child is and always will be, throughout their childhood, looking to their mom and dad as the first and most important role models for their own moral and spiritual formation.

And now these role models live completely separate lives; lives that, to a child, often seem to be polar opposites. And when the child asks those big questions of moral and spiritual identity ? who am I? Where do I belong? What is true? What is right and wrong? Is there a God? They're looking to two different models that often seem as different as night and day, and those two people aren't talking about this kind of big stuff anymore. They're not fighting about it ? they're not talking about it, nothing, but the child is wrestling with the differences that the child sees in each of their worlds, and that conflict that used to be between the parents has now gotten transferred to the child ? to the child's inner life, and it's within the child's own life in a very lonely, overwhelming way that the child is trying to confront these big questions, and I think it's the distinctive experience of the child of divorce.

Bob: I remember reading a quote from a young girl, a teenage girl, who was a child of divorce, and she said, "I wish my parents understood that for them to talk about God's love for me when they can't love each other," she said, "I can't deal with that on a cognitive level."

Dennis: Right.

Jen: Gary Thomas's book, "Sacred Marriage," is the book that I, hands down, call the best book on marriage, because it redeems the institution of marriage in my mind. Before reading that book, I had no desire to be married because why ? I see what goes down that road, why would I want to do that? But reading the book and the subtitle of the book, if you aren't familiar with it, is "What is the Purpose of Marriage?" It's to make us holy more than happy and really redeeming that idea that every aspect of marriage is a form, a spiritual formation and discipline that we not only grow closer to God, but also we are demonstrating the character of God, or we're not demonstrating the character of God, and that's the big thing of how do you ? what our parents in our generation ? what they were all told is when you're getting a divorce, sit the kids down, and you tell them, "Mommy and Daddy, we can't get along anymore, and so we're going to get a divorce but we still love you."

And what the child hears is that, "Mommy and Daddy once chose to be together," I just kind of came along. So if they can choose not to love each other anymore, then they can choose not to love me if I'm not perfect or if I'm not ? and that's where you get into all of these coping mechanisms, and it takes a long time to kind of disassociate from that part that is so ingrained in your hardwiring ? that love is fickle and fleeting and it's what you deserve. And then when you go to church, and especially for children a lot of times, everything is simplified, you know, because you want kids to understand it and, you know, things like "Well, adultery is bad." Well, does that mean Mom was bad? Is Mom bad? Then ...

Bob: ... what do I do with that?

Jen: What do I do with that, or, you know, God loves you and everything is going to be all right. Well, I don't feel everything is all right, so does that mean that God doesn't love me?

Dennis: I've talked to adults who have gone through divorce and have spent hours talking with them, interacting as I watch them attempt to recover and pick up the pieces in their lives and sort through all the emotions of what they were experiencing trying to piece it together. And I've often thought, if an adult who is emotionally mature, supposedly, fully developed as an adult, everything is in place, you know, they're functioning in life ? if they struggle trying to piece it all together and sometimes spend decades piecing together their own emotions and what they're thinking and feeling, how can we expect a 12-year-old, a 15-year-old, or, for that matter, and 18-year-old to process this emotional earthquake that has aftershocks that go on into adulthood that ? how do they even interpret it?

And for many of these young people today who have gone to college, and they're out, and they've established their own marriages and families, would you say, Elizabeth, that most have not dealt with it? Most have just denied the divorce as a significant event and are moving on with their lives?

Elizabeth: I think there is a real defensiveness among many of us who are grown children of divorce who say, kind of, "I'm not damaged goods. I don't think of myself that way. I'm okay. I'm relatively successful, and I don't like this whole debate about children of divorce and how messed up do the children of divorce end up, because that's not me."

I understand that defensiveness, and I think it really speaks to a weakness in our cultural debate about divorce because all we've wanted to know is, "Well, how messed up do the children of divorce end up and how many of them end up addicted or in jail or on the street or killing themselves?" That's important, and more than do end up with very serious problems like that compared to those whose parents stay married. But people who want to emphasize the upside of divorce or to say that divorce isn't so bad, they say, "Well, the majority of children of divorce don't end up with those very serious problems, and so they're fine."

That's really where I want to take on the culture. This idea that if children don't have seriously disabling, clear problems, if they're not just, you know ...

Bob: If you're not in jail, you're fine.

Elizabeth: If you're not in jail or pregnant at 14 or whatever, you're fine.

Dennis: It really is being minimized today, isn't it?

Elizabeth: It's being minimized, and saying that they're fine does two things ? one is that you just dismiss in silence the real struggles that they've gone through, and the other is that you send this powerful message that all we really care about is just setting and meeting a very low bar for children. You know, as long as they don't end up damaged, we've done our job.

Well, as a society, that's inadequate; as parents, that's reprehensible. Obviously, none of us, as parents, want to say, "All I want to do is prevent my child from being damaged. That's my biggest goal in life." To the contrary, as parents, we want our children to thrive. We don't want to just prevent the worst things from happening. We want them to have everything we can give them to have the most rich, fulfilling, productive life possible to give back to others. We want them to know how to love and be loved. We want them to walk in faith and to love God and to know that they're loved by God.

So it's not enough to just say, "Okay, well, how many of them end up in prison and that we need to worry about them," and we do ? we very much need to worry about them, but otherwise the others are fine. We need to realize that the people who are visibly suffering are only the tip of the iceberg, and there's a lot of us out there. We're not damaged goods, we don't think of ourselves that way, but our identities, who we are, are deeply shaped by our parents' divorce in ways that if you want to know us and if you want to welcome us into your churches, and you want to have a lasting marriage with us, you need to know about that pain.

Bob: And, you know, as you describe that, I'm thinking of folks in our audience ? two groups of people. One group that's sitting in conflict right now going, "Well, yes, you're right. I want my child to grow up healthy and thriving. And the environment my child is facing at home right now can't be producing that. I've got to do something to bring peace at home, if that's what I want for my child." That's one group.

There's another group that's already gone through the divorce and says, "So you're basically telling me I have inflicted lifelong damage on my child. I might as well just crawl off the face of the earth right now because I've done irreparable damage to my son or daughter." Speak to both of those first.

Elizabeth: Let me start with that second one. I have tremendous sympathy for the situation that divorced parents find themselves in. For one thing, a lot of them didn't want the divorce, it was done to them. For another, life is complex. All of us fall short before God. I've made mistakes in my life, and we all have, and I do not judge divorced parents. I think they're coming along in a very difficult culture at a very difficult time.

I do feel that divorced parents, even if they already are divorced, can do a lot to help their child if they understand their child's inner world better, and books like mine, books like Jen's, others, I think can help them to do that.

With regard to the parents who are listening and who are saying, "I want my child to thrive, and my home does not produce an environment for a thriving child right now. There's a lot of conflict. It could even be dangerous. I'm worried. My heart goes out to them. I do not think divorce is wrong in all cases. I think it's a vital option for ending very bad marriages, and I'm glad we have it.

It's a hard road, even if you have a bad marriage, it's a hard road to end it through divorce. You're still going to have to deal with that person, you're still going to need a lot of help, and I encourage you to reach out to your church and to great places like this to get that help.

What people need to know is that the majority of divorces today do not end high-conflict marriages. Two-thirds of divorces today end low-conflict marriages. They are ending marriages that are not characterized by abuse or violence or very serious and frequent quarreling, and they're ending marriages that are often ending for reasons like people grew apart, they're not sure if they love each other anymore, somebody else at work is more interesting. Sometimes they're ending for reasons that can be ? as adults, we can be sympathetic for the kind of reasons adults are ? you know, the people in the marriage are hurting, but a lot of this stuff is not on the radar screen to the child.

You know, the idea of, "Okay, my parents are happy but are they as happy as they could be?" Would they be happier not married to my mom or dad? Are they as fulfilled as they could be? You know, are they bored sometimes?" This is not on the kid's radar screen. What's on their radar screen is the day their parents come to them and tell them they're getting a divorce, and that's when that child's world falls apart.

So my message to people based on my own experience as a child of divorce and all the people I've talked to is if you're married to someone who you know is a good person and a good parent, and you're not sure you're in love anymore, you feel like you're growing apart, there are so many good reasons to reach out and get help and save that marriage for your child and for your own sake as well.

Dennis: I have two points I want to make about that, Elizabeth. First, you write in your book that this divorce is the most devastating of all for the child in the low-conflict marriage ...

Elizabeth: ... right ...

Dennis: ... because they don't see it coming.

Elizabeth: It doesn't rescue them from anything.

Dennis: It's a blindside.

Elizabeth: Right.

Dennis: It's like their home blows up for no reason. And so they can't even piece together the consequences of what brought them to this point. But the second thing is, and I just want to affirm what you're saying here ? there are so many marriages today, and I think it's because of our culture. We've created a myth of what the happy home looks like, and marriages are like people, they get isolated, and they get isolated from other marriages, they get isolated from people who can bring health to them and hope and healing and encouragement, and this is where the Christian community, the spiritual community of faith need to be offering solutions.

And it's why FamilyLife, as an organization, was founded in 1976, and that was to equip couples who are starting out their marriages together to get the tools to know how to keep love alive; to know how to resolve conflict; to know how to better understand one another sexually; to know how to fulfill your role as a husband and what that role looks like even if you didn't have that role and role model growing up, we can give you a picture of that from the Scriptures that work or of being a wife and a mom.

I think what we have is a great need today that must be addressed at the soul level among adults and what couples dare not do is toss the towel in too early, because they may be pronouncing the benediction on a marriage and proclaiming it dead when all it needed was just a weekend away to be able to strengthen it and provide some help and hope.

Bob: We have seen couples in that situation who have come to the Weekend to Remember conferences that we host in cities all across the country and have found exactly what you're talking about ? they've found practical help for their marriage, and they've regained a sense of hope, and, for a lot of these couples, a marriage that was headed toward a divorce gets headed in a different direction. And we talk to them 5, 10, 15 years later, and they say it was a turning point for us, and then we meet the kids who are there today because Mom and Dad took a turn.

And I would just encourage our listeners, if you've never been to one of these Weekend to Remember conferences, you can to go our website, FamilyLife.com, and get more information. We've got these conferences happening in cities all across the country this fall. This weekend, next weekend, the weekend after, through November and into the first part of December, you can get away for a weekend and find the biblical blueprints for building or rebuilding a marriage that is in need of repair. We've just seen it happen too many times.

Again, our website is FamilyLife.com. If you go, and you click the red button in the middle of the screen that says "Go," that will take you to a page where there will be a link to more information about the Weekend to Remember conference. You can get your questions answered, register online, if you'd like.

You can also, while you're on our website, get copies of the books that our guests today have written. Elizabeth Marquardt's book, which is call "Between Two Worlds," and Jen Abbas' book, which is called "Generation Ex," e-x. We have them both in our FamilyLife Resource Center. If you're a child of divorce or if you know someone who is, I was thinking about this ? even if you're a parent who has been through a divorce, and you have children, and you want to try to reach out to those children and say, "I'm understanding how my divorce may have had an impact on you, and I want us, together, to work through this to try to help resolve some of those issues." You may want to get these books and pass them along to your children.

Again, our website is FamilyLife.com. Click the red "Go" button in the middle of the screen, and that will take you right to the page where you can get more information about these resources, or you can call us at 1-800-FLTODAY is the number ? 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and someone on our team can let you know how you can get any of these resources sent to you, or they can answer any questions you might have about the Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference. Again, the number is 1-800-FLTODAY, and the website is FamilyLife.com.

Tomorrow we want to continue to explore the impact that divorce can have on the life of a child in their adult years. I hope you can be with us as the conversation goes on.

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.