Family

Secondary Healing

by Terry Barlow
03/10/25
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There is no denying the tearing and ripping apart that occurs in the souls of the children of divorce and physical separation,  when they have to witness the hostility and unilateral or mutual abuse being exchanged repeatedly between two parents whom they love, and when they feel forced to take sides. Their very identities become fractured and divided. They are caught in the crossfire and deeply wounded there. Of course the separation or divorce happened emotionally and spiritually before it ever became physically complete. (It is uncanny how the timing of so many of these upheavals occurs at precisely the time when teens are facing emotional turmoil outside the home and are in need of a calming interpretive presence from a united front in their parents, that can impart confidence in the turbulence instead of confusion and uncertainty.)  But what is usually overlooked is how some of that collateral damage can be soothed with consolation and almost undone in later years if those same parents then begin to treat one another caringly with respect and appreciation, with those same children noticing now that they are adults.  ( Remember that one of the most healthy and reassuring things young children can witness is their parents expressing open warmth and affection toward one another.)  The children have become adults but the parents have also matured and mellowed somewhat during that interval of time. ( I say "almost undone" because,  admittedly, the earlier damage was done in a more formative period of the children's development.) There is still then a kind of secondary healing that becomes possible.  Even the children of so-called "amicable divorces " enacted with smiling faces inflict their own form of harm, though it might not surface in the children to be consciously acknowledged until adulthood. It is no wonder that the Bible tells us that God hates divorce. 

  This isn't to say that embattled couples with children who stay together can't inflict damage of their own upon the children without even realizing it. Perhaps they stay together out of convenience or for reasons of principle or religion. The fact is there is still a separation, but in that case the separation is not physical but is felt and experienced at the emotional and spiritual levels. It creates an atmosphere of tension in the home that is not fully apparent until some circumstance produces a temporary separation.  In such cases an immediate sense of relief or release is noticeable and felt in the home atmosphere by the members of the family.

  Tolstoi the Russian author was on to something when he wrote  "All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy each in its own way."