I have been asked by some of you to look at issues surrounding children and divorce. This is a very sensitive issue and I am going to look at just one of the difficulties which can arise in belonging to two different households. Please email me if there are any further topics you are interested in.
All of us put on and take off masks depending on whom we're with. I once studied personality by studying letters that famous people in History had sent to various people in their lives. I looked at the letters that Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone had written to three different life-long friends, over the course of their lives. Both of them were British Prime ministers in the late nineteeth century. Each took on a different but consistent voice for each friend. Disraeli was tender, solicitous and humorous when writing to his wife but far more formal and aloof when writing to his colleagues.In other words, Disraeli was a different Disraeli depending upon his audience.Gladstone was more formal in all his correspondence. As Shakespeare remarked we are all actors with the world our stage.We play different roles, or different parts of our personality come into relief while others parts retreat. Young children of divorce might just have it worse than most: being one side of themselves with mum, and the other side with dad.
For example, I know a nine-year-old girl called "Arabella" who lives near to me who is caught between two of her selves. Her father left her mother and is now in a new relationship. The girl's mother, a bit nostalgic, would like to go back to the old marriage. When the child spends weekdays with her mother, she does her best to get close to her mother's world. She allows the sad side of herself to rise to the surface, regretting what's ending, saying she wished her parents were still a couple. But when she is with her father, every other weekend, she sides with her father by being more active, engaging with her father's new girlfriend with an exaggerated enthusiasm. She knows what each parents' respective worldview is, and she tries to fit into that view to have fun with that parent. She's performing roles, fuelled by what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" the ability to hold two contradictory views at the same time: it's easier to believe in the atmosphere around us than to constantly fight it.
One massively confusing part of all this for a child is that she doesn't often know she's adapting to two different worlds. She just feels moody, and might blame herself for that moodiness: she thinks she's sometimes really depressed and sometimes too buoyant, and doesn't know why other people don't experience such dramatic shifts of mood. She resists recognising that she's playing roles to please two parents who are very different from each other.
Children of divorce experience a split existence: they may say that they feel like different people with each of their parents, that their parents are polar opposites (even when they're not), that they need to keep more secrets from their parents than other children do, and that they don't want to resemble one of their parents too much, because it might alienate them from the other parent.Children of divorce may experience early pressure to create their own moral systems, because they cannot wholeheartedly endorse the rules of two different households.
For many children there is no such thing as a "good divorce." But there is a chance that some of the difficulties of divorce can strengthen personality traits in a child. Unfortunately, these children are forced into a form of adolescent "splitting"--keeping two sides of their personality in two different realms. But they are also forced to create their own code of behaviour. If they are able to move from a world of "splitting" (dancing between two radically different selves) toward a world in which these various masks are integrated, perhaps they find themselves with a more varied toolbox for approaching life than many of us have.
What do you think ? I would be interested in your views you can contact me on school email.
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