Getting Stronger: Reflection on Recovering from Your Parents Divorce

So I’m watching this movie the other night, called “The Son”.

It was deep and intense, but also brilliant I thought. 

Why? Because it went right to the heart.

The plot line is a family recovering from divorce.

The father has moved on and has another kid. The only child/son is living at his mom’s and it’s obvious in the beginning he’s struggling with depression. So the movie is really about how the family copes with that.

If you are someone who has gone through your parents’ divorce; or even your own, I think it’s worth a watch.

It’s really the first movie I’ve seen covering the topic of divorce that gets to the emotion like this one does. 

It makes me think of that quote, “You don’t know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”

When you are going through the aftermath of an event like that, a trauma, you have to be strong.

Parents say that kids are “resilient,” which, we are, BUT that doesn’t mean we don’t struggle with our parents divorce.

Watching this kid struggle with depression and cutting, reminded me of the pain I felt after my parents divorce. My problem was turning to the food. That’s what helped me cope and then I packed on the weight and my parents couldn’t understand why. Hm. Why do you think?

If you’ve been a child of divorce, you know what it’s like when that pain is just so deep and your parents don’t see it. My Dad, before he died and I was in treatment made an amends to me for always putting me on diets thinking that was the thing that would “fix” the problem, because that’s what he was visibly seeing. But the problem was never on the outside. It was the inside. 

They got divorced when I was 8. I didn’t figure that out till I was 31. So don’t be surprised if you are reading this and haven’t realized that yet.

Sadly, the parents in this movie don’t really know what to do. The kid tells them he’s depressed because of a girl at school but then admits he lied, because it was really about the pain of his dad leaving and the family breaking up.

The Dad (Hugh Jackman), I thought was a fascinating character because the whole movie shows how he’s really internally feeling about what his son is going through, and reflecting on what he hasn’t himself dealt with in his life.

It touches on what I think is one of the most powerful things about a family going through a divorce.

The root. What’s the root of the pain? 

He kept asking his son what’s wrong. He had high expectations for him, kept trying to buy him things to make up for it. But still didn’t see it.

The mom felt like a failure. 

The stepmom felt the pressure of raising a baby with her new husband, while this is going on with his son. 

The root is yes, there were issues in the marriage that each spouse had to deal with in their own way. But what so many people miss is that the root often goes further back. Was there a spirit of rejection in someone’s life. Was someone abandoned, taught not to communicate, abused, product of a trauma? So often that kind of pain usually happened way before the marriage. It was never supposed to be part of the marriage, but it doesn’t go away until you deal with it.

The dad couldn’t see what was wrong with his kid – that it was a heart issue – because he didn’t see his own heart issues.

This is why I’m so passionate about parents dealing with their own issues when they’ve got a kid struggling like this. You can’t change your kid. But you can change yourself. You can change how you respond to them, and part of that is dealing with how you responded to your trauma growing up. Think about what your life was like growing up and what you may have just stuffed under the rug.

This week in my message on You Tube, I talked about the topic of STRENGTH. You can view it here, if you are interested. It’s called, “Are you Looking for Strength?”

Here’s how it connects to this movie.

To parents who’ve been through divorce, who might have a child struggling with mental health, do you want to be strong for them? The best way to be strong for them is to face your pain.

Walk through what you brought to the marriage. Commit to getting stronger for yourself – in your mind, yes. In your body, yes. But also in your spirit. Get God back in your life – through a relationship and let Him help you through it.

Heal. Forgive. (Yes I said that, because if you learn to forgive with God’s help, you will show them how to forgive.)

Commit to spiritual growth.

Show your kids what working through your pain, getting healthier in mind, body and spirit, and healing your heart.

More importantly – show them what it’s like to lean on God.

These are the things – that will show them your strength. Do these things so you can move on and rebuild a life from a stronger place. 

To my fellow children of divorce: if you want to overcome this, recover from this, you’ve got to realize you don’t want your parents divorce to affect you for the rest of your life. Of course it will, even if you heal, but it doesn’t have to have a negative impact. You can grow through it.

One of the saddest things about this movie is how the kid responds to the divorce. Then the dad imagines what life would be like if he had. I don’t want you to be that person. I watch that movie and see how I could have been, and ironically the life the Dad thought his kid might have, is very similar to the life I chose – after going through the journey of healing.

Be the person who moves on, who finds your own life, who doesn’t let your parents failed marriage keep you from building a good one. Get mentally healthy for your future spouse. Deal with all those emotions from that event so you don’t bring it to your marriage. Deal with the behaviors or substances you’ve been using to escape the pain from it so many years ago. (Believe me, it stinks. I had to do it too. But you can do it.) GET into a relationship with God. Of all things, please do that. Our parents breaking up is a significant blow to the foundation of family. Once we start to build our own life, we have to find our OWN relationship with God that is usually not based on the religion we grew up in, but a relationship with the God who can enter our pain with us and begin to heal us. 

Getting stronger means working through it, even when it’s painful. 

I mention in my video this sign I have in my office about the decision you get to make in the wake of a traumatic even like divorce. It says this,

When something bad happens 

you can let it define you

let it destroy you

or let it strengthen you.

What’s your decision?

#divorce #childrenofdivorce #movies