 You ask, we answer. Welcome to Can This Marriage Be Saved, where we go up against common relationship problems and help you determine if this relationship should stay or go. Hi, you're here for another exciting episode of Can This Marriage Be Saved. I'm Rithga Slakin and I'm here with my husband, marriage counselor extraordinaire Shlomo Slakin. Shlomo, thank you for being here with us tonight. Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about something that speaks personally to me and I bet it speaks personally to a lot of you. And that is the topic of being an adult child of divorce, which I am and I know many of you are. I just have so much to say about this, but I want to say it with a professional here on the line with us because I don't know if my feelings are accurate and I'd like someone to back me up. But, you know, and to tell me what's psychologically been proven and what hasn't. But I guess I feel as an adult child of divorce, I feel that I come to our relationship and to my relationship with my children at a lack. I feel like I'm less prepared than other people. Is that just me or what do you think? Has that psychologically been shown? I don't know or scientifically. I mean, I think that's fair to say that. No, of course, not all divorces are the same and it really depends on, you know, some divorces are amicable and I would say somewhat. I don't think divorce is healthy, but I guess some can be healthier than others. And I think that if it was not a healthy divorce and you did not get the support from your parents and you did not see how to relate to others in a healthy way, then it definitely will cause damage as a spouse and as a parent. I know so many people talk about how, oh, they're wanting to get divorced for the sake of their children, you know, and so their children's lives will be better. I just don't think that that's true. I mean, at least in my case, the fighting was probably the same, if not worse, after the divorce. Yeah, I think that a lot of times, while there's fighting in the relationship, but once one spouse wants to get divorced or they leave the other person, then there's no reason to even try to be nice anymore because there's often so much anger and hurt and especially if one spouse left the other abandonment that sometimes they do whatever they can to pay back the other spouse. So like in your case, to make their life miserable. So in those cases, I think the children are the ones who have to end up suffering the consequences because they become pawns in the game. That's a good point, that they don't have to be nice anymore and that one spouse is so much angrier. Even more angrier than just being angry with each other and needing to go to someone to fix it. Now they were abandoned and so they're going to punish, right? That's why the divorce can be so devastating if they don't work on it together. Does that happen a lot where one spouse punishes the other? I know it was definitely the case in my story. Yeah, I definitely think that's quite true. You've seen that with others. Besides your story, yeah. And you know, I've always been someone that has worked so hard on myself and I've told myself I'm not going to repeat the same mistakes that my parents did. But boy do I find it come out at times when I'm parenting. Just because I saw so much reactivity and it was rare that I saw good role modeling as parents and spouses, it's just so much harder. I find it to be so much harder. And I guess so that's one question. And then the second is, are my kids doomed because I'm coming to this home with just a lack of resources? I think. I have my own internal resources, but I guess I feel that I come in a greater lack or I start off with a lack. Like a handicap almost. But you've worked hard and learned a lot. I mean, on the one hand, I see this with many of my clients are children of divorce. So I wanted you to say, are they having marriage problems because they didn't go up in a good home? Are they in a broken home? On the other hand, it could be that they're coming because they're that much more committed to making work because they know what it's like. So it's probably a little bit of both. You know, some people, it's easier to get divorced because if their parents got divorced, so it's not such a big deal. They've seen it before. It's not something that's kind of, you know, it's not like there's a red line there where they just won't do it. So I have seen that also. But again, there is often greater motivation to work harder to prevent it from happening. So from that perspective, I know you're saying, you know, you're working extra hard to compensate with what you didn't get. So in some ways that's, you know, your children can be benefit more than they would have ordinarily. I mean, I know God gives you what you can handle and, you know, and your children what they can handle and all that. So I have to, you know, remember kind of the divine plan here also when I get a little, you know, despondent. And my kids do appreciate when I speak to them about how hard, you know, how it is harder for mommy because I didn't get, you know, the love and nurturing that they're getting or that most kids are getting. It's hard. It's hard. And I just wanted to kind of put it out there for other adult children of divorce, you know. Shalama, like, I don't know what else you can say to inspire us. It is so hard because it really affects you on a deep unconscious level and that it's almost like not behind your control. But, you know, when we're reactive and we're not conscious, it just comes out because we, those are kind of our, like, our default mechanisms. So if somebody grew up in a good home, you know, some of these things they would never do because it just doesn't even cross their mind to act a certain way. But growing up in a home of yelling and screaming, you can have a home of yelling and screaming even if the parents stay together. But, you know, going to be in a home where there's divorce or there's a bad relationship, even if they stay together, there's still going to be issues that will come up. And, you know, we, you know, we will repeat what we saw and we might not even realize how it might be unhealthy. So give us some inspiration here. I mean, let's talk about the healing aspect because I don't know much about trauma work, but I know that there's many areas of my life where I'm still traumatized by what I saw. I'm still traumatized by what I saw with the divorce and how the parents behaved with each other. What are some trauma, like, you know, should I learn more about trauma or tell us about how the healing kind of would work for an adult child of divorce? Well, I think having a committed relationship, you know, having a marriage and healthy marriage is in and of itself quite healing. Because the issues that you have from child, that one has from childhood will come up in the relationship. And if the child of divorce can work on those with their spouse, then they can get the love and healing that they did not get growing up. So as we say in Amago, marriage is an unfinished business of childhood. So we're kind of going to recreate, you know, those challenges are for some of that nightmare. But if we can get conscious about it, we can get it right. So, you know, I think that the good news is that it is possible to heal and to... It is comforting when you're in a good healthy marriage. Definitely. I mean, I see that with you. Thank God that we're together. And all of my healing has come because of the work that we've done together for sure. And thank God we found Amago years ago, 14 years ago. Because I don't know where we would be because I just tended to, you know, do fight-or-flight, right? Isn't that what people do when they're under stress? Yeah, we have, we learn various adaptations to protect ourselves growing up. And that's just, that's where we're going to go when things get rough. You know, survival is the, you know, the prime instinct that we have when we're not feeling emotionally safe. That's where we're going to go. And that's just going to create a big mess. And a cycle of reactivity and fighting and escalation and just, and, you know, doesn't stop. So I guess how can an adult child of divorce, oh, you know what, let me ask you this. Do you ever see adult children of divorce married to adult children of divorces? Have you ever seen two? And even if you haven't, do you feel like two adult children of divorce can be successful in their marriage? It's interesting to think about this off the top of my head. I'm, I'm seeing one, you know, in a couple, typically one person is the adult child of divorce. The other one is not. I can't think of that many that were both, but it could be wrong. I don't know if statistically speaking, how that works, but, but no, I think usually it's one. And what was your follow-up? I guess I want to know if they can be successful too. What if they're two people who are adult children of divorce? Yeah. Yeah, because it's like they probably seem so much more reactivity. The more, you know, I always say, if you're willing to work on the relationship, if you're willing to put in the work, then you can be successful regardless of your background. It's going to be, might, might be a lot of, maybe a lot of hard work, but it is possible when there's a will. So what should we all be doing? I mean, tell us a little for, for those that are unfamiliar with a mongo therapy, what would you have, how would you have the adult child of divorce? You know, if they've never seen a proper role model, how would you have a session with them? Like what would you show them? How would the healing process begin? How would you teach the couple to be together? Well, it really depends. I mean, some people react different ways. Some people learn to be, like if there was verbal abuse and yelling and screaming in the house, some people learn that that's the way to react. Some people and other children in the same house could become reserved and shut down and emotionally checked out. So children even in the same house are not necessarily going to react to the divorce in the same way. So it's not that there's kind of like a blanket. It's more about teaching them, you know, depending on where they were wounded, helping them understand where they were wounded growing up, helping them understand what they saw in a marriage, helping them understand what their issues are now in their current relationship and exploring how they might be related to the way they saw things growing up and how it's familiar to them. Tell me more about the stages of being wounded, you know, as a child, what they saw. Tell us about that. Well, there's different things, what they saw and where they were personally wounded. I mean, there are developmental stages, Erickson's developmental stages where the earlier children are wounded, you know, the more contentious they're going to be. Because, like for example, if a child is wounded between zero to 18 months, the attachment stage, so they're going to have a hard time being in a relationship. They're probably not even going to come into a counseling office. They're going to have a hard time really sitting and working because one person is going to be, you know, completely, they're just going to have a hard time having a safe connection. So all of us are, you know, wounded or have unmet needs at certain stages along the way. But if we're in a house where our needs were not met, it's definitely going to be earlier, potentially earlier on and more devastating. But the good news is we can work through those issues and move up the food chain. So it's about connecting with our partner, learning safe ways to communicate, you know, to curb the reactivity that we maybe saw in the home growing up. It's about understanding, you know, how we met and why we were attracted to each other, the aspects of healing that you were mentioning. Yeah, I'm creating safe connection because if connection was not safe, if relationship was not safe, then it's going to affect us and we're going to be reluctant to really connect. So by creating safe connection, that itself can be healing for those childhood wounds. So I guess those whose parents had an amicable divorce are that much more well equipped to having safe marriage, safe relationships, probably? I mean, usually, but there's still, there's still potentially, you know, no relationships perfect, no parents are perfect. There's always going to be things that need to be worked on. But I would say it's probably going to be a little bit less, you know, less volatile if you didn't experience the volatility growing up. So I mentioned feeling really traumatized, like I know I feel traumatized and I bet a lot of people out there kind of feel traumatized with their backgrounds. I guess I just would love to know, you know, I'd love to hear it from you. You know, just some encouragement that we can be successful and we can get over the trauma of divorce and that it really can work. Like I want to know that it really can work and that one day I'm not even going to be affected by it. It's going to be so smooth to be a mom and a wife and not feel like I'm swimming in uphill battle. So it's definitely possible to heal and to work on it. It can seem like it takes may take a long time, but you definitely will get there through hard work and practice and dedication to learning healthy, more healthy ways of relating in relationship. And you know, it really can do a number on a child and really can affect them and make it extremely difficult. And if you put in the effort to become conscious and aware of it, then you will be less and less reactive and really more able to make a choice to choose how to act in a given situation and not let those kind of past memories cloud your present choices. And I guess I always realized that, you know, everybody does have their story. So everybody's walking around with some kind of story, whether or not their parents were divorced as a kid. You know, they may have had, you know, a parent that was mentally ill and so they've got their own situation. It's not, you know, a doom. It's not a, you know, it's not a, I don't know what the word is, but it's not like a sentence that I'm doomed forever automatically. Right? I mean, I can do this. And so can everybody listening that's coming from the similar background, because everybody has some kind of issue in life that, you know, traumatizes them or slows them down or right? Yeah, we all have, as we say in the model, unmet needs or childhood wounds, certain things that we could have used more of and some of us had it harder than others. But that's the opportunity of a marriage to be able to work through those issues and achieve growth and healing together in a couple of hours. Do you think it's ever beneficial for the adult child of divorce to see counseling alone and kind of work on their own issues? I mean, after all, their partner was not there with them as a kid. So why should they be subjected or dragged through their stuff? Well, I think we uniquely marry the person who is best capable of healing us and we view the healing taking place in the relationship. So while some may find it helpful to explore some of the issues, I think that's even more powerful. Doing it together as a couple because your spouse can really heal those wounds with you. Because as we say, you're wounded in a relationship and to heal, you have to heal in a relationship, to experience a relationship in a safe and connected way even if you haven't growing up. I do feel that. I've gotten that with you, Shlomo, because you were able to develop more compassion for me in our sessions after you heard some of what I had gone through. You saw it in your eyes that you were able to be more compassionate for me in what might have been an annoyance that you had about me when you finally heard where it was coming from in my story. I think it didn't bother you anymore. Would you agree? Yeah, I definitely can appreciate where you're coming from and have much more compassion for you. Even if I'm upset about something, I can understand where it's coming from and just feel bad for how you were treated and what you had to go through. And to see how hard it must be to have been in that situation and why you might get triggered in the way that you do. I think it makes a huge difference. It made a huge difference in our relationship to work through that together and for me to understand where you were coming from. Well, I thank you for doing that and having the compassion for me. For those of you listening, I do want to make you aware about an amazing opportunity that's coming up where you can really practice this stuff together. And to learn about healthy relationships. And that is a weekend that we're hosting coming up in November, November 13th to 15th, 2015. It's called the Getting the Love You Want Weekend Workshop. And Getting the Love You Want is based on Harvohendrix's Getting the Love You Want book, which is based on amalgotherapy, which is what he created. And why don't you tell us more about it, Selma? Well, the weekend is just a great opportunity to really learn about relationships, to understand how they work, why they start off so great and sour so quickly. And how that doesn't mean that you picked the wrong person, but that you can actually really understand why you're experiencing the conflict you do. And you also learn a lot of great tools to help you reinvigorate your relationship and give that jumpstart that you might need. And I just think it's an eye-opener, especially if you didn't grow up witnessing a healthy relationship. Even if you did, I don't think that any of us really know what it's like being married, even if we witnessed it. There's a lot for I think everyone to learn about what it takes to create a healthy relationship. Well, we went to this weekend 14 years ago and it was fabulous and we are hosting it for our own listeners. And it's going to be amazing. So contact us at our website, themarriagerestorationproject.com. If you're interested in attending, there's an events tab up at the top of our site where you can click on Getting the Love You Want and secure your spot. We have a few spots left and we would absolutely love to have you, especially those of you listening to this special, you know, those of you in this special audience of, you know, of Canvas Marriage Be Saved podcast, but also those of you that are adult children of divorce. It would be really wonderful for you to come. So I hope to meet you there and we stay tuned for the next episode. Have a wonderful evening. Good night. I hope you've enjoyed listening to today's topic. We'll be back again to focus on another topic that is sure to help you with your marriage. For any questions or concerns, please email us at info at themarriagerestorationproject.com with best wishes for your relationship success.