Parenting Before Divorce
What do I do if I'm having problems with my marriage?
If you are having problems with your marriage, I suggest you work on it. It's very easy to go the divorce route. One of the first places to go if you are having problems with your marriage is for marriage counselling. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. However, there are now wonderful programs. One of them is Marriage Builders. There are many other programs were people are devoted to helping people who are having difficulties with their marriages understand how to make a marriage work. And I suggest that people take advantage of those programs. If the marriage doesn't work out it's not lost because there is so much that people learn about relationships in those programs, so there is more than just the standard go to a therapist and try to get a marriage that is not working fixed. There are many options, so I would suggest not getting a divorce, and figuring out what brought you together in the first place, and what your responsibilities are now; which obviously involves children; and how you can make the marriage work, and there are many creative ways to rethink what is a healthy marriage besides just dissolve the marriage.
What can I do to avoid getting a divorce?
One of the amazing developments in recent times is the idea of self-development, of making myself as good as I can be. And there are a lot of self-help consciousness raising programs around. And it's there that a lot of people get dramatic shift in their consciousness to realize that they have settled, that this is all there is, when there is a whole world out there available to them if they would change their thinking, if they would develop positive relationship skills, that many things could be working to their benefit. One of the concepts we want parents to know and married people to know, in any relationship, is that to take personal responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. All of your thoughts, all of your feelings, all of your behavior and actions, are distinctly you. You decide that. In the old days the way most of us grew up, people didn't accept responsibility for their thoughts, feelings, and actions. And so instead, they blamed other people when things didn't go well for them. And that means, in blaming someone else, you don't look at what you are doing or saying that's creating the problem. When you're pointing the finger at someone else, you've got three fingers pointing back at you. That's a good metaphor like the place to start is within. Like, why am I having a problem with this person? Why are my children acting like brats, and I can't stand to be around them? It has everything to do with you.
Why is my marriage ending in divorce?
One of the reasons that parents end up in divorce is, they never did learn the positive relationship skills of how to be in a successful relationship, at all. They never learned adequately how tto receptively listen to each other, the value of an "I" statement, the value of a win-win way of solving problems. What a lot of parents learned in their childhood was to use drama to try to solve problems but drama doesn't solve problems. Drama escalates problems. So when people have grown up without adequate relationship skills, modern skills about how to be in a positive relationship at all, like a marriage or to be a parent or even in the workplace, then they will flounder in their relationships and it is so easy to run the victim game. Look at poor me. I've done everything I should and it's their fault. What's really at fault is that they never learned how to be appropriate in relationships. They're constantly in conflict and they dont realize that the person creating the conflict is me.
When should I consider a divorce?
A person should go down the divorce route when there really is no way for them to be compatible together. Certainly if there's serious abuse, domestic violence or someone's out of control, a rageaholic, an alcoholic, drug abuse, criminal activity, there isn't any way to make them change, then in extreme cases divorce is a very important thing to do. I just, it's something that needs to be thought through very, very carefully because the implications of reorganizing a family is very vast, and there's the possibility for one person to be making a unilateral decision for everyone in the family. In order to get a divorce all that's necessary is for one person to decide, "I'm getting a divorce", and everyone in the family, not just the other spouse, but the children, the extended family, it is a very serious decision to make, and there has to be really good reasons, I think, to make it, just as there has to be really good reasons to get married in the first place. I think that we have a tendency to take the concept of, idea of marriage too cavalierly. Like okay. I see people in my classes and I'm just astonished at how they got together and how they ended up making babies; that part doesn't astonish me, but now what astonishes me is that there are children and the people haven't thought through the relationship. If you're going to have children then you need to make a nest to put the children into, so that the children can be provided for and that takes maturity. So, back to should parents have children at all? Not, I say, not unless they're ready, that they've prepared and they are mature enough to raise those children.
