Divorced Fathers. Three Options For The Future

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Divorced fathers. Three options for the future

Elena Leontieva

Clinical psychologist, gestalt therapist, supervisor, family psychotherapist

Divorced fathers often visit a psychologist. They make different complaints and want different things. But they all want to understand why everything turned out in their lives in a certain way. They ask if they still have a chance for a good and close relationship, a new family. And why can't they, although five, eight, ten years have passed since the divorce? Let's try to describe the options for the future for divorced fathers.

Father King

Such men often become the initiators of divorce themselves and have several marriages and children from these marriages. The type of the outgoing era. As a rule, these men are over 50 and are financially and socially successful. When divorced, they feel guilty towards their wife, less towards their children. This is the type of men who are more focused on women in marriage than on children, so they easily raise other people's children and do not worry too much when someone is raising their children. They love everyone and are sure that everyone loves them too. They are not inclined to devalue the mother of their children; rather, they recognize her as a "holy woman" and an excellent mother, but a mistress who has exhausted the necessary resources.

After a divorce, they keep in touch with their children, often at the initiative of their ex-wife, and emotionally reorient themselves to a new marriage. Children from different marriages compete for the attention and resources of the father-king, with all the obvious consequences. Such men rarely come to a psychologist for other reasons. The prognosis for such men is very favorable as long as their sexual constitution is preserved.

Father offended

Such a father rarely initiates a divorce himself and does not plan to ever divorce at all. The wife's attempts to change something in the family situation are simply ignored. Divorce lasts a long time, painful.

Both sides employ a variety of psychological techniques, including:

Manipulating children;

Accusations of treason;

Involvement of children in psychological warfare;

Depriving the family of material support;

Revenge.

Such a father takes offense at everyone at once - the universe, society, wife and children. And he also takes revenge on everyone at once. To the last, he does not believe that divorce is a reality and psychologically adapts worse than everyone else. Addiction prone. He is usually pitied by the social environment of the family - because he suffers. Often disappears for a long time, is not interested in the life of the children (they betrayed him), does not give the family money or every payment to furnish in a humiliating way.

Offended fathers often come to a psychologist complaining of depression, inside which there is a lot of anger and resentment towards the whole world. People around them cause pity and irritation, sooner or later they cease to be called to family parties, because then the owners of the house for some reason quarrel. In adaptation, such fathers are helped by the distance, in which the family, wife and children are slowly moving away a considerable distance, the whole past life is being moved aside, analyzed. Often depreciated or idealized alternately. The exit from the merger with the family system is very painful and lengthy. Such fathers "disappear" not because they are bad people, but because they prove to themselves that they are able to survive, expelled from the family. And this is actually not easy.

Unfortunately, they themselves often spoil relations with children, who are often full of sympathy for their fathers upon divorce. But as offended fathers appear less and less often, and if they do, then such an appearance is accompanied by psychological destabilization or inappropriate behavior, children are more and more convinced that "the mother did the right thing, that she got divorced." The big mistake of such fathers is to fall into psychological regression and adopt to their children. Children do not like this, everyone, without exception, wants to have a strong, protective, mentally adequate father. As a result, the father loses his authority, the influence of his values and is annulled as an educator, which all together traumatizes him for the second time.

Moreover, in response, children themselves tend to react with psychological maladjustment. They begin to study poorly, do not obey, get sick, in a word, they try as best they can to return their parents to the parental position. That is why psychologists have so many children during the period of their parents' divorce.

If the children are small when divorced, they, of course, easily fall under the influence of the mother (grandparents). They can be easily turned against their father and intimidated. Young children often show a negative attitude towards their father and he does not know how to deal with it. He comes on a date appointed by the guardianship or the court with toys, and the child meets him with tears, screams, runs away.. He asks the psychologist - what does such a bad attitude mean, is it worth fighting when it ends? Will their relationship be restored? Should I show up once a year or two or three? Wait until "grows up and understands"? An extremely painful moment in the life of such fathers and a difficult experience to live.

My standard recommendation is that if you run out of strength and it is impossible to fight further, show up anyway, at least once - twice a year. It's better than just disappearing. Then, when this child grows up and comes to a psychologist, he will have great difficulties with the perception of the male role in the family and life. This applies equally to men and women. And this child will be grateful to you if at least something will know about you from personal experience, and not from the story told by the mother.

In this place, one is irresistibly drawn to whine about the role of the state in supporting the family.

With a huge number of divorces in our country, the family is in dire need of regulation and balance of interests of all parties - women, men and children. She herself is completely unable to cope with this. There is neither a culture of conflict resolution, nor a responsibility that is sufficiently deterrent to aggression.

Civilized divorce is a rarity and a huge human achievement. And so, the more I work with this, the more I tend to the idea that it would be correct to undergo family therapy for all family members in case of a divorce. It is necessary to somehow regulate the turnover of this aggression, just as we agreed not to use explosive bullets, antipersonnel mines and biological weapons. So this is the same at the level of a single family.

Let's return to the offended fathers. Divorce for them becomes a royal portal to a personal crisis, in which all life attitudes and experiences are revised. Many life hypotheses are subject to extremely severe disappointment - that "I did everything for the sake of my family and children", that "life for the sake of my family" guarantees lifelong gratitude and love.. That "life for the sake of the family" looks like this. In fact, such a father has to start all over again, he has a lot of fear and confusion. It is not entirely clear how exactly to start if the previous plan did not work out?

This is a long process: from three to ten years with a successful outcome.

If unsuccessful, offended fathers get stuck forever in the position of victim and resentment, become unpleasant evil people.

With the successful development of a personal crisis, offended fathers take their part of the responsibility for a broken marriage, restore working relations with their ex-wife and children, come out of regression and restore their authority. They form a new life plan, which may or may not include the family. Very often they abandon the family project in favor of personal freedom and comfortable loneliness.

Dad mommy

This type of father is extremely common among the generation of 35-45 year old men. Such men themselves were often deprived of their father in childhood due to divorce or for other reasons, were much closer to their mother. They gave themselves a vow never to disappear from the life of their children, so that they would not suffer as they did in childhood. According to psychological karma-irony, they themselves often provoke a divorce, unable to cope with the inevitably difficult periods in family life, or simply not wanting to endure unpleasant things. For for this (my) generation, the philosophy of "enduring for the sake of children" no longer works.

They come to therapy with a psychologist with one problem - relationships with women do not work out. In the standard version, these men do not disappear anywhere from the lives of children - on the contrary, children spend all weekends and vacations with their father, the father is aware of all the problems in the child's life, most of them spend a lot of financial resources on children and their ex-wife. A father-mom is prone to strong competition with his ex-wife for the love of his children and for being their best mom - to properly raise, feed, dress, etc. They are actually very good fathers. They are not ready for anything to lose the love of their children and fight for it to the last. Needless to say, almost all of their new relationships are doomed from the start. For several reasons:

In fact, they support the old family system, moving away from it only a little distance. They divorced according to documents, but not psychologically divorced. They are strongly associated with their ex-wife, there is an intense emotional relationship between them.

They spend practically all resources (financial, temporary and mental) on maintaining such a family system, little or not enough remains for new relationships. That the new partner realizes rather quickly, begins to fight for them and loses.

Such a strong love for children is like betting on zero in a psychological casino - the risk is huge. Which, sooner or later, mothers and mothers begin to realize. They, like the previous generation of mothers, "lay down their lives" for this love and would like guaranteed compensation in the form of reciprocal feelings of their children.

But life has its own program - no matter how close the parents are, sooner or later peers become more important. And then the children grow up, create their own families and "abandon" their mothers and fathers alone. It is often quite late, after thirty, but the stronger the loneliness in which mothers-fathers find themselves. Lonely, no longer very attractive to women, deeply disappointed in relationships.

But this is in perspective, and when they come to a psychologist, they still have hope. Quite ghostly, because they "merge" the relationship as soon as they cross a certain line, after which the old system must be changed. There is absolutely no motivation to change her, and because of this, women generally cause a lot of aggressive feelings.

There is, of course, the illusion that sooner or later there will be one "who will understand everything", will be wise and somehow solve the unsolvable puzzle of the life of a father-mother. But in reality, such a man immediately sees in a woman a dangerous enemy who seeks to subdue and force him to work. And he has children in the first place. So it's best not to change anything.

This is the kind of love and perspective. As a consolation, I think these mothers and fathers will be good grandfathers. That will give them love at an older age, extending life after retirement age.