How it Feels to Have Divorced Parents; From Someone Who Has Had Divorced Parents for 10 Years

Are your parents divorced? Do you feel like it has scarred you for the rest of your life and made you feel ruined? Do you also feel like you’re alone out there? Well then you’ve come to the right place.

Having divorced parents is mostly like a battle in tug-of-war, but you’re the rope. You have to deal with a lot of different things. Talking in the sense of what it’s like, you’re gonna have to deal with having to choose sides, parents getting separate houses, and trying to deal with both parents separately but also all the time. So, let’s talk about what you will have to go through.

First, let’s talk about choosing sides. With that you have to pick between one of your parents, for whatever situation you’re in. But the hard part about it is that you don’t want to either hurt one of their feelings or make them feel like you don’t wanna be with one another. Which does hurt you in the meantime, and is a very hard decision to choose, but whatever happens it’s never gonna be your fault in the end. Next, we’ll talk about parents having to get separate houses. Although this might not sound bad at first glance, it’s very complicated between wanting to stay at your moms house rather than your fathers (or whatever is which to you). Some advice I could and try to give about this is that it matters how you feel about going to either house because if you feel safe or not in one house you would want to move to the next house. So it all depends on how you feel about staying at, let’s say your dads house for example. If you don’t feel safe there for whatever your dad does, you have the ability to not want to be there and go to your moms. And the last thing to talk about for this part is on how you’re gonna have to deal with both sides. What I mean by this is like, let’s say one of your parents does something stupid or random to you, then they get the other parent involved and it becomes a whole situation. What I would do if I were you in this situation is not talk to the parent that started that whole dilemma until you are ready to speak to them again.

Having divorced parents feels like an emotional train wreck. It makes you have so many emotions that you haven’t realized you had them yet. So with that we’re gonna talk in this part about how being angry with one side, getting frustrated with one side, and feeling unfair about things all relate to each other. Let us start with being angry with one side/parent. This feeling is one that makes you want to push away from that parent, because of what they did or what they’re doing. Some advice for this is to maybe tell the other parent of what has or has been happening and listen to their advice to either try and fix the problems you’ve had with them or to stay away. Now we’ll talk about getting frustrated with one side/parent. Being frustrated feels different than just being plain angry, it definitely makes you want to punch something. This is a normal feeling to have, but a piece of advice I have is to just let it be. No matter how frustrated you get, expressing your anger the way you want to could make things even worse. Trust me I know how it is. One last thing is that you’re gonna have an unfair feeling about most decisions that get made. What I mean about his feeling is that most things that’s gonna happen during this time period is how unfair they are to you. And yeah, parents are gonna say things like, “Oh but it doesn’t matter if it’s unfair or not, I’m your parent and you have to listen to what I say!” This is probably one of the most unfair things a parent could say to you, right? Well for now it seems like it. It’s gonna stay like this till you’re old enough to speak your mind and make your own decisions.

Having divorced parents can cause a lot of problems in your life, such as depression, the most common feeling to have during something like this. So, what even is depression? Depression is a mental health condition that causes sadness and the feeling of emptiness. You lose motivation to do things. There are many reasons that cause this condition, and one of them that we’ve been talking about is the divorce of your own parents. I don’t really have any perfect advice for this one, as I deal with it myself. If you feel depressed it’s important for you to tell one of your parents or a trusted adult that you feel most comfortable telling. You can also talk to a doctor about your condition, and maybe they’ll have you talk to a therapist about it to get it off your shoulders. The people at the National Institute of Mental Health say that you should start with tiny goals, practice self-compassion, and seek professional help. Because of having depression, you might start to lose the motivation to do a lot of things, even if they are your favorite things. I actually have an example for this, it’s about the job I’m doing right now, writing for Teens in Print (TiP). But it’s not just about TiP, it’s about the loss of motivation that depression gives me. This causes me to be several minutes late to get here and also not have that good of a start to the day or even the whole week. 

And last but not least, we’ll end this off by talking about how you might get the feeling where you don’t wanna even talk to one parent or the other. Some examples of this could be when one parent does something that you really don’t like, so you push yourself away from them as much as you can. Some advice I would give for this is that you should at least try and talk it out with the parent before you try and push yourself away.