I don’t believe anyone wants to endure the pain and heartbreak of one or more divorces—or to see their children suffer. My parents divorced in 1960 when I was seven years old, before the divorce rate peaked in the United States. The concepts co-parenting and amicable divorce were foreign to my parents. While they were both good people, they had a lot of baggage and were clueless about how to navigate the challenges of raising four daughters after their divorce.
As a result, more than half of my childhood was spent living between my parents’ disparate worlds, leaving me feeling confused and pessimistic about adult relationships. As a young woman venturing forth into the world, trying to establish loving, intimate relationships, I found myself paralyzed with fear about my own relationships breaking up.
As a daughter of divorce, learning to trust is one of the biggest challenges I’ve had to face. At the very root of my mistrust is the fear that when my partner truly knows me, he’ll leave me. This lingering feeling of mistrust makes it difficult to be vulnerable and intimate with my partner.
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I believe that we are all born with the propensity to trust but through our childhood experiences, we can become mistrustful as a way to protect ourselves.
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I believe that we are all born with the propensity to trust but through our childhood experiences, we can become mistrustful as a way to protect ourselves. In my case, both my mother and grandmother where married and divorced twice and my mother remained single and somewhat bitter towards men until the end of her life. During the time I lived with my mother (after she left my father) I remember feeling a longing to be with my dad and anxiety about when I’d see him.
Always a “daddy’s girl,” I developed an intense craving for the love and affection of my father, as our interactions became fewer and farther between. In hindsight, I believe that I blamed myself for my father’s distance. But what I found out when I was an adult is that the high conflict between my step-mother and mother caused my dad to be more passive and detached. According to my older sister, he truly wanted to keep the peace and stay out of the crossfire.
As I struggled to deal with the aftermath of essentially losing my father at a young age, I never talked about my feelings of loss to anyone. I was afraid that others would just brush it off as me being needy , saying something like “you’ll get over it,” or even worse, reassure me of what I no longer knew to be true: “Your daddy still loves you.”
Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, my feelings of being betrayed by my father, coupled with my mother’s persistent bad-mouthing of him left me with a fear of abandonment and trust issues. Truth be told, I lacked a sense of control but had no way to understand and translate it.
Like many other daughters of divorce, I learned to adapt fairly well in some aspects of my life—at least on the outside. I was a good student and focused on pleasing my teachers. Although I didn’t attribute it at the time to the absence of my father, I did experience an intrinsic mistrust of men throughout my life, and oddly enough a strong craving for their attention and approval.
What I’ve come to believe is that our childhood experiences, including our parents’ divorce, create a scaffolding for how we experience love as adults.
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What I’ve come to believe is that our childhood experiences, including our parents’ divorce, create a scaffolding for how we experience love as adults. In my case, my parents’ split when I was young and I long to recapture the love they lost, even though it’s a fantasy. But since I didn’t grow up with a healthy template for how couples achieve intimacy and resolve conflicts, I’m more prone to reenact unhealthy relationship patterns. This has been my experience during both my first and second marriages.
Although I desperately want to build a positive relationship with my second husband, I don’t always know how to go about it. Even though he has never given me reasons to mistrust him, I find myself questioning his intentions all too often—wondering whether he truly has my best interests at heart.
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In any marriage, you are bound to encounter a few bumps in the road. When this happens, you may be tempted to point the finger at the other person, or even blame yourself. But what happens with me is that I’m wired to experience high levels of stress when I have even a minor disagreement with my husband. For me, even a difference of opinion over a trivial issue can cause my nervous system to go into overdrive, creating high levels of stress, doubt, and an urge to flee. This flight or fight response happens to humans in response to feeling threatened but it’s exaggerated in my case.
Are we wired to recreate the past? For instance, I was at a friend’s 60th birthday celebration recently and was suddenly flooded with feelings of mistrust as my husband Craig, who enjoys socializing, was chatting with an acquaintance—leaving me in the dust (from my perspective). My feelings of vulnerability were so intense that I spent most of the evening feeling jealous—barely speaking to Craig on the drive home. Needless to say, he was perplexed because he was clueless as to why I was so upset.
The uncertainty of intimate relationships can be scary. The breakdown of my childhood home left me hesitant to trust, even though my partner is reliable, honest, and faithful. In order to experience trust in others, I know that I must first overcome my self-doubt and lack of self-acceptance. By doing so, I believe that I’ll be able to open myself up to the real love and intimacy that I’ve craved throughout my life. Trust is an act of courage that can be achieved through trusting my intuition and facing my fears.
Terry recently published “Daughters of Divorce: Overcome the Legacy of Your Parents’ Breakup and Enjoy a Happy, Long-Lasting Relationship “available at Amazon.com. www.movingpastdivorce.com
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock