Too many marriages fail today and even trained marriage counselors don’t know why. I have been a marriage and family therapist for over fifty years and the title of my website “Confessions of a Divorced Marriage Counselor” shows you what I have learned in my life and what I have done to help thousands of men and women recognize that divorce is not the solution. Spoiler alert: My current wife Carlin and I have been married for 45 years and our love grows stronger every year.
I could write a lot and tell you the full story, but I guess you’d appreciate me getting straight to the point and telling you what the ticking time bomb is and the secret to defusing it.
The hidden bomb causes changes in our brains when we grow up with a “father wound” and the secret to defusing it is to change the false beliefs planted in our brains that undermine our relationships.
Although this deadly time bomb can explode at any moment in a marriage, middle-aged couples are especially vulnerable. Susan L. Brown is Director of the National Center for Research on Family and Marriage. In a recent article, “The Graying of Divorce: Half a Century of Change” offers the following items:
- People over 50 are divorcing in record numbers and three to four families are feeling the effects.
- 1 in 4 divorcees in the US are over 50, as opposed to under
1 in 10 in 1990.
- As the divorce rate for adults over 50 increases, so does the number of adult children experiencing parental divorce.
- In their book Second chances: Men, women, and children a decade after divorce, Sandra Blakeslee and Judith S. Wallerstein tell us, “Divorce is illusory. Legally it is a single event, but psychologically it is a chain – sometimes an endless chain – of events, relocations and radically changing relationships over time, a process that forever changes the lives of the people involved.”
Understanding and healing the wound of the father of the family
Even though I had written several books that helped me understand what causes relationships to break down, including international bestsellers. Looking for love in all the wrong places, surviving male menopause, irritable male syndrome, and The Illuminated Marriage: The 5 Transformational Stages of Relationships and Why the Best Are Yet to Come It wasn’t until I faced the “father wound” that the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
In my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family, I say,
“There is one problem that surpasses all others in its impact on men, women and society. It is the wound of the father. We focus on the importance of mothers in determining the well-being of children. Without the support of their fathers, men become disconnected from their true selves, feeling that others control their lives. The father wound may be the most pervasive, most significant and least recognized problem facing men and their families today. The wound of the father is not limited to men. Women also suffer from the wound of the father.’
As I recount in the book, my father’s wounding began early. Like many men, my middle-aged father had become increasingly depressed when he was unable to earn a living to support his family. Although there were many problems in the system that led to him losing his job, he blamed himself and felt like a failure as a husband and father. When I was five years old, she overdosed on sleeping pills.
Luckily he didn’t die. He was committed to the state mental hospital, where the “treatment” of the time was inadequate at best and his condition worsened. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to prevent it from happening to other families.
According to the National Paternity Center,
“More than 20 million children live in a home without a father physically present. Millions more have fathers who are physically present, but emotionally absent. If classified as a disease, fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency.”
I grew up believing that there was something wrong with me, that I was somehow responsible for my father’s depression and suicide attempt. We now know that “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs),” including the loss of parental support, can affect our brain chemistry and the ways we perceive ourselves and our world.
As I wrote the book, My distant father, I thought I had healed my father’s wound and now I could share what I learned with others. One of those who found my book helpful was Iyanla Vanzant, the world-renowned spiritual teacher and thought leader, and host Iyanla Fix My Life on the Oprah Winfrey Network. He said,
“Millions of us grew up in a home with a father who was distant, absent, dismissive or dysfunctional. Jed Diamond’s wonderful healing journey offers us a story of hope, reconciliation and redemption where we can finally make peace with our father’s wound and find true lasting love in our lives.”
It wasn’t until the book was almost finished that I realized there was another wound of the missing father. I knew my mother’s father, John, had died when she was five (the same age I was when my father went into the mental hospital), but she never talked about when it happened or how it affected her life.
The hurt she never faced caused her to marry and divorce three times. I believe, like many, he was “looking for love in all the wrong places”, always looking for the father he had lost, but never realized it. Like many women, she had an unhealthy emotional attachment to me, her son, and was never able to have a successful, long-term marriage.”
I realized that all the women I had loved most had suffered from a father trauma: My first wife’s father died when she was seven. My second wife’s father couldn’t stand her growing womanhood, and he walked away from her completely when she hit puberty. Even my current wife, Carlin, lost her father through divorce.
Whether you’re a man or a woman, I think we can all relate to the words of fatherhood expert Roland Warren. “Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that doesn’t heal easily.”
Of course healing and defusing the bomb takes time. I have developed a program that I use with my private clients. You can learn about it and take the course here.
There is another course that is excellent called “How to Diffuse the Divorce Bomb,” developed by Steve Horsmon, founder of Good Guys to Great Men. You can view this lesson here.
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