It doesn’t matter how old you are when your parents divorce. It hurts at every age and it changes the way you see your own life. Unfortunately, there’s no way to escape the hard time you’re experiencing. It leaves you asking how to deal with your parents’ divorce in your 20s.
You have to feel the grief, pain, and confusion that comes from your family changing and transitioning into a different phase of life. But, there are ways to make the grieving process easier. Here are 23 tips to help you figure out how to deal with parents’ divorce in your 20s.
This post is all about how to deal with parents’ divorce in your 20s.
DEAL WITH PARENTS’ DIVORCE:
1. Remind yourself that your parents’ divorce does not negate your and your siblings’ happy childhoods
It’s natural for something life-changing, like your parents divorce, to make you question a lot of facts you believed about your life. For example, you and your siblings may think back on all of the happy memories from when you were young children.
Those memories are still real and valid, even though you’re now the adult children of divorce. What’s happening in the present does not change the past or how happy you were when you were a little kid.
2. Accept that you will experience a lot of emotions and they’re valid
When you’re getting used to different circumstances, any time you experience change, you’ll deal with uncomfortable emotions. Since you’re an adult going through the process of your parents’ divorce, you might be tempted to suppress your feelings.
Unfortunately, the only way to feel better about your parents separating is to let yourself feel the horrible stuff that comes with that. Let yourself feel all of the emotions for your good.
3. Consider seeing a family therapist
Therapists can take an overwhelming set of circumstances and make sense of them. They give you the tools to work through difficult emotions and the rough patches in your relationships.
Plus, you have someone to process your emotions with and, when everyone you love is connected to the divorce in their own way, you don’t always get someone to listen with your best interests in mind.
Family therapists are uniquely qualified to help you work through your parents’ divorce because they are trained to work with systems.
In other words, they think of every individual as a small part of a much bigger system (including family, marriage, and culture) and they look at the system as a whole when they treat the individual.
4. Avoid looking for a bad guy in your parents’ divorce
When you think of your parent’s divorce, you likely want to blame someone immediately. Maybe you can come up with a list of reasons why your parents’ marriage failed. Most of the time, children see divorces happening way before their parents accept it.
This means that you’ve noticed every time your mom rolled her eyes or your dad left the room and you can think back on all of those moments to identify the reason why your parents couldn’t make their marriage work. It’s natural to search for something to blame when you’re hurting.
You get to focus those negative emotions on someone and get angry with them. In this case, like pretty much every other case, this will stop you from processing your range of emotions and grieving the marriage properly.
5. Find out what a healthy relationship looks like
Since your parents’ marriage was your example of marriage growing up, you may never have seen a healthy relationship. Maybe you haven’t learned how to work through conflict in your own relationships, so you never make it past the first fight.
This is your chance to do some research and identify what a healthy relationship looks like for everyone involved. Ask yourself how to argue so that you solve the problem without hurting the other person.
You can also ask family members or a close friend what they think a healthy relationship looks like. This will help you understand which behaviors you need to unlearn from your parents and which behaviors are not normal even though you saw them in your parents’ relationship.
6. Give yourself the time to process the divorce
Once you find out about the divorce, give yourself time. Let your parents know you need space away from them. This way you can process your feelings without having to think about anyone else’s wellbeing.
Sometimes, you’ve watched the process of divorce happen over decades, which makes it that much more of a painful process to finally see happen. A lot is going to change even though you’re now the adult child of divorce, and change is scary.
Change is even scarier when you’re hurting as you adjust to new family dynamics and think of your parents as separate entities.
7. Prepare yourself for extended family celebrations
It’s strange to watch the families around you split up because of divorce. When your friends go through parental divorce at a young age, you watch them split their time.
Maybe it’s such a difficult time that their parents can’t be in the same room for years, so the child gets torn between parents. You, now being an adult, have to experience this on holidays, when your friends have gotten this process down by now.
You’re getting used to a whole new way of living in your 20s and it will take time for you to get into the flow of it. Be kind to yourself as you prepare for the formation of two separate families.
8. Allow yourself to go through the process of your own grief
The worst part about experiencing a divorce is that you don’t always feel like you have a reason to grieve if you’re not the one getting divorced. This is especially true if you’re an adult when you’re dealing with the impact of divorce.
Society can sometimes tell us that being an adult means you feel fewer feelings or are more capable of handling those feelings without processing them. This couldn’t be more wrong.
No matter what age you are, you need to process your feelings and validate your feelings. They’re real and they will not go away if you ignore them.
9. Accept this big change as one of many that are outside of your control
As annoying as it is to hear people say, “The only constant is change,” it’s true. It doesn’t have much meaning when you hear it all the time without any context, but it’s still true.
You can’t count on anything in your life to stay the same, so it’s best to put your energy into expecting change and growing resilient to it. Not to mention that some change is good and we choose it sometimes.
Relocating for a better job, growing a family with a planned pregnancy, and getting married are all examples of positive changes that we create in our lives.
So, it’s true that change is the only constant and it’s important to start accepting that so that you have the tools to bounce back after a major, painful change.
10. Consider the fact that your parents are happiest by going their separate ways
Regardless of how often we saw our parents fight or show contempt for each other, we never wanted to believe they were anything but a cohesive unit.
We may even think that our parents would be better off apart, but that’s just us getting angry about how much their contempt or anger towards each other hurts us.
When your parents finally divorce, it will probably still hit you hard because you don’t want to see them as two separate people who are happiest without each other.
No one wants to think of their parents like that. The beauty of being an adult when your parents divorce is that you have the distance from them to see that they’re doing the best thing for their marriage by separating.
11. Let yourself get angry at your parents if that’s what you’re feeling
Get angry. If you feel angry, let yourself feel it because it’s telling you something. This doesn’t mean you take it out on your parents. Instead, let yourself get angry and notice what you feel in your body.
Ask yourself where the anger is inside of you and listen to what that’s telling you. Oftentimes, our bodies will tell us why we’re angry if we feel that anger. It may sound strange, but take a moment. Maybe it’s your chest tightening or your head hurting or your throat getting dry.
Then, let that help you understand your anger. This is the only way to process your anger because it’s usually more complicated than you think.
12. Watch out for your mental health
When you’re going through your parents’ divorce in your twenties, it seems like the worst time to focus on your mental health. Your mental health is not great because the whole family is changing in real time.
A lot of memories are coming up for you with different emotions attached. It might seem impossible to think about self-care or mental health when you’re trying to survive each day, while also probably invalidating how much you’re going through.
Your entire life is changing because your family is changing and that is normal. You deserve to feel everything that comes up, but you also deserve to take care of yourself while you’re in this process.
That might mean getting professional help from a therapist, journaling about your feelings, or talking through it with your best friends.
13. Remember that you don’t always have to find the silver lining
It’s a big deal for your parents to divorce. So, while you should take care of your mental health and practice self-care, you also need to feel the anger, sadness, and pain. You can let yourself feel the negative emotions without shaming yourself into finding the positives.
Notice when people around you tell you to stay positive rather than listen to your feelings. You may need to distance yourself from these people because they’ll make it hard for you to feel your feelings authentically.
They might shame you for complaining or ranting when you have to process the negative stuff as part of the grieving process. You can’t skip the hard feelings because you’ll never move past them.
14. Set boundaries with your parents
Let your parents know that you need space. You can tell them that you’re still their child and you still want a relationship with them, but you need time to get used to your parents not being together.
The chances are that you two can’t give each other space to process because you two need that space for yourselves. It’s hard to talk about how much your parents’ divorce hurts to your parents, and you have to talk about it.
You need support, so let your parents know that you need time for that. Hopefully, they’ll respect it. If they don’t, take more space away from them because they’re not supporting your grieving process.
15. Expect the consequences of your parents’ divorce to pop up randomly
Years will go by and you’ll celebrate your milestone 30th birthday and realize you can’t invite both parents unless you want them to fight. This is one example of many that will pop up the longer your parents are divorced.
You will keep finding out new ways the divorce has changed your life and you’ll experience new consequences you never thought of before. Maybe one partner was financially dependent on the other, so they can’t go on the family vacation this year.
Prepare yourself for new triggers to pop up that will make you feel your parents’ divorce in new, different ways.
16. Prepare yourself for the day your parents will find new partners
It’s one thing to accept that your parents aren’t together. It becomes a whole new issue when you have to accept your parent’s new partner.
Whether the person is angelic or demonic, you will probably have to focus on personal growth for a while to get to the point of accepting them into the family. Plus, your parent may never treat the other person’s partner as valid or as family.
This will make it even harder for you. But, with some time and preparation, you can move through the emotions of their divorce to find the desire to see them happy above all else.
17. Ask yourself how this affects your own marriage or current relationship
Your parents getting a divorce is life-changing enough that it will probably cause you to question your identity. You develop your understanding of the world based on your relationship with your parents and their relationship with each other.
So, it makes sense that your parents’ split would shake up your world. This does, unfortunately, mean that you need to answer the questions that come up for you.
Ask yourself how your parents’ marriage, healthy or not, has influenced your view of marriage. From there, you can identify the harmful behaviors you learned from your parents that you need to unlearn.
18. Reach out to the people in your support system for help
Everyone processes pain and emotions differently. However, almost everyone benefits from connecting with other people and feeling empathy from the people who matter. In your case, think of the people you can trust to talk this out with.
Most likely, you will think of close friends and extended family members who can listen without using that space to process their own feelings about your parents’ divorce.
There’s nothing wrong with you and your siblings or parents bonding over your shared pain, but that’s not going to give you emotional support if you have to be concerned with someone else’s pain in addition to yours.
19. Remember that your parents are humans in addition to being your parents
Being an adult when your parents divorce can be beneficial. While it will hurt the same and present different existential crises, you do get the chance to see your parents from a different perspective.
The older people get, the more they realize that their parents are humans just like them. They are not all good or all bad people we thought they were at a younger age.
Plus, you might even have your own children by the time your parents divorce, giving you a new understanding of their situation.
20. Find a support group near you
Support groups are an invaluable resource when it comes to working through feelings of sadness without feeling like you can have open communication with anyone in your life. You can talk to friends and family detached from the situation.
But, they won’t understand or offer advice based on their own experience if they’ve never gone through a parental divorce.
When you attend a support group, you automatically gain a community of people who understand what you’re experiencing. If nothing else, you can commiserate and be sad together.
21. Stay in contact with your parents and communicate with them
If it helps, separate your parents from your family in your mind. Think of your relationships with your parents as separate from the divorce. This is important if you want to maintain a relationship with each of your parents aside from the years of marriage they’ve ended.
You don’t have to have a relationship with either of your parents if that feels like the right thing to you, but make this decision outside of the divorce.
By deciding to maintain your relationships with them while you’re going through this difficult period, you’re making sure that you aren’t making decisions based on your emotions.
However, keep in mind that you can stay in contact with your parents without talking about the divorce. Let them know that’s off the table for the sake of your mental health.
22. Keep in mind that being an adult doesn’t make it easier
You still feel the same feelings you did when you were little. Your perspective has changed and you are more mature, but that doesn’t change the negative impact of your parents’ divorce.
The worst thing you can tell yourself right now is that you should be able to handle this better because you’re older. It doesn’t matter how old you get, you still get hurt.
The only thing that changes is the amount of tools you have at your disposal. While you need to process your emotions, you also deserve to feel okay sometimes while you grieve.
23. Remember that it’s not your fault
Divorce is never the fault of the child, even if the parents blame them. In the same way, you are never responsible for the actions of your parents. When they divorce, it’s because they want to end their marriage.
They may have stayed together because they believed it was best for you, but that was entirely their choice.
You are never responsible for someone else’s perception of you and you can’t control it no matter how hard you try. You deserve better than to blame yourself for someone else’s decisions.
