My Parents Should Have Divorced

I was 8 years old when my mother discovered that my father was having an affair. I did not know it then, but it was also officially the end of my childhood and the start of having to grow up quickly as I was now at the early beginnings of a long road of traumas. Traumas that only within the last 2 years I have re-explored and dissected to finally heal. That is the thing about these types of life traumas, the effects of it are insidious and the damage may not even show up until years of denial later. What forced me to finally heal it will be a different story for another time, but let me start from the bare-bones of where all the trauma began: my parents and their unhealthy emotional regulation, their projections of it in their marriage and what they overlooked in me.

Even before my father’s affair my parents always had a rocky relationship. The unstable relationship was largely due to the fact that my parents did not have healthy communication skills, nor did they have healthy emotional regulation within themselves and it affected every aspect of their relationship, especially in the parenting and care-taking of their only-child: Me.

My parents both have varying levels of emotional unavailability and it shows through the way they react and express themselves. My father is extremely anxious, fearful and hides it all behind a loud voice, passive-aggressive behaviors and when angered or provoked he can hold grudges in silence for long periods of time. My father’s temperament, emotional reactivity and processing can be compared to a chronic illness—left unchecked, can wreak havoc on the body and cause much irreversible damage.

My mother is the complete opposite. She is very expressive, and projects her emotions loudly through uncontrollable outbursts of yelling, condescending lectures and can be repetitive in her delivery, but once she explodes she can quickly return to her normal self with no grudges. Her passive-aggressive nature shows up in that there are no conversations to iron out what just happened—we must all move on as if nothing emotionally taxing just happened. My mother’s temperament, emotional reactivity and processing can be best compared to a very active volcano—the more explosive eruptions it experiences, the quicker it can recalibrate and everyone around her can relax.

Despite my parents’ unique temperaments they showed me love and support in the best ways that they could, which I will forever be grateful for. My parents unconditionally provided a safe home, good food to eat, new clothes and stability in providing all of my needs for school and extracurricular activities that I immersed myself in. My parents are huge about education and always made a way for me to experience all that I could to expand my knowledge and curiosity of the world. They never stifled me in any way with exploring new hobbies and never questioned supporting my love for music, concerts, traveling and having fun. They spoiled me with a good education and the ability to have amazing life experiences and adventures. I am extremely lucky to have parents that spoiled me in this way and I know it is through these unconditional acts that they showed me their love despite lacking the emotional availability to verbally express it–I still felt it. I still saw it in every way that they showed me. What made things difficult growing up was that they did not know how to parent and support the part of me that I needed most to feel loved–which was empathy, emotional sensitivity, examples of emotional regulation and healthy communication.

As a young, undiagnosed highly sensitive empath, I could feel energies and emotions in my environment without the need for words—a sixth sense, if you will—that at the time debilitated and controlled me. Despite the physical and financial support my parents successfully and unconditionally gave me, you can imagine the level of anxiety I had growing up in an environment of emotional instability walking on eggshells from my parents’ opposite, yet intense, unpredictable temperaments.

I was already having to brace myself within this type of environment before my father’s affair, discovering the affair made everything exponentially worse. My mother became more condescending and emotionally reactive towards my father and to cope my father became riddled with guilt, laced with resentment because of how my mother was treating him. They both were extremely unhappy with each other but felt it was their responsibility to stay together for me. In hindsight, it was this specific statement said to me by my mother that stuck with me and negatively affected me moving forward: ‘I am only staying with your dad because of you.’

At age 8, receiving this, not even fully understanding what my mother meant I felt so guilty. I felt so sorry and did not want to be the reason my parents stayed together if it meant I had to witness, feel and absorb all of their sadness, pain and resentments day in and day out. I was already experiencing their volatile emotions before my mother discovered the affair and so knowing I needed to endure more because they felt they needed to be together for my welfare made me desperate for solutions to make things better.

There was one thing I knew that helped me to cope; I knew my parents found joy, pride and happiness when I earned awards, did well in school and excelled in extracurricular activities. As a now anxious 8 year old girl, empathic, and sensitive I felt completely responsible for my parents’ happiness and felt pressured to make it all worth their while in staying together for me. To cope and to feel like I had some sort of control of my environment I became a perfectionist and high-achiever. Since my parents showed their love for me by supporting me in every way academically, it was extremely important for me to always excel and have high honors in everything I did moving forward because it was only then that the energy positively shifted with my parents and my environment. It was the only time I experienced my parents being happy, so achieving became an addiction and like all addictions, this led me on a dark path. A path of people-pleasing, a loss of identity, self-esteem issues, insecurity, self-abandonment and an energy that attracted romantic partners who further perpetuated the trauma.

Now, at my current age of 35 and having acquired more clarity and awareness, I know my mother did not mean for me to take that statement and feel responsible for her happiness. She did not mean to say that statement for me to be riddled with guilt. I know she was doing what she thought was best at the time. I know both my mother and father had the best intentions and were doing their best to put me first. They both did not want me to grow up in a broken home and they did their best despite the circumstances.

Going through a journey of therapy and then couple’s therapy with my husband, as well as doing my own research to help increase my self-awareness and heal, what I have discovered about myself and my parents is that we were all on survival mode. My parents were in survival mode long before they even met–from their own childhood traumas, teen traumas and immigration to America. My parents brought their personal unprocessed traumas into their marriage and it manifested into more trauma within their marriage. My father’s affair was just one of the manifestations of each other projecting their unresolved personal trauma. To cope with them being in survival mode, I found my own survival mode to get through it all.

This is why I say my parents should have divorced. The decision for them to separate and for me to grow up in separate households, yet both parents be happy, would have been far less traumatic for me than them deciding to stay together and my continuing to witness unhappiness. I would say, from my personal experience, the greatest mistake my parents made was to stay together for me but do nothing to help improve and heal themselves. They stayed together out of love and responsibility for me, but did not prioritize to love themselves enough to choose healing and progress. I got to witness more trauma, more examples of lack of self-care and self-love which conditioned me to be the same growing up.

It was not until my 30’s, and after all the therapy and healing, that I cultivated the awareness to see my parents through eyes of compassion and understanding. I started to see my parents as real people with real traumas and not the “after-school-special” parents that I kept wishing for them to be. My parents are people functioning and parenting from their own levels of healing. Since they have not done too much to actively help themselves heal, they parented and functioned from the only place they knew how: their hurt selves. They were already giving me their best and I am grateful for their best.

My mother is now 62 and my father is 70 years old. They still continue to exhibit the same behaviors, communication struggles, resentments and grief. I watch as they are still together, but unhappy. They have resentments so deep that it has turned into invisible handcuffs. It breaks my heart that my parents have accepted their life to be this way. To this day, I still believe my parents should divorce, because it will set them free to hopefully be happy. What I can only do is love, hold space and compassion for them and continue to wish them healing.

Now married and with 3 children of my own, it has become extremely important for me to be my best, to heal what I needed to heal in order to have a healthy relationship with my husband and so we could be good examples for our children. I have learned to see the unhealed parts of my parents and my own childhood with eyes of compassion and love and use my experiences to break a cycle for my children. I can only control myself and I hope with my own self-care and self-healing journey I can make my parents proud of all the sacrifices they have made for me. In those same sacrifices I also hope for them to see another perspective: that I have grown to be an example of healing, hope, change and love to, hopefully, cultivate those same desires I know they have within.

My trauma started with my parents, but my triumph is also because of them. My parents unconsciously taught me the importance of healing and that I have choices. My children are so lucky to have my parents as their grandparents, because my parents’ unhealed traumas taught me the lessons I needed in order to heal my traumas. Generational trauma ended with me and now my children can have a new beginning.