The consequences of a divorce are the equivalent of a major earthquake in a child’s life, mind and feelings. As an adult, you may also feel these tremors inside yourself once your divorce begins, but you have the experience and developed life intelligence to survive the shocks and move your life forward. Your children are still novices in coping with the major life crises that adult hearts and minds are used to.

When left to their own imaginings and fears, children believe distortions of reality when they start to feel that they caused the divorce because they didn’t eat their spinach, or that they brought home two C’s on their report card the night that their mommy left.

There are thousands, if not millions, of cries for help from children of divorce that echo in therapist offices across Massachusetts. All of these examples have one thing in common:  they are all self-centered remarks. They all arise from the desperate need of the children to feel secure in the face of a crisis that has shattered the stability of their personal world. Their sense of personal security was rooted in their assumption that mom and dad would be living together in the same house forever.

Children see divorce through the tunnel vision of “What is going to happen to me?” Since they are too young to survive on their own, their own security is their overriding concern. When their home life is disrupted, it becomes a major sense of concern.