All family members obviously suffer from the effects of divorce, but i never relised that grandparents actually suffer a great deal too. We know that children have a hard time coping, and ex-partners for sure. But the effects of divorce spread further than that.
I recently had to change my viewpoint. I am going to tell a story from my own life, and I hope you recognize the emotions and feelings I share.
Yesterday, my phone rang. It was my friend's Judy's father. Her family has always been like part of our family, and even though we live in another city, we still keep in touch by phone. Judy's Dad, Ed, was very upset over the phone. I will tell you the story.
Ed and his wife Karen have two children, Judy and her younger brother Andy. Andy married 16 years ago to a girl named Sue. Sue and Andy could not get children, due to some medical problem. They always said that the problem was of them both, and nobody ever knew what the exact problem was.
After some years, they decided they would go for adoption. Now these procedures take long years, and after 7 years there daughter Sandra arrived. Because they would love to have two children, they adopted a little boy too, whom they called Matthew. The children are now 5 and 9 years old, and they were a happy family.
At the end of last year, Sue suddenly phoned Karen, to tell her something unbelievable. Andy told her that he wanted to divorce, that he had been unhappy for a long time and that he wanted to move out as soon as he had rented a flat. Ed and Karen went to see her straight away, as they could not believe what was happening.
Needless to say, Sue was in a very bad state. The children did not know of anything yet, they were just wondering why Daddy was behaving a bit strange, and the oldest was making little jokes about Daddy's behavior.
Karen and Ed were speechless. Andy was their preferred son, they had been sure that Sue and he were happy and would stay together forever, and now this... Ed was very angry, Karen was very sad, and Sue was everything at the same time.
As said, Ed phoned me yesterday. He is still cross with his son, although he knows that that won't help much. It is actually bad for his own health, he has been suffering from all kind of stress related diseases over the past 12 months Now there suddenly is a new area where he has great difficulty to cope, again related to the effects of divorce of his son.
Andy is in a new relationship, he is living together with the new woman. Karen makes clear that she thinks that he has been dating her before he divorced Sue, but I think it does not really make a difference. The fact is that she is there and she seems to stay for at least a while.
Ed and Karen sought contact with the parents of Andy's new woman. I suspect that there mission was to make sure that her parents would talk to them, and maybe convince them to break up, so that Andy could get back to his family. This did not work, as expected. They are still keeping in touch, I am not sure what they talk about.
Last week, Karen phoned again with Andy's new 'mother-in-law', and she told Karen that the children had been staying with them. They do not have grandchildren yet, and they were really happy that the kids were accepting them so well.
Karen was very upset, and Ed became very angry again. First this girl steals away their son from his family, and now her mother steals away the grandchildren from them! Ed wanted advice, because he feels that his health suffers a lot, and the atmosphere at home is tense as well. Karen started crying again, and he started been stressed again.
When Ed phoned me, he wanted my opinion. Actually, he wanted me to agree with his point of view. He also wanted me to phone Andy to tell him how blunt and thoughtless he is.
At first, I was wondering what to say. I do feel sympathy for his way of seeing things, and I do feel sympathy for them as well, they have been like a part of my family for a long time after all. But agree with him... I was wondering if that would actually help anybody in this case.
I started browsing the internet, I found a couple of support groups, I started reading the posts, and suddenly my eye fell on this entry:
'Tinkerbell says: "Find your happy thought".
What that means: Focus on what makes you happy. You know the old saying:
Whatever you pay attention to, you will get more of
When you find something really nice to focus on, you will discover that you have less time to think about all the bad things in your life. Gratitude is a key in this process: Start realizing the good things you have, and express your gratitude for them. By focusing on the things you want, you also will discover more about your own personality: What is it that makes you tick?'
Now I realized that I found a gem here. I started thinking how I could get Ed and Karen to shift perspective and start being grateful for the things they have. I realized that they will only be truly happy again if they change their paradigm. They are still in the place where shortage rules, and they need to go to the place where abundance rules.
Explaining would not help. They would stick to their emotions, and they would not even let in the possibility that there would be another way to look at the situation. I had to find some other way to their heart.
I am convinced that nothing happens without a reason. Since a month or two I am part of a group of personal development minded people, we call ourselves the Magic Hat group, after the technique we are promoting. The founder of the group is a Master Practitioner NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) too. He developed a new combination of outstanding NLP techniques, to help people making a shift in their awareness and emotions in an instant. In his coaching practice he has had amazing results with this technique, and he is ow planning to spread the word (and the actual technique). I knew I had to try this new approach now. I was about to start teaching Ed the Magic Hats Technique.
When I phoned Ed back, I told him that I wanted to do an exercise with him, he would probably not understand straight away. I asked him to just listen and follow me, and that he could decide afterwards if it worked or not. After twenty minutes we were done, and his reaction was typical: 'Can you do this with Karen too? She will feel so much better.. Jeesh, it feels like I just threw off a backpacker with 20 big rocks in it.'
After that I did the exercise with Karen too. She was very skeptical at first, but because Ed pushed her, she did agree. Her results were maybe even more spectacular than the ones I had with Ed. Even Sue phoned me to ask what I had been doing, and when I told her she asked when I have time to do a session with her. Now I have other things to do as well, so I sent her to the Magic Hat website, where all the material is available for free. I have used only the yellow hat so far, but the other hats are promised to arrive soon. The yellow hat does fine for these kind of effects of divorce, but I am sure that the other hats will be geared towards other emotions, feelings, blockages, maybe also effects of divorce or maybe related to completely other fields of life.
When you are in a similar place, you now know that there are ways to shift your energy and emotions. In very short, the exercise exists of three short parts. You first hypnotize yourself, then you use the swish technique to change your emotion, you use a hat as an anchor, and voil. If you are at ease with NLP, this is relatively easy, if not you can find freely available step-by-step training videos on the Magic Hat website.
Charlotte Kamman is a blended family coach, she coaches families and individuals from all over the world. If you want to overcome effects of divorce, please have a look at the free videos and information on the Magic Hats website. Click here to get your own unique version of this article.
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