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28 Fam. & Concil. Cts. Rev. 19 (1990)
Divorce as Bereavement: Similarities and Differences

handle is hein.journals/fmlcr28 and id is 20 raw text is: DIVORCE AS BEREAVEMENT: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES Christopher Francis Clulow* Marriages are broken by death and divorce. Both these major changes introduce significant discontinuities in people's lives. They involve coming to terms with loss and the search for new meanings. The course of mourning, which has been so carefully charted in bereavement studies, can usefully be ap- plied to understanding the behaviour and reactions of those who divorce. Shock, protest, anger, pining, depression and despair interweave with each other before there is a sense of having come to terms with events and the process of recovery becomes recognisable for what it is. But do these different ways in which marriage end really have much in common? Although not yet as common as losing one's spouse through death, separation and divorce are experiences which touch the lives of many people. In England and Wales there are around 150,000 divorces each year, affecting nearly the same number of children. It is predicted that 37% of marriages will end in divorce rather than death, and for those who marry very young, or who remarry, the risks are even higher.' The family provides important resources and supports for its members, and supplies the social environment in which the next generation forms its assumptions about how people behave in relationships and how far they can be relied upon. For these reasons, marriage break- down and the way it is managed are important mental health issues. The statistical familiarity of divorce can have the effect of blunting sensibilities to its effects upon the individuals involved. In the short term, the experience can be extremely harrowing, even life threatening. Out of anger or fear partners are capable of committing a kind of psychological murder. As far as I'm concerned you don't exist in my life, said one woman to the man she was divorcing. Yes, I have a soft spot for my wife, quipped another jilted man bitterly, about twenty cubic feet of quicksand. The long-term effects will depend upon how the breakdown of marriage has been managed-by the partners, by any children they may have, and by the community in discharg- ing its legal and social responsibilities. In Britain, rather later than in the United States, there has been growing interest in examining ways of minimizing the damaging effects of divorce through providing alternatives to litigation for resolving disputes. The most comprehensive sur- vey of English conciliation services has recently been published by the Conciliation Project Unit at the University of Newcastle.2 * Christopher Clulow is a marital therapist, Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, The Tavistock Centre in London. He has written and lectured extensively in the field of divorce. The paper was presented at the Newcastle Conference on Conciliation in England in 1989. Among the interesting findings in their report was the confusion which exists in the minds of separating and divorcing couples about the nature of conciliation. In particular, they point to the difficulties people have in distinguishing between conciliation and reconciliation. They suggest that better information, clearer terminology and procedural changes would do much to reduce the confusion. No doubt this is true; but it may also be that the confusion reflects ambivalence about whether or not a marriage has ended. Very commonly one partner wishes for the marriage to end while the other wishes it to continue, and it is not unusual to find people of two minds when contemplating divorce. Conciliation assumes that the marriage is over yet draws the parties together to discuss the consequences. The subtle distinc- tion between working together as parents and being together as partners may be lost on those struggling to make the break in their marriage, or to avoid that break becoming final. Recently, the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies pub- lished the results of research which aimed to discover how far it was possible to help parents reach agreements over child custody and access issues when they were the subjects of welfare enquiries instigated by the courts.' In the course of doing this work we met parents and children who denied the reality of marriage breakdown (five in every six of our sample of applica- tions to the courts concerning children were set against a background in which one or both partners were still emotionally very engaged with each other), who were angry and outraged about what was happening to them, who felt guilty and fright- ened, who were depressed and ill, and who both wished to use the courts to further their ends and felt victimised by the judicial procedures they had activated. Their feelings were not unlike people who have been bereaved, and, of course, their experi- ences had much in common with them. While we saw a particularly contentious population - those who wished the courts to arbitrate for them - they confirmed the reality for some of the stress rating scale4 which ranks divorce second only to bereavement in terms of major crises in life. When considering the kind and degree of reaction to loss, one vital question to be asked is what (in terms of personal and social significance) has actually been lost. Among the bonds that hold people together in marriage there are: Economic Ties The financial basis of a marriage often only becomes apparent when it ends. Separation can lead to changes in job- related behaviour for men and women. Divorce almost always leads to an erosion of material security, especially for women (in this country 60% of lone mothers - many of whom will be divorced - claim state benefit at some point.) 19 FAMILY AND CONCILIATION COURTS REVIEW/VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1/JUNE 1990

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