Dealing with a divorce as a kid

Few kids that have to deal with parents going through a divorce experience it calmly. While there may be some adults (few admittedly) that can focus and detach themselves through a permenant seperation, kids react on pure emotional levels. The political structure of greed and anger that erupts when parents divorce tends to drop like an atom bomb of reality.

This can often be good, in some ways, as people can live their entire lives in a suburban cave and not have to deal with real life situations. Of course, it is also a strong shock to the life system that many may not be able to cope with. Insanity becomes something that one has to cope with, and forge a path through the chaos.

The peaceful people you thought your parents were, now have 500 meter restraining orders, and making claims that one of the parents sexually abused your sister, perhaps to maintain custody. Watching adults change, while still being a child, gives great future insight to life choices once childhood is shed off. Hatred and violence in the midst of a pristine middle-class existance seems more in place in the nightly newscasts of Eastern Block countries than behind the fallen china plate cabinet and broken windows.

It's funny when people wonder why some teenagers are so angry, even funnier when some teenagers try to fit into that mold without the experience that fuels the anger. Some kids will sink deep inside themselves and turn to their computer to code and lose their consciousness in assembly of another world, while others will put on fatigues and Doc Martins and storm the neighbourhood with baseball bats, destroying property and fighting each other. The fact is, kids are isolated, the support for rational choice is non-existant, when their lives have become battle zones.

Life is a serious fucking mess for some people, and for others it's a droning monotony that never wavers. Different people find their own ways of expressing themselves, and it's unfortunate that many need to find strength by, for example, stealing their mom's bf's drugs & chasing them out into the street with knives. Regardless, for both the quiet and the extroverted, the removal of a known structure creates lost and isolated feelings. violence and suicide are often the result.

Kids need time to re-formulate their world's grounding, the internal structures used to give function to their lives. It can take a long time, and often poor choices are made. Good, proper support is very important from a neutral environment. If you have experienced your parents divorce from between 10 and 16, you may well relate to the confusion and terror i've explained. If not, you lack a dimension of understanding that goes a long way to understanding kids, and some adults who may appear bitter.