Divorce as Family Transition

When Private Sorrow Becomes A Public Matter

Margaret Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429912849
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Psychology

Based on the 1996 Family Law Act, this book looks at how the therapist can work with the different professions involved in a divorce, how children might be consulted, and ways in which vulnerable family members can be protected. 78 pages.

Chapter One
Introduction

There are two reasons for writing a book on the family transition of divorce at this time. Firstly, the original proposals in the mid-1960s to change the divorce law led to often fierce public debates, which were mirrored—but also provoked—by the media and which revealed oppositional and hitherto often privately held beliefs about marriage and the family.

It is surely significant of the need for change that the measures in the Law Commission's original proposals for the reform of the divorce law, laid before Parliament in 1965, led to more general demands for some reform, and these have built up over the last 30 years. There has been considerable concern, on the one hand, because we have the highest divorce rate in Europe, and, on the other, because of the cost of legal aid (£332 million in 1995), through which some 72.5% of petitioners in 1994/5 were able to claim legal advice and assistance. The Family Law Bill when proposed as legislation by the Lord Chancellor led to intensive political debate both inside and outside Parliament, often of an unprecedented form. Largely as the result of a campaign in one of the tabloids, the proposed Family Homes and Domestic Violence Bill was abandoned in 1995; the Bill has now been included in a slightly amended form in the new Act (as Part III). So the stakeholders in the current preoccupations are not only the families involved, the politicians, and the media; there are also the legal profession, the Lord Chancellor's Department, and, of course, the Treasury, the Legal Aid Board, as well as those caregiving professions such as health and social services whose task could be said to be to attempt to pick up the pieces of the fallout during and following separation and divorce. During the debates in the House of Commons, the vote was supposed to be one of individual conscience, and many ministers voted against the government even in the teeth of the impending general election; there was, however, tabloid-press pillorying of those MPs who voted one way but seemed in their private lives to live another. There were also apparently surprising cross-party alignments during the debates, in one of which, in the House of Lords, the Government was somewhat unexpectedly defeated. This involved an amendment, which was carried, to give the wife, on divorce, a share in her former husband's pension, and ways of achieving this are currently being explored. At the final and third reading of the bill in June 1996, the Family Law Act was eventually passed.

The rise in divorce rates

The divorce-rate figures have risen very sharply since World War II and are now huge. Indeed, it is argued that one marriage in three is likely to end in divorce: current estimates suggest that 41% of marriages in England and Wales will end in divorce, and these figures do not include the separation of cohabiting couples. In 1994, there were 158,000 divorces, 88,000 of which involved families with children under the age of 16. In fact, these figures represent a fall from 165,000 divorces in 1993, the first since 1989. The average ages of husbands and wives who divorced in 1994 were 39.3 and 36.7 years, respectively (Family Policy Studies Centre, 1996). Richards (1996) lists the factors associated with the rise in the divorce rate during the 1960s and 1970s as follows:

1. higher expectations of marriage, including an increased emphasis on conjugal life and sexual relationship;
2. increasing employment of married women, including those with children;
3. decreased stigma attached to divorce;
4. a relative reduction in the post-divorce support costs paid by men to their ex-spouses and children.

Research by Davis and Murch (1988) indicates that 51% of men and 29% of women regret divorcing and would have preferred to stay married, although fewer of these women were married to the 51% of men. Davis and Murch also point out that many couples use divorce to try to sort out their relationships. In 1993, 175,961 children were affected by their parents' divorce, and it is estimated that approximately half of these, particularly those in the lower socioeconomic groups, will lose touch with one parent (usually their father) within two years and also that one in four newborn children is likely to see its parents divorce (OPCS, 1995). The public cost of divorce has been put at £4 billion each year (Family Policy Studies Centre, 1996).

As the Parliamentary debates during 1996 on the proposed new divorce legislation have demonstrated, there is a prevailing view that the numbers of those who divorce are determined by the legal process. While, strictly speaking, couples cannot divorce if it is not legally possible, this certainly does not ensure that couples remain living together. The fact that the divorce rates have not continued to rise so sharply from the end of the 1970s is attributed to the less-favourable economic conditions, with difficulties over housing and insecurity of employment, rather than to any change in belief systems regarding ending marriages. In addition, there is greater knowledge of the difficulties that are endemic in marital breakdown, including emotional and socioeconomic problems and those that the children face.

The second reason for writing this book arises from my work as a marital and family therapist for almost 40 years and as a mediator since the early 1980s. I thought it might be opportune to pause so as to reflect on my work with families where the marital/partnership breakdown of the parents may or may not lead to separation and/or divorce and on the effects of this on the whole family. I should make it clear that this is not a "how-to-do-it" account but a hope that, in sharing some of the explorations and findings of my journey, these may be of interest not only to other family therapists, but also to mediators, marital counsellors, court welfare officers, and others who become involved with family members during the divorce process. As I have already said, in view of the high rate of separation this is likely to include most of those in the helping professions.

My approach is primarily based on systemic ideas, but I have also tried to cross professional boundaries, referring particularly to legal, mediation, and psychodynamic theories, as I shall explain later. In doing so, I hope I have been sufficiently clear and comprehensible to others whose customary professional ways of thinking involve using language differently.

Burnham (1992) has provided a helpful model and working definition of the approach, method, and techniques of family therapy. As he points out, the approach of the practitioner includes more than the theories that s/he espouses, embracing also the "values and assumptions which are associated with their selfhood", such as "their (dis)ability, intellect, sexuality, gender, race, religion, age, class, culture, ethnicity and social difference". These values and assumptions, of course, influence our choice of theoretical model and also combine recursively to influence how each of us participates in the social and ethical construction of our work. I shall focus primarily on my own principles and methods as well as attempt to cover what we know of research in relation to family divorce.

Personal and professional principles

The evident values of my selfhood are likely to be discerned by my clients, but I will make a brief attempt here to distinguish and describe the principles on which I believe I base my work. In fact, because many of my clients are also in the caregiving professions—and if I think it might be helpful—I often do just this at an early stage of our relationship.

Although brought up professionally (as it were) to base my knowledge and practice on psychoanalytic principles, I became part of the family therapy movement during its early days at the Tavistock Clinic and was also particularly influenced by the work of Robin Skynner, as well as later co-working with Ros Draper for five years during the 1980s. I never joined in the (then) rush to differentiate systemic family therapy from psychodynamic practice, because in those early days I realized that all new methods of intervention, in order to become established, need to overstate their differences from what has gone before. I would often retreat into my own understanding of psychodynamic principles in order to try to make sense of what seemed to be happening in the families I was seeing, although I did not acknowledge this publicly. Because separating or divorcing involves the separation of parenting into individualized parent-child relations, it seems to me important to hypothesize and sometimes explore how the individual parent's own experience of being parented might have affected the way each has tried to be a parent. What seemed to me to be paramount, then as now, is respect for personal autonomy, and for that reason I never felt entirely comfortable with devising strategic interventions—hence they rarely worked for my clients. I have been somewhat reassured theoretically by a recent article by Benjamin (1995) on the constructive uses of deception, which argues persuasively: "all human beings deceive and manipulate and sometimes the noble lie is essential for change." Now looking back, I think that I employed "object-relations" interactive psychodynamic theory when this seemed to throw light on what was happening in a family—just as now I use systemic ideas when co-working with a psychoanalyst colleague, or those of the law or mediation when the family seems to be approaching or is going through the divorce process. Nonetheless, I became a committed family therapist not only because this seemed to be a respectful and economic form of intervention, but also because children cannot wait for their parents to get themselves "sorted out"—at that time, much individual and couple psychotherapy seemed to go on for many years. While a number of family therapists now use psychoanalytic understanding as part of a hybrid approach (Bebe Speed, personal communication 1996) and most attend to the countertransference, as far as I am aware none of us interprets the transference, although we may be aware that it is happening. There is little comprehensive theoretical synthesis of psychoanalytic and family therapy. Now that Lynn Hoffman (1993) has introduced the idea of different lenses through which we can choose to perceive our work, maybe this lack of theoretical synthesis is not as significant as I once thought it was, and I may select an object-relations, mediation, or legal lerts, as seems useful, though always with a firm systemic base. This enables me to go on thinking of the family as a system, and indeed it is currently my belief that "once a family, always a family". Although the family form and interaction will certainly change after a separation or divorce, the objective of those who work with them might be that they should separate with the minimum of destructiveness.

In the meantime, I would describe myself as a social-coristructionist family therapist working in a circular conversational way with my client families and much influenced by Hoffman (1993) and by Anderson and Goolishian (1992). As I am beginning to understand it, this way of working is based upon Habermas' theory of discourse ethics (1990), in which the concept of the "ideal speech situation" is used to limit the ways in which discussions can be distorted by power relations. This, in turn, implies consideration of structural constraints (such as the way the conversation is itself set up), power imbalances relating to participants' differing skills, experiences, and motivations, and constraints that emanate from outside the discourse (such as pressure of time, social roles, and institutional affiliations of the participants and their differing control over the allocation of resources) (Blaug, 1995). Jeri and Ivan Inger (1994), drawing on the work of Buber (1965), put this aptly when they describe it as "experiencing, reflecting, organizing, synthesizing, re-experiencing, which requires us to be vigilant about our contributions to the evolution of the situation. Such a method is low on therapist control" (Heatherington, 1990); this is important not least because working with families involved in divorce both confronts and challenges our personal ethics: it is tempting for the therapist to make assumptions that divorce is inevitable, that the termination of such a marriage would be beneficial to one or both partners, or that it is essential for them to stay together for the sake of the children. Such implicit and personal assumptions—as I have learned to the cost of some of my clients—can unwittingly change the course of one's therapy as well as the lives of those one is trying to help.

My interest in this field led to my learning to practise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Contents
• EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO Divorce and the law
• CHAPTER THREE Legal "definitions" of the family, and the family life cycle
• CHAPTER FOUR Divorce as bereavement
• CHAPTER FIVE After separation and divorce
• CHAPTER SIX Post-divorce parenting
• CHAPTER SEVEN Methods of intervention
• CHAPTER EIGHT Mediation and counselling/therapy
• CHAPTER NINE Summary and conclusion
• REFERENCES
• INDEX