Questions and Answers

Q: What’s a divorce ritual?

A: A divorce ritual, or parting ceremony, is a way couples can end their relationship with forgiveness and healing.

Q: Sounds weird. Why should anyone use ritual for a divorce?

A: Although most people don’t realize it, all marriages end in ritual — a court hearing, signing legal papers and, all too often, ritual combat between ex-spouses and their lawyers. Unfortunately, such ritual is usually angry, impersonal and demeaning and creates wounds that may not heal for years, and often permanent estrangement. By shifting the focus from adversarial legalities to issues of emotion and spirit, a parting cremony can help a couple remember and celebrate what was good and beautiful in their relationship and grieve what they must now let go.

Q: OK, but why should anyone care?

A: Fifty percent of all marriages now end in divorce. If half the people who marry — millions every year — end up angry, embittered and estranged, this blights their hearts and the hearts of their children. It also makes joint custody and/or co-parenting more difficult, not to mention any relationships they might have in the future. If a divorce ritual or a parting ceremony can contribute to healing and an improved relationship between ex-partners, and a better life for their children, isn’t it worth exploring?

Q: I’ve been divorced. There’s no way my ex and I could do something like this.

A: Perhaps. On the other hand, you may be in thrall to the Myth of the Bad Divorce. This myth promotes the idea that all divorces must be nasty and brutal. Our adversarial divorce system reinforces this idea by constantly reciting what we call the ABCs of divorce: accusation, bitterness, conflict; anger, blaming, contempt. It’s true, most divorces are painful. But research tells us that they do not have to be destuctive. Ritual can help make a divorce healing, as the stories in our book clearly show.

Q: Are parting ceremonies religious?

A: Not necessarily, but they can be. Almost all the rituals we’ve come across have been spiritual in nature, and some Christian denominations, as well as Reform Judaism, offer rituals for divorce or rituals for healing that are often adapted for divorce.

Q: Can a parting ceremony help my chidren?

A: Absolutely! As we all know, children often suffer most from a divorce. A parting ceremony be healing in a number of ways. Chiefly, it can demonstrate that, even though divorcing, their parents are able to work cooperatively, even lovingly, to create an ending to their relationship. The parting ceremony itself can include statements of continued love and commitment from parents to children. All this can be very reassuring to children who fear that they’re losing a parent and a family.

Q: What’s so special about ritual?

A: Ritual is a way that we symbolize rites of passage, usually from one stage of life to another. A christening is a rite of passage into the community of believers. A wedding ceremony is the way we symbolize the rite of passage from being single to being married. A funeral symbolizes the transition from life to death. For millenia, such symbolic rites of passage have proved their power to facilitate life transitions and offer a way to work with the grief we feel for the life we have had to leave behind.

As our culture evolves and our life spans grow longer, some life transitions appear for which there are as yet no effective rites of passage. Divorce is one of these. Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. In our culture, divorce has become a huge problem. The evidence is all around us in the form of thousands of books and articles. However, despite the statistics and the vast literature on the subject, divorce is still seen by many as an anomaly, a "failure" of marriage, and there is a reluctance to recognize it with ritual. We disagree. Whether one sees it as a failure or as a sin, it is without question a major life transition for millions of couples and their children — a life transition now handled coldly and impersonally by law and the courts. We believe that reframing divorce as a life transition and using ritual to facilitate the divorce process can heal hearts and transform lives.

Q: What if my ex won’t participate? Can you do a divorce ritual by yourself?

A: Yes. If possible, we believe it’s most healing if a couple can work together to create a ritual, but many of the rituals and ceremonies in our book were created and performed by individuals and single parents with powerful healing effect.

Q: Isn’t divorce a sin? And aren’t you promoting divorce and celebrating sin by using a ritual for divorce?

A: We don’t believe that divorce is a sin. We understand, however, that many people do. This is why we’ve included a chapter in our book called "Ritual, Religion and Divorce" in which many ministers and rabbis discuss this and other related theological questions. As far as promoting divorce by creating divorce rituals is concerned, we think it very unlikely that anyone would endure the pain of divorce just for the sake of a ritual. On the other hand, if a divorce is inevitable, we also think it makes sense for people to find a way to separate that is as healing as possible for all concerned.

A: How many people have done this?

Q: We don’t know, but from our research we suspect a lot more than you might think. At this point, though, parting ceremonies are a bit unusual — not surprising since the culture is still in thrall to the Myth of the Bad Divorce. That’s one of the reasons we wrote A Healing Divorce, so that there’s a resouce for people who want to find a more healing and forgiving way to end their relationships.

Q: Is there some formula or outline for a parting ceremony?

A: Not really. We offer what we call a template which will help you create and perform a ceremony of your own. But as you will see from the stories and ceremonies in the book, each is unique. Some are based on a denominaltional liturgy, some are ecumenical in spirit, and one even centers on dance.

Q: How can I buy A Healing Divorce?

A: A Healing Divorce is available as a trade paperback, or as an e-book, from 1st Books.com. Click here to find out how you can buy it as an e-book or to order a print copy online. You can also buy it from online booksellers such Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or order it from your local bookstore.

Q: How can I learn more about how to make divorce more healing?

A: You can check out our link page to other helpful divorce related sites.

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