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 adapated 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 estranged, 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 heart
and transform lives.
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 for as a trade paperback, or for 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 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.
Home
- Read the first chapter of A Healing Divorce
Questions & Answers - Benefits
- Table of Contents
Reviews - Video
Clips - Links - Contact
Us
Buy
a Healing Divorce
Tell your friends about A Healing Divorce
