Speaker 1:
Welcome to John Susko’s A Better Way to Divorce podcast. John Susko is a Florida family law attorney whose practice is focused on collaborative divorce and mediation. And now here’s John Susko.
John Susko:
Well, I’m here today with Carol Hughes who holds a doctorate degree in clinical psychology. She achieved it Summa Cum Laude, and also a Phi Beta Kappa honors. She’s a two time Fulbright scholar, board certified hypnotherapist and an EMDR therapist. And I had to look that up, but I think I got a feel for that. And she has been working in Laguna California as a therapist co-parenting and child specialist, a divorce coach and mediator, and she has assisted hundreds of families going through separation and divorce. She is a member of the collaborative divorce solutions of Orange County. Served on the board of directors and in many capacities, she has written several articles. One was in the book called Divorce Puzzle:Connecting the Pieces Collaboratively published in 2007 by Open Palm. And she’s co-authored a book Home Will Never Be the Same Again: A Guide for Adult Children of Gray Divorce published in 2020. So thank you for being here. Carol, tell us a little bit about your life as a psychotherapist and a mediator and counselor out in California.
Carol:
Okay. Well, I’ve been a psychotherapist for several decades working with families, couples, children. Now you’re an adult. And in early 2000, I read about collaborative divorce process that was going on in Seattle. And I was really intrigued by that process. I thought it would be really good for families. I am also Orange County Superior Court appointed child therapist, a reunification therapist, family therapist, helping families who are in the litigation process. So having done that for a long time, I was really positively impacted by what the goal of collaborative and mediation and so I [crosstalk] go ahead.
John Susko:
No. How do you do… Here in Florida we have a facilitator role and perhaps a financial planner role. And then we’ve got two attorneys. Tell the folks how it’s done in California. I mean, what are the players at the table?
Carol:
Okay. And I don’t speak for all of California, but I know a lot of California uses a two coach model where each client has his or her or same-sex, whatever the partnership is, has their own divorce coach collaboratively trained. We have to be licensed therapists or psychologists in California to be collaborative professionals.
We’ve also started over the last 10 years or so using a hybrid model, what we call hybrid, where we have one coach and we call it either a single coach, like in the Texas model, or we call it the family specialist. And that person serves as a divorce coach to both of the adults, both parents, and sometimes also meets with the children, minor and adult children. So we’ve combined the child specialist role and the two coach model role sometimes into one family specialist, which is the closest to your facilitator [crosstalk] model. And then sometimes we still have the family specialist, and then we have a child specialist that’s separate. So it isn’t a one size fits all. We tailor it to what we think will best serve the family. But of course there are two collaboratively trained attorneys that’s a requirement for collaborative.
John Susko:
Okay. Well, tell us what inspired you to write the book Home Will Never Be the Same Again. Can you please?
Carol:
I will. Well, as a therapist for decades, I did work with a lot of adult children whose parents were going through divorce. There wasn’t… It did not [inaudible] gray divorce yet? Although the research shows that the gray divorce, they called it revolution, that was Bowling Green State University started researching from 1990 forward and they named it the gray divorce. But in my therapy practice, I was working with a lot of children who were already adults when their parents were going through divorce. And I was struck by that there was no help for them anywhere and nothing. It was one book that had been published. It was out of print and a second one kind of almost memoirs of adult children going through… Two different adult children, but there really was no research. There was nothing out there. So I just treated them as, therapy clients as best I could.
And then when I helped form collaborative divorce solutions in Orange County in ’03, eventually we had a blog on our website. And so one of the topics I wrote about was adult children, whose parents are going through divorce. They’re already adults when their parents are divorcing. And in early 2016, New York times journalist reporter was doing an article on adult children of gray divorce.
And she found my blog on our website and ask if she could interview me for an article, which she did. Came out in April of ’16. And then in September of ’16, a literary agent from Roman and little… Sorry, Curtis Brown in Back East called me and said, would I be interested in writing a book about the topic. I had never really intended to write a book about that, but I’m one if something comes to us like that, then I say, yes.
John Susko:
All right.
Carol:
And, and.
John Susko:
Go ahead.
Carol:
And these adult children need a voice. They need our culture to understand that what they’re going through is a trauma. It is painful, they are grieving, some are angry. And so I wanted to shatter the myth that they’re adults now that they can just roll with it and get over it.
John Susko:
I got to tell you, you shattered my myth again. I had back when I was practicing a lot of family law back in the 90s, we basically would tell ourselves the family law attorneys, we tell ourselves that children were resilient. And I realized that was a myth when I get out of the practice. And when I read your book or when I had your book first, it just blew my socks off because I understand what these children…. They’re major stakeholders, but they’re not being brought to the table. And again, it’s hard to bring up to the table but… So tell us how prevalent is gray divorce. I mean, tell us a little bit about the numbers.
Carol:
Yes. Well, I didn’t do the research Bowling Green State University did. And they, as I said, a few minutes ago, they started studying the US census. By the way, this is a phenomenon that’s happening throughout the industrialized world. It isn’t just the US, but Bowling Green State first published about it. And what they found was of their first run at the studying the census was between 1990 and 2010, the divorce rate for those parents. Well, not necessarily just parents, but couples 50 years and older had doubled in those 20 years between 1998 and 2010. And they predicted that at the rate it was going, by 2030 it will have tripled. And then they did another review that they published on the census in 2015, which showed that the divorce rate was continuing at the rate that they had predicted. It would have doubled.
And again, they were projecting that it would triple by 2030. So that’s the adults that are divorcing. And then just on average, if you look at a marriage, the average number of… This is an average of course, children that parents have is two. And we know many families have more, many don’t have any children. And so if, and then every year they found that 600,000 adults were divorcing in that age group, 600,000. So if you take that 600,000, which is maybe just couples that would make a couple as 300,000. Are you following my numbers here?
John Susko:
Yep.
Carol:
And then by two children for each marriage that’s 600,000. Plus the 300,000 of the couples that’s 900,000. We’re just guessing as best we can from the statistics. So, and then each year, many of these adult children and their parents have not healed. They’re still grieving, a lot of them. Most after about three years are in a better spot. So we’ve got over roughly a million people each year in the United States alone, that this is a population that’s being affected between the parents and the adult children.
John Susko:
Do you have any theories as to why people are divorcing later in life?
Carol:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Several. One, we’re living longer, better healthcare, and people are taking better care of themselves on average. So a lot of times, if people married in their 20s, 30s, even 40s, they’ve been together, 20, 30, 40 years of marriage, depending on when they married. And if it wasn’t the happiest of marriages, or if they’ve drifted apart, they start thinking I could live another 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Do I want to stay married to this person especially if they haven’t been happy? So longevity is one, a second reason is that the majority of women in the United States who are married, do work outside the home and have their own careers or professions. So they’re not as economically dependent on their husbands. And the research shows in the United States, the majority of divorce filings are by the wife so that would be a second reason.
John Susko:
Are you finding… This is a collaborative question, I guess, is, are you finding that the divorces are more contentious because there’s more things to fight about or what happens going through typical California divorces?
Carol:
Well, I know from a colleague of mine, a family law attorney, he said that a couple of years ago in the California bar journal the statistics, where I want to try to get these right. Throughout California, which is a very litigious state of course, known for that. And of the family law cases, the divorce cases that are filed only 10% go to trial. That would be the most litigious ones. Right? And in Orange County, which is a very litigious County, he said the statistics were 30% go to trial.
John Susko:
Oh my goodness.
Carol:
I know. So since we’re in orange County, even in collaborative, I think a lot of people have began thinking that collaborative is just a softer, kinder way to do litigation. It’s out of court and just the last seven or eight years or so, a lot of our collaborative cases have been very high conflict. So now we say in my practice group, we just go into a new case thinking it’s going to be high conflict and we’re pleasantly surprised if it isn’t.
John Susko:
That’s good. Okay. Tell me again now the adult children, why do we dismiss? I mean, I don’t remember why as a family law attorney I would have this myth that children were resilient, but why do we dismiss adult children?
Carol:
That’s a really good question. And I think there’s several answers to that too. One. I think the family law attorneys traditionally have dismissed adult children because they are not within the jurisdiction of the court. It’s the minor children or the ones that are… Well, I’ll just say minor children that’ll be simpler. And then the second reason I think is that, what parent doesn’t want to believe their children are okay when they’re going through divorce. I mean, that’s what parents want. Right? Most parents want their kids to be okay. And that they are ‘adults’ we have that mythology in our culture that when the kids magically turn 18 years old, they’re mature and have all kinds of coping skills that they don’t have. And I don’t know about you, John, but I have yet to meet an adult, any adult who’s going through divorce, a husband or wife or whatever, who isn’t having some difficulty and some painful feelings, grieving, anger, sadness, fear. So why would we think as a culture that the adult children, aren’t having some of those feelings?
John Susko:
I think in your book, you talk about the fact that the home is not there. And I went through a divorce and it was a somewhat friendly divorce back in the late 70s. And I was going down to borrow something that was… I’m sure my wife would have allowed me to have and we weren’t in the ages of cell phones so I left messages and I showed up at the door and I put the key in the lock and it wouldn’t work. And I realized what had happened and I sat on the front porch and cried like a baby, because that wasn’t my home anymore. And so I understand what you’re saying in terms of never having a home or not having a home. What can the parent do to help their children with this process? Or let me phrase the question differently. Tell me what your adult children tell you going forward about their thoughts about the divorce of their parents.
Carol:
That’s a very good question. First, the adult children and the research shows this too. There’s a little bit of research that we included in the book that has been out by the time we were writing the book. Number one, the adult children say, I just want my mom and dad to get along. It’s the same number one statement that minor children say almost unanimously. So that’s a good reason to do a peaceful divorce process. Right? Collaborative or mediation. Number two, they say they don’t want to feel invisible. They want to have what they’re going through, their experiences and their feelings be acknowledged. Many say, I don’t want to feel crazy. And when they find out that what they’re experiencing is expected, and it’s a common experience that many adult children have. They often say, wow, you mean I’m not crazy. I was feeling crazy.
They want their parents and friends and their support system, their community, to understand that they are affected by their parents’ divorce, their home… And the home you mentioned a minute ago, John, the family home, the residence is a home. And it is where many of the adult children grew up and expected to bring the grandchildren, et cetera, and is also symbolic of all of that breaking apart, the bonds, seeing mom and dad together, feeling like you’re caught in the middle, just like minor children are caught in the middle many times. So the home is symbolic of that and as you went to your front door and tried to unlock it, a lot of adult children don’t feel like that’s their home anymore. Sometimes the home is sold. And so they want their parents and their community support system to understand the losses they’re going through, which is why we have a chapter on grieving also in the book.
John Susko:
And what… Well, let me first, let me, I just want to say that we are here talking to Carolyn Hughes one of the authors of Home Will Never Be the Same again: a Guide for Adult Children of Gray Divorce. What can the parents do going forward? I mean, what would you recommend they do if they came into you ahead of time? Which they probably don’t.
Carol:
Unfortunately, that’s right, John. They usually don’t. If they do, or they come to me later, I tell them the number one thing that I want them to practice doing, and I have handouts and things I give them to do to learn is simply listen. Listen deeply to what their adult children are saying they are feeling and going through. And when we listen deeply, we listen without judging and we’re not formulating what we’re going to say to try to convince them to feel a different way or do something different. We simply listen.
I tell people, that’s why we have two ears and one mouth is listening is more important than talking. And then the second thing I tell them, that’s the most important is to please use a peaceful process because, and don’t put their children in the middle their adult children. It’s tempting for parents to think of their children who are adults as confidants or their therapist to use them that way as their confidant or their therapist tell them all kinds of negative comments about their other parent, ask them to align with them against the other parent that is damaging to the adult children just as it is to minor children. So avoid all those pitfalls. I educate them about the pitfalls to avoid.
John Susko:
And in addition to problems between the parents taking sides is the rest of the members of the family, because other people are going to be on other sides. I mean, can you explain that please?
Carol:
Exactly. Exactly. Well sadly our culture is still… Thinks of divorce as a war to be won. A battle to be won. Win, lose. And so that encourages family members and friends, community support members to line up on one side or the other. And so it’s a cultural phenomenon. I mean, one of the contributor to the book next to the last chapter is Sharon Alison who wrote taking the war out of our words, and we still do think of divorce as war, as I said. And when we think of divorces as war, we have to think of sides and then that’s how people start lining up on each side. And it’s very sad to see.
John Susko:
Yeah. I mean, it sad in all divorces.
Carol:
Yeah.
John Susko:
I mean… Let’s see. Talk a little bit about the traditions and the celebrations that go on with the, I guess it’s the adult children’s families. Tell some interesting stories in terms of what happens with parents that are grieving. Can we have grandpa and grandma at the same function?
Carol:
Right. That’s the wish. I mean, if it was a very high conflict marriage many adult children are just glad to have peace and can’t even imagine having their parents in the same room, because it was such a high conflict marriage. That sounds understandable and unless those parents that you say they’re grieving and anger is always part of grieving. So it might be a few years, hopefully they would do their own work with the therapist or a counselor to get to the point where they could at least be grandparents together in the same room for their children. That’s something that, as I said earlier, adult children want. Most adult children, so that they have not completely lost that sense of family. And so that their children can experience grandma and grandpa together as a grandparent unit. That’s an important attachment bonding process for young children or any children.
What often happens though, is that because of the warlike process, that so much of divorce is, adult children feel like they have to, show up at moms, show up at dads, split their day and some of them just decide… For holidays and things, they’ll just have their own holiday celebration, start a new celebration tradition to avoid conflict between mom and dad. And if their children are having birthdays or some other graduation celebration, many adult children say they didn’t really want either parent to come to the graduation like college graduation let’s say, or their children’s graduation, because they knew that it would be tense. It would be a tense situation. So all of those kinds of situations occur if parents can’t do what’s right for their adult children as well and their grandchildren, which is let’s try to have a peaceful divorce process and respectful. Why do all the bonds have to… So many of the bonds have to be broken? Relationship bonds.
John Susko:
It’s truly a generational problem. I mean you’re talking about the generation of the adult children’s children.
Carol:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Susko:
And not to see grandma and grandpa. I mean, that’s heartbreaking.
Carol:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Susko:
Well. You have a chapter on changing roles or changing family roles and rules, and you have a number of different… The family here or the responsible one, the placater, the beautiful loser, lost child. Is it possible that during the divorcing process of the, I guess the grandparents that the roles change among the siblings?
Carol:
Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). One of the things that we know from the research of just families period. Not speaking just of divorce, is that in general, the women, the females are what we call the kinship keepers. And so that’s true whether families are still together or apart. And so what happens when parents divorce, if there are daughters often the role of organizing the family celebrations, trying to keep the family members together, talking to the siblings that won’t talk to each other, because one’s align with dad, one’s aligned with mom falls upon one or more of the daughters. And so it’s as though the daughters become the matriarch, maybe mom is depressed or works and is kind of oblivious to what’s going on in the family. There all kinds of scenarios. And then also the adult children can become caretakers. If the parents are much older, 60, 70s have health issues, maybe mental health issues, they are depressed.
Some men and women become so depressed during divorce. It affects their ability to work. If they engage in a high conflict litigated divorce, it can really have depleted a lot of their family savings. And so a lot of times the adult children find themselves in a position to be helping their parents one or both financially. If they’re younger, adult children say they’re in college, sometimes they have to leave college if the parents were helping them with their college tuition, et cetera, because there’s no money to continue to help them. So it can become very stressful actually on both the parents and the adult children.
John Susko:
Some challenges that the siblings often encounter. How close are you to the siblings and to the parents? Are siblings closer with one parent or the other? How close to parents or the siblings are to each other? So those play out for going for ad infinitum until the parents or the divorcing folks actually pass away.
Carol:
Yes. And if you know any attorneys who do probate, they talk about that. That it can just be, it’s horrible. These siblings, many haven’t gotten along for decades. And I want to just underscore what you were saying that is really true. And in fact, I don’t know if you know this, John, but collaborative is moving into probate and estates now because still always dealing with families I don’t do that work, but some people I know do, and it really does help them have a more peaceful resolution.
John Susko:
Yes. It’s called elder care coordination. And I’m trying to get our judge up here to do that for a couple 80 year olds that have a son who is… Again, it’s a mess. And they can litigate this thing for forever, or they can come up with the solution. So in California, do you have much family rituals going forward with closing out of a collaborative case? Is that common out there? Or have you gone into any cases where that’s occurred?
Carol:
Yes. One of the rituals that I know… Very few people, I wish there were more have been doing is a ‘divorce ritual’. Not a celebration of divorce, but make it a ritual they go to a park, they write what they want to say to each… What each parent was to say to the other. They talk about all the positives that were in the marriage, the beautiful children, wonderful children and grandchildren, whomever they have there. And it’s a divorce ritual. And Must We Say We Did Not Love I mentioned that in the book, by Monza Naff, it’s in their resources. Who’s an English professor in Northern California wrote this book Must We Say We Did Not Love and talks about divorce rituals. And some parents are doing that. And I’ve read some others throughout the US and other countries.
So that it’s like a passage, like we have memorial services, we have weddings, we have graduations. Why shouldn’t there be some kind of passage for divorce. It’s a life-stage for many people. So that’s actually one of the rituals, traditions that is catching on. Not tremendously, but it’s a good start. And then a lot of couples coming into collaborative and mediation do want to keep the holiday celebrations. Maybe not every single one, but one where all the family members are together and peaceful. There’s no tension. And to continue that sense of family, because frankly, when parents are divorcing, one of the things I tell them is what is the legacy you want to be leaving to your children right now? What do you want them in 5 or 10, 15 years to be telling their friends and maybe their significant other about what their life was like during your divorce. [crosstalk] sobering for parents when they really think about it.
John Susko:
I had a family law attorney from Texas telling me that she had a contentious divorce or contentious collaborative… Or it went from a contentious divorce to a collaborative case, and they were still contentious and there were two sons and they were probably college age. And when the facilitator sort of raised this issue, all of a sudden the light went on and they now meet for every Christmas. They go someplace with the entire family and they do it. And they have… I guess, their two sons and it’s worked for them and they get together at Christmas and it’s a joyful experience. So again, I know that it works and it’s very useful in some families and I think it would be good if we could get it in all families. Tell me a little bit about how your practice is broken down between your counseling of people and your mediation and your… You were a child specialist in these cases. Tell me how your practice is broken down.
Carol:
So I would say about, about half of my practice is my therapy practice, where I serve as I said earlier, as a therapist to adults and children, minor and adult children. And that includes, of course, any of the court referrals that I receive for being a minor child’s individual therapist or family reunification therapy, or family therapy, co-parenting therapies I get. So that’s about half of my practice. Some of it comes from the court and family law attorneys who litigate, but who are more family minded than just battle.
And then the other half is collaborative and mediation. And I would say those two are about equal. Collaborative cases and mediation cases. I do not serve as a solo mediator because I don’t think that’s really ethical, frankly, because a divorce is a legal process and there is a family code, which I’m not an expert in because I’m not an attorney. So we do what we call co-mediation, where I can be a family specialist with a family law attorney mediator. I can be a divorce coach with the family law mediator, child specialist. Sometimes I just work on the co-parenting counseling and help them develop their co-parenting plan with a family law mediator. So there’s a lot of options that way. And then the collaborative process that I described earlier.
John Susko:
Going in terms of this mediation, this hybrid mediation, tell us what it looks like in various forms. In other words, I imagine that sometimes you’re talking with the attorney and the parties, and sometimes you’re just there by yourself on the child issues. Tell me what that looks like.
Carol:
Okay. I’ll describe a typical case to you. So if the family law mediator, attorney mediator decides he or she thinks that they need a financial specialist, as we have in collaborative divorce. And a family specialist or maybe two divorce coaches and a child specialist, that person refers the couple to me from my part of it. And then to the financial person, a professional for his or her part. And then I assess how I think I could best serve that couple and their children. So sometimes I only meet with the couple, maybe their children are older, or they’ve already got kind of an agreement about what the co-parenting plan is going to work look like.
Or I can meet with the minor children, sometimes even the adult children to help with the co-parenting plan, that the co-op communication and negotiation skills. Communication is really key because most people who are divorcing aren’t divorcing because they had wonderful communication skills, so that’s one of my jobs for sure. And then the financial specialist does the financial work, gathering all the financial documents and so forth. And then the family law mediator works with that financial person and with me to get the agreements that the parents have worked up together into the settlement. The final settlement agreement.
John Susko:
Now are these cases where the parties are unrepresented? Or…
Carol:
Yeah. No. Ideally of course, any ethical mediator, at least in California, strongly recommends that each client have their own consulting attorney. Not all do sometimes only one does, but we continually strongly recommend that they do because a mediator can’t give legal advice can give legal information
John Susko:
And I guess my question was… I’m just trying to picture, and you also do collaborative cases where you are one of the team members?
Carol:
Correct.
John Susko:
Okay.
Carol:
So a collaborative team could look like, there are always two collaboratively trained attorneys, that’s a requirement. And then often there might just be two clarative attorneys and a family specialist, maybe there are no children. I mean a financial specialist, because maybe they don’t have children. They do have children minor or adults, then they can it could be two clarative attorneys, financial specialist, and a family specialist, or two divorce coaches or two divorce coaches and a child specialist, whatever mixture and hybrid that we as the professionals and the clients agree would best serve their family’s needs and interests.
John Susko:
Okay. Well, I want to thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would like to tell our audience in terms of dealing with, again, the adult children of divorce? All right. We covered everything. I think we’ve covered…
Carol:
Well, yeah but I just would like them to know the last chapter we call hope and healing because even though the tools for hope healing are woven throughout the book, we really want people to know adult children and the parents who are divorcing that there is hope and healing, and that your family doesn’t have to be destroyed in this process, whatever divorce process you choose, and just be brave enough to ask for help from someone, a pastor, clergy trained therapists, collaborative professionals, mediators, to help you because divorce, what we know from the research is ranked the second highest stressor that human beings go through second, only to the death of a loved one. So it deserves some help and it doesn’t have to as painful as a lot of people think it does.
John Susko:
I thank you. I thank you, Carol and I think we are going to close up our program right now. So again, thank you for being on and I look forward to working with this book about the two homes with the adult children from Jacinta. [inaudible] So again, I thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
This has been John Susko’s A Better Way to Divorce podcast. John Susko is a Florida family law attorney. If you’d like to learn more about collaborative divorce or mediation, go to susko-collab-med.com or click on the link in the show notes below.