#001: How Restored Helps Children of Divorce
Are your parents divorced? Are they separated? Has that brought a lot of pain and problems into your life? Do you feel alone and unsure of how to deal with it all?
If you answered yes, the Restored podcast is for you. In this intro episode, we'll talk about how your parents' divorce is still affecting you, what you can do about it, and how this podcast exists to help cope, heal, and feel whole again.
Also, if you love or lead someone with divorced or separated parents, the Restored podcast is also for you. We want to help you, help them.
Links & Resources
Leave your feedback here! If it’s easier, feel free to comment below too.
Dr. Judith Wallerstein's book: The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
[Full Disclaimer: If you purchase through this link, your purchase will support Restored. Thank you!]Research: 1/3 high conflict divorces, 2/3 low conflict divorces
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Coming Up: Episode #002: How 70 Adult Children of Divorce Have Suffered with Leila Miller
Thanks for listening! Our next episode features speaker and author Leila Miller, who wrote the book Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak. [Full Disclaimer: If you purchase through this link, your purchase will support Restored. Thank you!]
TRANSCRIPT
Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!
Are your parents divorced? Are they separated? Has that brought a lot of pain and problems into your life? Do you feel alone? Do you feel broken? Do you feel uncertain of how to deal with it all? If you answer yes to any of those questions, this podcast, the Restored podcast, is for you. Now, if that doesn't describe.
I have another question. Do you love or lead someone with divorced parents or separated parents? If so, the Restored podcast is also for you on it. We feature expert interviews and stories that give practical advice on how to cope and heal after the trauma of your parents' divorce or separation so you can feel hold.
Keep listening.
Welcome to the Restored podcast. I'm your host, Joey Pelli. This is episode one. Thank you so much for listening. In this episode, we're gonna touch on a few things. First, we're gonna talk about how your parents' divorce is affecting you. And what you can do about it. Uh, we'll touch on why studies show that people who come from divorced families typically struggle more in romantic relationships than people who come from intact families.
We're gonna talk about restored. What is restored and why does it exist. What you'll find is that it exists for you, and we're gonna also talk about the plan for this podcast. What's touc come down the road and how this can be valuable. To you if you come from a divorce or separated family or you lead or love someone who does, Anyone from a broken family knows that when your parents separate or divorce, it hurts.
It's painful even when it's absolutely necessary and it makes life harder. A lot of unique problems and challenges that children of divorce have to face that other people. And most young people I've found, feel alone, feel broken, and really uncertain of how to deal with it all. In fact, that was Mary's story as a little girl.
Mary watched her parents fight all the time. Their marriage was a mess, and they needed some serious help, but they never got it. Fast forward to when Mary was in high school, Mary's mom came to her and said, I want to divorce your dad. Mary didn't quite know what to say, so she said, I just want the fighting to stop.
Her mom went through with the divorce and what seemed like a solution to really bad situation, just made things worse. It just brought more pain and problems into their lives instead of fixing them. Now up to that point, uh, Mary was a pretty good girl. She didn't drink or party or do anything like that, but that all changed when she went off to college.
She got into the party scene, started drinking heavily. That led to dating the wrong guys. She married one of those guys. He ended up being a drug addict and an alcoholic. They got pregnant and because Mary was terrified that her baby was gonna grow up in that hell, she got an abortion. That obviously brought a lot more pain into her life and eventually she divorced her own husband, repeating the cycle, started by her parents, and once the dust settled, she fell into a deep depression and she still deals with all of this to this day, years later.
What if Mary could have gotten the help that she needed when she was dealing with all that stuff as a teenager? As a young adult, what if I could have helped Mary? What if restored could have helped Mary, given her the support she needed, helped her learn how to cope in healthy ways instead of unhealthy ways, and how to find real healing.
I can't help but think that her life would not have turned into the tragedy that it became. Mary isn't alone. Each year, over 1 million American children suffer the divorce that our parents. That statistics from the The Heritage Foundation, and if you're one of them, if you're like me and you're one of them, you can relate to Mary's story.
Again, I created this podcast, The Restored Podcast for you specifically. Now, divorce is a heavy topic, but it needs to be talked about. And for anyone listening, especially any parents out there, You know, you've gotten divorced. We're not here to condemn you, right? We're not here to condemn anyone or tear our parents down.
We're rather, we're here to focus on how we can help the children who are often forgotten. Like Mary, my parents are divorced too. I'll never forget the day that they separated. I was 11 years old and my mom sat us down, my siblings and me to break the news, and as soon as I. My whole world just shattered.
Without a doubt. It was the most painful day in my entire life. And as a boy, as an 11 year old boy, I didn't know what to do with that news. I didn't know how to deal with it. And so I just hid the closet and cried, and a million thoughts raced through my head, and I worried about my parents. I worried about my siblings, and I worried about myself and what would happen now sitting there in that closet, I felt so.
I felt extremely abandoned, and I felt like I wasn't good enough because if I was, why were mom and dad going separate ways? I became very bitter, very angry, uh, very sad. I isolated myself and just felt very lonely, and in an attempt to numb the pain, I turned to pleasure. Around that time, a friend showed me some pornography, and so I, I got into porn.
Even though it brought some momentary relief when I was looking at it afterward, I just felt so empty. Even at a young age. I knew that I wanted to be happy, and I knew that this was not making me happy. And so I needed to change. Not long after that, I heard a talk by Jason Everett, and in his talk he spoke about pornography and how harmful it is and how it just poisons us and our future romantic relationships, our future marriages.
Around that time too, I, I met some really good friends. The people I was hanging out with weren't good for me, and so got some new friends and I noticed. When I spent time with them, I was just happier and they happened to be, uh, Christians. They, they were Catholic Christians, and so I, I tried to spend more and more time with them, and that helped a lot.
But even though life was getting better for me, I still felt very broken inside. I knew that I wanted authentic love, I wanted freedom. I wanted happiness, but I felt stuck. I felt held back by my own brokenness. And so I realize this principle that I believe is true for all of us, and that is our untreated brokenness is one of the things that holds us back most from becoming the person we deeply desire to be.
I'll say that again. Our untreated brokenness is one of the things that holds us back most from becoming the person we deeply desire to. And so I knew I needed to heal. I looked around for some help. I looked for a book, a speaker, a retreat, something out there, and I found nothing. There was next and nothing out there to help people like me and certainly nothing practical.
There were some studies and some research that had been done on children of divorce, but nothing specifically speaking into the pain and problems that we deal with, and I knew I wasn't alone. I looked at my siblings and I saw how they were struggl. I looked at friends of mine, close friends of mine, and I saw how they were struggling with their parents' divorce or separation, and I heard about other people too and how they were struggling, and so years later I started restored and ever restored.
We create content that gives practical advice to teens and young adults on how to cope and heal. After the trauma their parents divorced their separat. At this recording, the, the type of content that we produce is talks, podcasts, episodes, and our blog articles. In the future, we're gonna do things like videos, books, and, and much more.
We have a lot planned ahead. We also offer online community just to give support and, uh, help everyone to have a safe place to talk about, uh, the pain and the problems that they deal with from their parents', divorce or separation. And we also have a way to find a coach, a counselor, or a spiritual. Uh, to guide you.
My goal with all this is just to give. What I wish I would've had years ago. Now, I, I mentioned that restored is focused on teens and young adults, so anyone from 13 to 30. But of course, anyone can listen to this podcast and if there's something that's useful for that audience and someone else finds it useful, that's awesome.
We love that. Now, I also mentioned that anyone who loves or leads children of divorce or separation, uh, this is for you too, whether you're, you know, a boyfriend, a girl, Family friend, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, whatever the case might be. Uh, if you're a teacher, a coach, a youth minister, passer a priest, this is also for you as well.
We wanna help you help them. A little bit about me. I'm not a psychologist, I don't have a PhD, but what I do have is 15 years of experience wrestling with this stuff. I've done 10 years. Spiritual direction or coaching. And if you're not familiar with that, it's just basically a, a mentorship where a coach helps you in life, deal with whatever you're dealing with, and especially helps you grow in your spiritual life.
I've done five years of counseling, three years of listening to people like us and researching this topic heavily. Now I'm not pretending to be perfect and trying to tell you guys that you just need to be like me. Not at all. That's not what this podcast is about. I have learned a lot along the way and I wanna share what I've learned if it's helpful, but we just wanna help you guys and if that means you learn something from me, from my experience and what I've learned in the research, I've.
Great. Um, but maybe it's from someone we bring on the show or a story that you hear. We just wanna help you guys in whatever way we can. And I'm still learning. I'm still growing, I'm still dealing with my own brokenness, but the whole goal here is for me to help the people who are a few steps behind me.
And if I can't help them, then I'm gonna get you the help that you need in some other. Let's talk a bit about divorce and how it affects the children. Now, I think most of you guys would agree that divorce is a tragedy. It's a really sad thing. Even in cases where it's extremely necessary, it's traumatic for the children, right?
It wounds us. It overwhelms our ability to to cope and deal with it all. Even with that, there's some people in the world who say that divorce is such a good thing that we need more divorce. In fact, you can Google this. There is such a thing as divorce parties. These are parties to celebrate your divorce.
You get a divorce, you invite your family, your friends, to celebrate your divorce. It's like a reverse wedding. Now, some people say that divorce doesn't hurt the kids, or you know, they're resilient. We hear that a lot, that the kids are resilient or even if they admit. Divorce does hurt us. The kids, they usually say that it's not very significant.
It's a small hurt and it doesn't last very long. The problem with that is that it's just not true, and even though some people who say that are probably have like the best intentions, they just haven't seen the research. Even those of us though, who do admit that divorce is a bad thing, I think we've just become so numb to it because it's so common.
When I give talks, uh, I ask the audience to raise their hands if they come from a divorce or separated family, or, uh, if they have a friend who does. I know someone who does, and every time I've given it, it's been practically a hundred percent every time. I, I'm pretty sure it's been a hundred percent.
It's hard to count when you're up there, but pretty sure it's always been a hundred percent and. This is a tragedy. This is such a big problem in our world, yet hardly anyone's talking about it. I wanna take a second to speak to those of you who do come from a divorce or a separated family. Guys, I'm so sorry for what you've had to go through.
You've had to endure more pain in your short lives than some people have to deal with in their entire lives. Every child deserves. A healthy family and two parents who love each other and stick together. Guys, the divorce was not your fault. The divorce was not your fault. No matter what anyone says, there's nothing that you could have done to prevent it.
And there's nothing that you did that caused it. It was between your parents, not you. And of course we were affected by it, but it nothing you did cause. After giving a talk recently, a girl came up to me and she confided in me that her dad, even though she's in college now, her dad still blames her for the divorce that happened years ago when she was a kid.
It's so sad, and I want you all to know that you are not doomed to repeat your parents' mistakes. You are not doomed to repeat your parents' mistakes You. Your own story. We fear that, don't we? We're afraid that we're gonna get divorced, that you know our life, our marriage might turn out the same way our parents said.
But I'm here to tell you that you don't have to repeat that past, You can write your own story. Now, diving into some of the research, how does Divorce effect the children? So the research shows that children of divorce are more likely to have social. Behavioral problems, difficulty in their relationship with their parents, difficulty in romantic relationships.
They're more likely to get divorced. They have higher frequencies of depression and violence. Higher risk for suicide attempts, reduce physical health, lower levels of success in school, more emotional problems. And typically have lower self-esteem. Now, this wasn't just one study that found this. This is from a meta-analysis study, which is basically a summary study of 67 different studies about children of divorce and the effect the divorce has on them.
And it was published in the Journal of Family Psychology by Dr. Paul Amato from Penn State University. Another researcher who spent so much time with children of divorce was Dr. Judith Wallerstein, and for 25 years plus, she studied children of divorce and she wrote a book called The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce.
And in it she reports her findings from a 25 year long study. She followed around 131 young people from 60 families, and one really important. Note about this study is that she only chose children who never had emotional or developmental problems before the divorce. And she compared them of course, to, uh, children from intact families over the years and after years of researching this, she said our findings challenged the myth that divorce is a transient crisis.
And then as soon as parents reestablish their lives, the children will fully. That doesn't happen. She found in her research that children of divorce were less likely to get married. They were more likely to divorce, less likely to have children. They're more likely to heavily use drugs or alcohol during high school.
They were less likely to finish high school, less likely to go to college, and more likely to drop out. They're far less likely to receive financial support from their parents for college and the men. Interesting. We're far less likely to enter into an intimate relationship. Dr. Judith said parents like to believe that if they are unhappy in their marriage, the children will also be unhappy.
Conversely, if divorce is better for them, it will be better for the children, but things don't work that way. Children frequently do not share their parents unhappiness with a problematic marriage while a divorce brings pain into their lives. That until. Has gone unrecognized. She goes on to say, We are allowing the children to bear the psychological, economic, and moral brunt of divorce.
The really key takeaway from her research is that the effects of divorce actually aren't fully experienced until adulthood years later, and the most obvious way that it becomes apparent. Is in our future romantic relationships. And you might be wondering why is that? We're gonna get into that in future episodes of the podcast.
But a basic, the basic reason why is that we lack a roadmap for love. We don't have a roadmap for love. Our concept of love and marriage is very broken because more than anyone else, our parents teach us about marriage and they teach us about love. And if we didn't see that go. Then we have a really broken idea of what it's supposed to look like, and I think that's a big reason why we're less likely to marry and more likely to get divorce.
I mentioned that we're gonna talk about that in future podcasts. We're also gonna talk about what you can do about it. At this point, I hope you can see that divorce is bad for the children, even in. When it's necessary, it may just be the lesser of two evils. And it's painful, right? It makes our lives harder.
Now, you may be thinking, are there ever any exceptions to this? And you probably caught what I've said a few times, that there's extreme cases where it is necessary. And before I get into those cases, I just wanna say, The goal is always to reunite the couple and bring the family back together if it's possible.
And sometimes it's not possible, right? We're under no illusion here at ReSTOR, but that's always the goal. Now, some of the cases where divorce is necessary is when there's violence, when there's abuse, you know, no one should live in that situation. We are. Encouraging that at all. You know, you there needs to be physical separation in that case, and if it's necessary, divorce extremely high conflict marriages where there's just always so much drama.
Now, side note on that, research shows that less than one third of divorces are actually like that. I always thought it was much more, but less than one third of divorces are actually like that. And more than two thirds, more than 66% of divorces are actually low conflict. So they don't have all that drama.
They don't have, you know, maybe the violence or the abuse. And the last reason I'll mention is for legal reasons. So imagine a mom who is a full-time mom. She, she's at home with the kids and maybe she has three kids, let's say, and dad one day just picks up and leaves with another. At that point, it may be necessary for the mom to pursue a divorce in order for her to get some money for her and the kids and provide for herself and just while she gets on her feet.
Again. Having said all of that, I want you to know that we're not belittling parents or their suffering. I can imagine what it's like to live in. Difficult marriage. I am married, so I know that marriage can be hard, but I can't imagine to live in something that's so intense. That being said, we believe that children, parents, and society deserve better than divorce.
We believe that we need to be supporting them. Supporting these families, supporting these marriages and helping them fix or heal the problems in their marriage and help them thrive, help them have great marriages, instead of leaving them feel like they only have one option and that's to leave their spouse or to get a divorce.
In the majority of cases, there's simply a better way and we need to be doing all that we can, uh, to help couples like that. If your parents are divorced or separat, I know hearing all this can be pretty depressing, so bear with me. There is hope. The first thing I want you to know is that you're not alone.
You're not alone to face all of this. We're here to help you. You are the hero of your story, and we just want to guide you. We just wanna help you along your journey. How are we gonna do that? We actually have a very simple plan. The goal of this podcast is to offer practical advice from expert interviews and stories.
Focus on two area. The first area, how to cope in healthy ways. The second area, how to actually heal the expert. Interviews are gonna be conducted with authors, speakers, researchers, psychologists, counselors, marriage experts, uh, spiritual coaches, life coaches and so on. In these interviews, I'm gonna be asking questions like, how do you begin to.
Right. What's the process look like? How does someone overcome their porn addiction? Right? Drinking habit, overeating, cutting. The list goes on and on. How do I cure the loneliness? I feel, How can I overcome my fear of love? How do I build a really good marriage when I didn't see it at home? How do I build a divorce proof?
And so many more questions like that. The idea with the interviews is for us to do the hard work and give you access to people who you may not have access to In this podcast. For the stories, we're gonna be talking to other children of divorce, especially those who are older, so they can shed light on not only what happened and the pain and the problems that they dealt with, but also.
How they found healing and what their life looks like now, and how they feel so different now because they went through the healing process. You may be wondering, why are we gonna focus on coping and healing? Specifically, coping is all about survival. In simple terms, coping is the thoughts that we have or the actions we take, and in response to the pain and problems in our lives and the stress in our lives.
And what I've seen in my own life and working with and speaking to so many children of divorce is that when your parents separate or divorce, it hurts, right? It's painful. It brings a lot of problems into our lives and to numb the pain and distract ourselves from the problems that we face, we usually.
to unhealthy things, right? We turn to unhealthy ways of coping. Like I mentioned porn in my own story, drinking drugs. The list goes on, and when we do those things and we seek and escape in that way, it always leaves us feeling empty, and it certainly doesn't make the pain or the problems go away. It doesn't solve anything.
And so it's so important that we learn to cope in healthy. If we wanna find the freedom and the happiness that we long for, because life in our family situation is gonna throw a lot more pain and problems at us. We're also gonna get into specific situations and, and how to deal with them situations like, you know, what do you do when your parents turn to you for emotional support in an unhealthy.
Or what do you do when mom or dad starts talking bad about the other one? What do you say in that situation now? How do you set healthy boundaries? What do you do when holidays come around and it's really painful and, and much more. There's so many unique and difficult situations that we wanna help you learn to navigate, uh, and deal with.
Now, shifting gears from coping to healing. Healing is all about growing and thriving. If you, if you Google healing, You'll see that it's the process of becoming healthy and whole. And we all know what this looks like in physical healing, right? You break your arm, you go to the doctor, they examine your arm, you know, they put you in a cast.
Maybe they have to do surgery or do something more extreme, but they give you pain medication and you know, you do physical therapy for a while and then eventually your arm is, is whole. It's, it's healthy. The same thing needs to happen in our emotional and psychological lives too, because we experience very real injuries, very real hurt in those areas of our lives.
But because we can't see them often, we don't do anything about it. You. As I've said a few times now, when our parents separat a divorce, it wounds us. It hurts and left untreated. Those wounds usually bring more pain and problems into our lives, and they, they hold us back in life, right? They give us that feeling of being stuck.
So we can't simply treat the symptoms in our lives, the porn, the drinking, the drugs, whatever else it might be. We have to go underneath and get at the root cause, the root issue. And I, I noticed that in my own life. Like I said, you know, when I got porn out of my life, life was better, but I still felt broken.
And so I was just treating the symptoms and I think so often in a world we do that, right? We just treat symptoms, we don't actually get to the root problem. One of my parents separated. It left me feeling, uh, abandoned and not good enough. And those are very real wounds. A wound of abandonment and really a wound of inadequacy or just not feeling like you are enough.
So many of us. When we experience wounds like that, we stuff them away. Now, if you stuff your wounds away, or you live with them for so long, they'll seem normal. You'll just think that, well, this is the way that life is and this is the way it's always going to be. And I'm here to tell you guys, that's not true.
All right. Your life can be better than it is today. You can actually find healing. You can actually reverse those unhealthy ways of coping. You can find freedom from your wounds, and you can feel whole, and we're gonna prove it to you in this podcast through the stories that we tell. Two obstacles I think we face when it comes to healing is that one, we don't make it a priority.
Like I said, we might. Get comfortable in life. So we don't give any time or attention or effort, uh, to dealing with it. And I hope that through listening to this podcast and these future episodes, you'll realize that healing is actually worth the effort. It's worth your time. It's even worth the pain that you're gonna need to go through to find it.
The second thing I think is we don't know how, We don't know how to heal. Over the years, I asked so many people, How do I heal? And to be honest with you, I didn't get very good answers. Certainly not practical and actionable answers. And so listening to this podcast, our hope is that you'll know how to heal, and we're working hard to make all of this content, all the advice that we're giving.
Very practical, simple, and actionable stuff you can actually start doing in your life. I want to end with this. You may be thinking, what's the point of all this? Why do I even need to heal? Why do I need to find healthy ways of coping? Why can't I just leave what's in the past, in the past and be done with it?
I wanna tell you a beautiful story of Lina Everett's healing. Uh, as a response to those questions, her earliest memories are of her dad hitting her mom, her, her parents got divorced as well. She suffered sexual abuse and high school. She got into drugs, alcohol, sex, and she just felt miserable. Too similar to me.
She heard a talk that changed her life. And she stopped drinking, stopped doing drugs, and stopped sleeping around, and it was difficult for her, but life got better. But even though life got better, she still felt broken, and it wasn't until a few years into marriage. When she became a, a mother that her brokenness started to surface.
She started to feel angry a lot and just was experiencing all these messy emotions. And what she realized is that for so long she had stuffed to weigh so much of her brokenness, and she was seeing it come out now on her children and her marriage on her husband, and so she said, This stops with me because she knew that if she continued down this path, she was gonna pass on her brokenness to her husband and to her kids.
And so she dedicated herself to her healing and she got a counselor. She went to counseling. She got a good spiritual coach. She's Catholic, so she spent a ton of time praying, spent a lot of time in adoration, and this was a three year major healing process. Afterward, she said that she felt so transformed.
She felt so free. She felt so light, she felt more confident, she felt stronger. She felt like a better wife, a better mother. She wasn't ashamed of her past. She didn't feel the need to keep secrets. In short, she just felt so free, so whole, and she just wasn't afraid. Guys, that is what healing is meant to do for you.
That's what I want for all of you to experience the freedom and wholeness like Sina felt, and I, I wanted you to imagine that. Imagine that you feel like Chris Sele very broken, all these messy emotions. A lot of pain and problems in your life, and then imagine going through that healing process and feeling so transformed.
Life isn't perfect, but you are better, and you are stronger, and you're more confident and you're, you're experiencing that freedom that you long for and you feel whole, not broken. And we have to acknowledge too, that at an extreme, our lives could become like Mary's life. They can turn into a sort of tragedy or maybe it's not that extreme and maybe life just continues on, but we lack the meaning that we long for, we lack the freedom that we long for life is kind of dull.
It's not the adventure that we want it to be. And I, I don't say that to scare you, but just to acknowledge the fact that if we don't do anything about our broken. Then that's the path that we're heading down, and I wanna leave you with this. It's a quote I heard the other day that's attributed to CS Lewis.
He said, You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. We can't reverse what happened to us. We can't change our past. In that sense, we are a victim, but we're not meant to remain victims. We can write our own story and we can choose. What our future will be like.
We can heal, we can grow. We can learn how to deal with the pain and the problems in our lives in a healthy way. Guys, that's what we want for you, and we're gonna help you get there. With this podcast, we're working hard to really make this useful and valuable to you. And if it was useful and it was, I invite you to subscribe just so you'll be notified of, of new episodes that come out, and you can do that just on your preferred podcast app.
Otherwise, you can go to our website, restored ministry.com/podcast. Uh, again, that's restored. Ministry Ministry is just singular restored ministry.com/podcast. When you go on that page, you'll enter your email and your name and we'll notify you when new episodes. Thank you so much for listening. Always remember, you're not alone.
We're here to help you feel whole again and become the person. You deeply desire to be.
