Divorce is always stressful. In this article, we look at what are some of the unique stresses and challenges that expats face when they are going through a divorce.
 With the prevalence divorce rate, many of us are now growing up to be Adult Children of Divorced Parents. Having gone through the turmoils of our parents' divorce, we now feel the past is over and we can focused on living our own life, cutting our past and leaving it behind. What we may not be aware of the continued effect of this hurt in our current, present lives as adults.
 Tricia* just realized that her husband, Kent*, doesn't want children, and she does. Emotionally it's hard for her to accept. Doubt start creeping into her mind: should spell the end of the marriage? While they did not have clear plan about having children, but Kent had made some indication that gave her the impression that he wanted children too. Why have he changed his mind?
*Not their real name  Having looked at the goals of coparenting, let's look at how we can communicate so as to facilitate this process.
 For those who had divorced, parenting will have its challenges. However, may be even more difficult is co-parenting your child with other involved adults in the child’s life (be it your ex, new partner, grandparents, etc). Relationship stress often occurs when one or both people can’t agree on who is responsible for fulfilling what needs the child may have. Conflicting co-parents are often unable to nurture the child successfully. Effective co-parenting is required to help your child develop to be holistically-healthy, balanced, socially productive, and reasonably content (happy).
To nurture well, the co-parents need to evolve from their conflicts to having clear goals, plans, priorities, “job description” (roles), and rules based on consensus. Although individual co-parents will have unique goals, most parents will strive for some general, basic long-term co-parenting outcomes.  “For better or worse, through sickness and in health, till death do us part.” Extra-marital affair, without a doubt, would be categorized under the “worse” part in the marital vow. Its damaging effects are due to the fact that it shakes the very foundations of the relationship: Trust and Commitment. The discovery of an affair in a marriage often leads to a crisis full of emotional struggles for all parties involved. Eventually, should a couple decide to continue their marriage, some of the questions that would surface are “Where do we go from here?”, “Will things ever get back to normal?”, etc.
Whether a marriage would survive an affair is dependent on the strength of the couple’s emotional bond, as well as the efforts both put in the recovery process. The tasks facing the couple are two: rebuilding the marriage and personal healing. Here are some tips on rebuilding a marriage after an affair:  All of us have our own ideas of what love is. These ideas may be shaped by examples from our parents, friends, books, magazines, and especially Hollywood romance movies! A large number of couple ended up in my counseling room fearing the doom of their relationship because they no longer feel “love”. “Not feeling ‘love’” for their partner is one of the many excuses for people to justify their affairs and/or decide to end their relationship. Couples tend not to understand that a love relationship is not just a “state”, it is a process of never-ending opportunity to love once again, forgive once again, to commit to one another and to the relationship, over and over, again and again.
Let’s look at the stages of development in a love relationship and where potential point of “divorce” or leaving the relationship for couple who couldn’t successfully transit to the next stage: |
AuthorMs Ho Shee Wai Archives
April 2017
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