Leah Hadley [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Intentional Divorce Insights. I'm Leah Hadley, certified divorce financial analyst, accredited financial counselor, and the founder of Intentional Divorce Solutions. I'll be your guide through the complexities of divorce finance and emotional wellness. Join me as we uncover practical tips and empowering insights to help you navigate your divorce with clarity and intention.
Leah Hadley [00:00:24]:
Hi there and welcome back to Intentional Divorce Insights. I am so, so happy that you are here with us today. We have a guest that we are going to be talking about, a really important topic that comes up with clients a fair amount. So I was really looking forward to meeting Kent. This is Kent Darcy. He's the founder of Adult Children of Divorce Ministries. He is committed to breaking the cycle of divorce among adults with divorced parents. Kent is also a licensed professional counselor in Michigan.
Leah Hadley [00:00:52]:
He authored Choose a Better Path, Overcoming the Impact of youf Parents Divorce, which is a devotional that helps adults with divorced parents identify and process issues created by their parents divorce. Since 2004, Kent has written and spoken extensively on the impact of parental divorce that continues after their kids are grown. He is also addressing the latest wrinkle in parental divorce, Gray Divorce, which occurs after the children have grown. Kent's newest book is due in the fall of 2025 and is tentatively called Preparing to say I Do When Parents Said I Don't the Premarital Guide for Adults and Divorced Parents. Excuse me, adults with divorced parents. Kent has been married for over 40 years to Kathy, and they have three adult children. Welcome, Kent. Thank you so much for joining us.
Kent Darcie [00:01:44]:
Well, thank you. It's great to be here.
Leah Hadley [00:01:47]:
Ken, I'm curious how you got into this work. Can you give me a little bit of background?
Kent Darcie [00:01:50]:
Sure. My parents divorced when I was 13, and basically I went from seeing my father every day to seeing him three to four times a year because he moved away. And I loved my dad. I know some people didn't have great relationships with their dads, but I had a fabulous relationship with my dad. But my mom basically raised myself and my two younger sisters and she had to deal with an angry young teenager. And as an adult, married three kids and we were attending a marriage retreat and I felt that God said to me, Kent, if you don't get your act together, you're on the same emotional path as your dad. And at that point, he was an adult from an adult childhood divorce from an adult childhood divorce, which is pretty common and had already divorced twice and was heading towards his third marriage. And that scared the bejeebers out of me because I love my wife and.
Kent Darcie [00:02:42]:
And I didn't want a divorce. And he led me to a book called the Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. And I'm basically a researcher at heart and did a lot of research, talked to counselors and adults with divorce parents and all sorts of people and basically was serving on a church board at the time and said, we need to let people know about this. And they said, well, go for it. So 20 years ago, I presented my first all day seminar on the impact of parental divorce on the kids, basically to share what I'd learned. But one thing I want to just say up front, I always do, is that this is not about bashing divorced parents. If you're divorced, which I would imagine many of you are going through it, this is not about beating up divorced parents. My parents are divorced and I love them even more after I process through this stuff.
Kent Darcie [00:03:31]:
But there are issues that the research shows that does impact the kids when their parents divorce and adults when their parents divorce that we're going to need to talk to about that today.
Leah Hadley [00:03:43]:
Absolutely. So what are some of those common issues that affect adults with divorced parents?
Kent Darcie [00:03:48]:
Well, like my parents divorced when I was 13. If you're high school and under when your parents divorce, the biggest issue is unresolved anger. Basically we're just a couple of the issues include loss. We can lose standard of living, we can lose whole sides of the family. Sometimes we can't do sports because we're not around enough to do the practices, lose friends, there's just a lot of losses and we get angry. The other big one that we can talk about with anger is what I call the loyalty challenge, which is basically, who do you love more, me or dad? And we end up in this kind of in between thing and that creates anger. Another issue is fear. There's a lot of fear.
Kent Darcie [00:04:29]:
Fear of abandonment, fear of divorce, fear of rejection, fear of doom, which is an interesting one. Basically the fear of doom is waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under us at any time. It is not uncommon that the divorce announcement came as a shock to people because good parents will kind of shield the arguing and all the stuff from the kids and they're blown away and they kind of enter their adulthood with the thing that things can go wrong at any time. And that one's particularly interesting because if you're from an intact family, the husband's work is going good, family's good, marriage is good, everything is great, your anxiety level goes down. But if you're from a family with divorced parents and marriage is good, kids are behaving, job's good. Everything's great. Your anxiety level goes up because you have this programming that says anything can go wrong at any minute and you don't relax. And we tend to become control freaks because of the fear of doom, because if we think we can control everything, then everything will be okay.
Kent Darcie [00:05:42]:
So fear of doom is a big one. Fear of inadequacy, fear of marriage. We also have trust issues. We don't trust. And we will tend to really make people earn our trust. And unfortunately, what will happen is we'll poke him with a stick. Poke him with a stick. Poke him with a stick.
Kent Darcie [00:05:58]:
Poke him with a stick. Poke him with a stick. And then he gets tired of getting poked with a stick and say, I'm out of here. And we say, see, I knew I couldn't trust him. And it just is kind of this sort of thing. I know a lot of our audience is female. One of the big issues also that parental divorce and childhood creates is father hunger. And basically, it affects men and women.
Kent Darcie [00:06:18]:
Anger really affects men and women, but anger comes out more destructively with guys. Father hunger comes out more destructively with the ladies. And it's something that we have to be careful of, basically. If you boil down father hunger, ladies need an answer to two questions. Am I lovable and am I special and basically. Or am I beautiful and am I special? And I'm not talking about supermodel beauty or anything, but just beautiful in the eyes of your dad and am I special enough to be around? And guess what? Divorce kind of says no to both of those in the lady's eyes. For guys, the question is, do I have what it takes to be a man? And it's just kind of under the radar. But that's one of the issues.
Kent Darcie [00:07:04]:
And if there's people of faith out there, one of the things that creates a little difficulty is it distorts her image of God, because one of the scripture says, honor your father and your mother. Well, if you're sitting in church and the person you're thinking, well, maybe that applies to you, and maybe that applies to you, but honor my father, honor my mother. You got to be kidding me. And we start to cherry pick which scriptures apply and which ones don't. So those are the major issues that impact adults when their parents divorce when they're kids.
Leah Hadley [00:07:36]:
That's so interesting. And there's so much there, right? And you can see how just hearing you talk, that would play out in, you know, potentially in somebody's future marriage or current marriage, depending on the situation. I'm really interested in this book that you have coming out. What are some of the strategies that you share in this book for people who are getting married and want to feel confident that they are going into this marriage eyes wide open and ready to make it work?
Kent Darcie [00:08:08]:
Well, one of the things that is the first thing is we have to acknowledge that the issue exists. I was in denial for decades until I went to the marriage encounter thing where God said, you're going to get your act together, or things are going to collapse. And denial is real. We are in a culture that says it's not a big deal, it's just a bump in the road. And if we're getting married, the list that I just gave you of items that adults with divorced parents struggle with. If you go to a marriage conference or read a marriage book or go to a marriage site, the very issues they'll tell you to strengthen in a marriage, those are the very things that undermine. That we struggle with and undermine relationships. So the first thing is we want to understand what's going on.
Kent Darcie [00:08:50]:
And probably half of the book deals with what are the issues? What's going on? How are we feeling? Was there an affair in there? And the book is basically intended to come alongside traditional marriage counseling or premarital counseling that tends to not deal with this stuff. If there was an affair, guess what, there's trust issues, and it's not going to come up. Who was at the wedding? Who wants to be in which pictures? We don't have an image of family. We don't have an image of communication. The only communication most of us saw was not super great. So communication issues. And basically the book takes us through. Where are the areas that perhaps are weak and how can we strengthen them?
Leah Hadley [00:09:39]:
Excellent. I think that's going to be a tool that helps so many people, and I'm looking forward to reading it myself. As a adult who had divorced parents and then went through my own divorce and then now remarried, I think it'll be really interesting.
Kent Darcie [00:09:52]:
Thanks for Married and Remarried because it's about, you know, when I do a workshop or do a talk or whatever, about half the audience is divorced already and often don't know some of the issues that may have contributed to that. On the other side, it's anger. We see a lot of anger. And the anger is often attributed to a lot of the things that occur when there's a parental divorce.
Leah Hadley [00:10:19]:
Yeah, absolutely. So a big area where we are spending a lot of time these days is gray divorce. I mean, that's just where we see people needing, especially since I do, the financial support. There tends to be more financial complexity with gray divorces. And so they need more of that, you know, financial analysis and support, which is. Makes a lot of sense, but there are a lot of issues that are coming up with families with adult children. Right. And can you talk a little bit about how it's different when you're getting divorced later in life?
Kent Darcie [00:10:51]:
Sure. And ironically enough, the initial data coming out on Gray Divorce is coming out of the lawyer's offices because people are coming in and going. And the lawyers are like, wait a minute here. Because as you had said, financial whatever. However, one of the things that's important to understand, particularly with gray divorce, is that. And there's a book called Home Will Never Be the Same Again by Friedenberg and Hughes, great book on gray divorce. And they talk about the fact that we spent 80% of our time on 20% of the issue. 20% of the issue is the finances and all that sort of stuff.
Kent Darcie [00:11:26]:
80% is emotional. Now, when you deal with the kids, one of the problems, in many ways, gray divorce is worse on the kids than when they're kids. Because the first issue is there's no support if your son or daughter or yourself, you go to work and you say, I just got a call after 35 years, my parents are getting a divorce. What you're going to hear is, oh, what's the big deal? You're not home anymore. Aren't they entitled to have a happy life? They don't understand that now your whole childhood is now in question. They don't understand that now you're explaining to your kids why before you were going to grandpa and grandma's house, and now you're going to grandpa or grandma's house. They don't understand that your whole world has changed, and it becomes really problematic. Another issue with Grey Divorce is TMI.
Kent Darcie [00:12:16]:
Too much information. What happens is basically the parents treat their kids like adults. And whereas when you're a child and your parents divorce, good parents will see you from all the gruesome details. When you're an adult, you're old enough to understand why your mom is a deadbeat or your dad never does whatever, or for 20 years I've been suffering. I've never been satisfied for 20 years. I don't want to hear this stuff. La la la la la la. I mean, but they treat them as adults and they miss the fact that there's just nowhere to go into getting too much information.
Kent Darcie [00:12:50]:
Another issue was the loyalty challenge. You know, I mentioned that with anger, when you're an adult, you should understand why mom is this or dad is that. So it puts stress on the loyalty challenge because you're old enough to understand and we don't want to be caught in between the two. The other thing that's interesting with the loyalty challenge with Gray divorce is that it messes with siblings too. And I've been doing this for 20 years and gray divorce has kind of come on the latter part of that. But I have yet to see any pattern as far as who sides with who. It's not like the gals side with mom and the guys side with dad. It's kind of all over the place.
Kent Darcie [00:13:30]:
So not only are you not getting support and you're getting information from the parents, the siblings aren't even always in sync. So you have that problem. Another issue with gray divorce is doubt. There's kind of this thing that says, well, if mom can put up with that all these years, or dad can put up with that all these years, then we can make it with our problems. But when the marriage collapses after 35, 45, 52 years, basically this doubt comes in that if, well, if they couldn't make it after all this time, how on earth are we going to make it with all our issues and just those seeds of doubt kick in? And again, for people of faith, we have this issue where it distorts their image of God. What's the deal? They went to church. I mean, how did this happen? What's going on? And how can I trust you if this is going on? So it creates a number of issues that are problematic.
Leah Hadley [00:14:26]:
That's so interesting. I'm curious, what would good support look like for adult children?
Kent Darcie [00:14:33]:
You know, it's interesting, when I wrote Choose a Better Path, one of my concerns was how would divorced parents take it? Because my heart was not to bash people, was not to dis divorce parents. I mean, my parents were divorced, you know, and I have found they've been some of the biggest proponents because it's basically just a devotional. It's not a big, you know, deep read, but it gives them an understanding of where their kids are coming from. Because everything. One of the things that's interesting about divorce is prior to divorce, everything tends to be kid centric. After the divorce, everything is parent centric. And we tend to look at everything through the lens from the top down instead of from the kids up.
Kent Darcie [00:15:22]:
And one of the things that we want to do is the first best thing is to understand what is their world like, what's going on there? What are they experiencing? What's it like to be in a room with two people that really don't want to be together, even if they're cordial? Stephanie Stahl wrote a book and she has this great quote. She says, we were all comfortable with the uncomfortable situation. And I love that quote because there's this tension there. The loyalty challenge. I don't think parents really get how strong that is. How can you help your adult children? Give them permission to be able to be with the other spouse without feeling guilty? Because they will.
Kent Darcie [00:16:08]:
And even when you give them permission, they still feel guilty. You have to reinforce it, reinforce it, reinforce it. And don't do TMI. Don't make them choose. Well, basically, all the co parenting stuff that you guys teach, don't put the kids in the middle. Don't use them. Don't badmouth the other person. You know, when I counsel and I'm dealing with somebody who's going through a divorce, one of the things I try and encourage them to do is look at the war and not the battles.
Kent Darcie [00:16:37]:
Take the high road, because sooner or later the kids get it. If you're bad mouthing or your spouse or your ex or whatever is bad mouthing all the time, you may think like you're going to win by helping them to see how bad the other person is. But eventually, when they get to the end, in a majority of the divorce, the center of the bell curve, they find that they learn that things happen, we don't get whatever. But if you've burned that bridge, they see the truth. Down the road, they'll go, you know what? Dad never said a negative thing about Mom. Mom never said another negative thing about dad. And that's when you win the war, that relationship is there. But if you're busy badmouthing and now one of the big phrases is parent alienation, which is kind of the extreme version of what normally happens.
Kent Darcie [00:17:27]:
Doesn't work on the long term. So follow the co parenting rules. Learn what they are, follow them, understand what is going on with your kids and develop that language from the bottom up and not the top down.
Leah Hadley [00:17:40]:
I think that's so interesting. And it really is true. When people, because a lot of people wait till their kids are grown up to divorce, right? They want to stay together for the whatever. But then the kids are sort of like, all right, we're done raising the kids right? And then they're kind of like all of those conversations we have about proactively talking to your children, about, you know, that you still love them and you care about them and, you know, all of these things that we talk about for children who are younger, are still at home, are still important for our adult children, but they're sort of taken out of the picture. And certainly I see way too frequently the too much information being shared.
Kent Darcie [00:18:27]:
Oh, yeah.
Leah Hadley [00:18:28]:
And yeah, that's. That's unfortunate.
Kent Darcie [00:18:30]:
Or we only stayed together because of you. Please don't say that. Right. Please don't say that. And you'd be amazed how often I hear that.
Leah Hadley [00:18:43]:
I can imagine. I can, because I hear it. I mean, I don't know about people saying it directly to their kids, but I hear it all the time. Right. So I can imagine that it gets said, you know, to the kids as well.
Kent Darcie [00:18:51]:
And there's not ill will. When we started this, I said it's just not about blaming parents. And that's the biggest thing that with the ministry, I say there's not ill will with the parents. One of the things in doing this for 20 plus years, when you're dealing with the adults, with divorced parents, you also deal with divorced parents and you see the pain and you see the woundedness and you see the desperation because even though 50%, which is not true, but even though everybody's getting a divorce and that sort of jazz, when it happens to you, it's like a snowflake, it goes in single file and everything is changing. And the emotional pain of a divorce is off the charts. I've heard it described as the funeral that never ends. It just goes on. If somebody dies at 42, it's unfortunate, it's horrible.
Kent Darcie [00:19:38]:
It's before their time. When somebody leaves at 42, it's rejection. They don't go away. Now you've got other people in the picture and it just complicates everything. So the emotional pain on that side is huge. But that can blind us to what our kids are going through. And we have to be very, very careful that we don't put onto them our pain, because that can happen very easily.
Leah Hadley [00:20:04]:
That is such an important point and I'm so glad that you shared that with us. Kent, I could honestly talk to you about this all day. I just think your perspective is fascinating and I'm looking forward to checking out the book you have coming out this fall for where can people find more information about you? Because I'm sure there are other people like me who feel like we're just kind of getting scratching the Surface. And there's so much more to learn.
Kent Darcie [00:20:27]:
Yeah. The website is hope4adp.com hope4adp (adults with divorced parents).com and basically there's a whole wealth of resources there. There's blogs and podcasts, and I like to say it's not the Kent Darcie show. The resources basically are the best that I can find. If you're, you know, if you're a mom, a wife, and you're listening to this, and you have divorced parents. There's a great book called Daughters of Divorce by Terry Gaspard. And it really steps into, like I mentioned father hunger earlier.
Kent Darcie [00:21:00]:
It really steps into that because the divorce can. It kind of reprograms our brain. And we don't even realize these things are running under the radar. So those type resources are on the website. Good books, podcasts. But it's also important to not be in denial. I was in denial for years. Not a big deal.
Kent Darcie [00:21:23]:
The holidays are a hassle, but I'm okay. I'm fine. And I wasn't fine, and I was putting huge stress on my marriage. And chances are you're not fine. So learn what the issues are and get with somebody. If you've got a girlfriend or somebody that you trust, go have coffee. The Choose a Better Path book is interesting because it basically is just little vignettes. It's a page and a half or whatever and kind of walks people through the various issues that may be affecting them.
Kent Darcie [00:21:51]:
Anger, bitterness, grieving. Because we do grieve. And that's an interesting thing real quickly is that when your parents divorce, when you're a kid, you grieve. What could have been. When your parents divorce, when you're an adult, they grieve. What should have been. We already had it. We've been going to the cottage since I was five.
Kent Darcie [00:22:12]:
We just celebrated your 35th anniversary. It was there. All my other friends, parents are divorcing, but that would never happen in my house. And now it's happening. So we grieve what should have been. Very different type of grief. And there's forgiveness triggers anger, of course. And also there's a chapter on hope, but it's a whole bunch of vignettes.
Kent Darcie [00:22:30]:
But the one thing I have learned about the book is it's important to go through with somebody because it will stir up stuff. That's really helpful to go through it with somebody. So the resources, the website, and if you're a person of faith, God is with you, even though everything is crazy. He is with you and he is the God of hope. And very often with all this craziness, hopelessness can kind of drift in because things are so out of control. But with God there's always hope. So we can always turn to him in prayer.
Leah Hadley [00:23:04]:
Oh fantastic. We will include links to Kent's website and his book and all the information that was shared. I know you referenced a couple of other books in the show notes, so if you're looking for that information, you can find it in the show notes. Kent, I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I think this is just great information for our audience and for those who are listening. Thank you for being here with us and we will see you next time week.
Leah Hadley [00:23:29]:
Thank you for joining me on Intentional Divorce Insights. It's a privilege to share this time with you. I hope each episode offers valuable guidance to navigate your journey. If you find our content helpful, please leave a review to help others discover the benefits of intentional decision making in divorce. Until next time, take care and continue to embrace your path with intention.
