Assisting Those Who Get ‘Caught in the Middle’ : Workshops Help Children Endure the Pain of Divorce

Judy Alvarez sat her 3-year-old son, Andre, down one evening and tried to explain that Daddy was going to be living in a different house.

A few weeks later at a court-ordered workshop on children of divorce, she discovered that she had done the right thing to talk frankly with her child.

Since April, divorcing couples in Sedgwick County with minor children have been required to attend the workshop or equivalent counseling before a final decree is granted. About half of the 400 divorce cases filed in the county each month involve children.

Alvarez, 21, a downtown Wichita office worker, said the workshop helped her deal with her fear and hurt feelings.

‘Everybody Hurts’

“When you have children, you’re never completely divorced,” she said. “There are ties. There are going to be times when everybody hurts.”

Associate District Judge James Beasley, who issued the standing order requiring the workshop for divorcing parents, said he is seeking alternatives to the traditional antagonistic courtroom process used in divorces.

“As adults, I don’t really worry about them hurting each other. They’ll do that and there’s nothing I can do to help them,” he said of the men and women he sees in court. “What I am concerned about is that in the process of hurting each other the byproduct of that is hurting the children.”

Children as Infantry

He likened children to front-line warriors in divorce wars while parents are more like generals ensconced in a chateau, giving orders to lawyer lieutenants.

“The people who are getting emotionally maimed and injured are the little kids,” Beasley said.

The Wichita Guidance Center, a nonprofit agency that employs about 20 psychologists, therapists and social workers, handles the workshop. It costs $15 per person for the two two-hour sessions, but the fee is waived when participants can’t afford it.

Emotional Games

No therapy is involved in the workshop. Instead, lecturers concentrate on what happens to family members during a divorce and some of the emotional games they play.

“Divorce is the end of a marriage, not the end of a family. That’s real hard to accept at gut level because it doesn’t feel that way,” Mardelle Moyers, a clinical social worker, tells her workshop audiences.

Children, who are never prepared for divorce and look to their parents for stability “are affected emotionally more by how parents react to divorce than anything else,” she said.

Dick Geiselhart, a psychologist, cautions workshop audiences about “pain games” that parents play, putting their children in the middle.

‘Disneyland Daddies’

He talks about “Disneyland daddies” and “Marineland mommies” who react to their own guilt by trying to do or buy spectacular things for their children.

Workshop participants, who fill out evaluation questionnaires, generally indicate that they appreciate the information passed along in the sessions. And others in the divorce counseling field praise the Sedgwick County program and others like it.

“A lot of parents going through divorce are very caught in trauma themselves,” said Patti Rizzo, clinical director of the Center for Kids in the Middle in St. Louis. “They have great emotional needs, and they sometimes don’t think about what their children are going through. They need to be reminded.”

Required Attendance

Kenneth Pangborn, a Clearwater, Fla., psychologist, said the first two years of the divorce are the roughest. He said Beaseley is showing remarkable insight by requiring attendance at the workshops.