Shake, Rattle & Split : The Jan. 17 Quake Rocked Some Families to Their Very Foundations, Increasing Marital Stress and--Perhaps--Divorce

For Kim, the issue was not one of whether to leave, but of how.

Three weeks after the Jan. 17 earthquake, with her Northridge home damaged, her husband rendered jobless by the disaster and the ground still rolling from aftershocks, she found a way. In the midst of being treated for a post-traumatic stress disorder, Kim took matters into her own hands, moving herself and her two small children to her parents’ home in Oregon--and leaving her husband behind.

“(The earthquake) propelled her like a shot from a gun,” said Dr. Richard Ferman, a Northridge psychiatrist who treated Kim. “She wanted to go anyway, but she couldn’t justify it before. The earthquake gave her the perfect excuse.”

This, then, is the latest unhappy consequence of January’s devastating earthquake. In an eerie echo of a phenomenon that has occurred among survivors of such disasters as Hurricane Andrew and the Mount St. Helens eruption, divorce and marital stress seem to be on the increase among quake-affected Angelenos.

Although experts caution that it is still too early to make definitive correlations, and even though post-quake divorce statistics have not been tabulated by Los Angeles County, marriage counselors and psychologists say many already troubled relationships have foundered even more following the quake, and divorce specialists report that their caseloads are inexorably rising.

“I’m seeing a lot of divorces right now,” said Lois Isenberg, a Miracle Mile paralegal who estimates that her number of clients has risen about 20% recently--a phenomenon she also witnessed in 1971 following the Sylmar quake. “We had more clients last month than we’ve had in a while.”

Similarly, at the Los Angeles Free Clinic, officials say the number of couples seeking divorce through the clinic’s legal department is up dramatically in the past 10 weeks--about 40% from the same period last year. Observed Richard Thor, the clinic’s counseling services director: “The quake has put people over the edge in situations where they normally would have coped.”

Although the question of whether divorces follow catastrophes is just starting to be examined, researchers and psychologists say separations are to be expected, given the extraordinary pressures disasters place on people.

Just eight months after Hurricane Andrew, for example, the number of couples seeking divorce in Dade County, Fla., climbed 30%, a figure disaster experts predict will grow even higher in several years’ time. Psychologists beginning to study the effects of last year’s Midwest floods on survivors say they also expect to see a similar increases in divorce, especially among younger couples.

“The anecdotal data suggests that (disasters) are a stress that many weak marriages do not recover from,” said Dr. Charles Figley, director of the Psychological Stress Research Program at Florida State University. “When the cleanup is over, people sometimes go back to their relationships with a new perspective, and sometimes that perspective is not that useful for the relationship.”

*

Researchers give several reasons for the upswing in separations. Paramount among them is the host of psychological conditions any disaster can trigger in survivors, including anxiety, depression and a rise in psychosomatic complaints. Domestic violence and substance abuse can also increase, experts say, and in extreme cases, survivors may suffer lingering bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the case of unhappy spouses such as Kim, disasters can also serve to “crystallize people’s thinking” and enable them to act upon their subconscious thoughts, said Dr. Kenneth Manges, a Cincinnati psychiatrist who specializes in treating people affected by catastrophes. Indeed, for survivors, the cliched “moment of truth” is one that occurs frequently in disasters.

“It’s not uncommon for a person facing death to make decisions that had been lying dormant,” Manges said. “There’s the sense of, ‘If I live through this, I’m going to do things differently.’ ”

Margery Shelton, director of clinical training at the California Family Studies Center in North Hollywood, concurred: “It clears up a lot of gray areas. Some people have said, ‘I was thinking of leaving my spouse, and as a result of the earthquake, I realize that I must.’ ”

That was exactly the thought that flooded the mind of Tina, a college instructor in her 30s from Los Angeles, who nearly left her husband on the afternoon after the quake. She was on the verge of hailing a cab to the airport and was prevented only by the fact that “I couldn’t make up my mind where I wanted to go. Otherwise, I would have left.” She is attempting to reconcile with her husband.

Then again, some couples find their relationship better as a result of having rallied around each other in a time of crisis. Ruben Murillo, a coordinator with Project Rebound, a quake recovery program that provides mental health services, escaped the disaster with just the clothes on his back.

Although his Sylmar home was destroyed, Murillo credits the quake for making his 28-year marriage even stronger. “When you’re standing outside among the ruins, that should help you see that what’s important is each other,” he said.

Likewise, Los Angeles divorce attorney Patricia Phillips said she was handling the divorce of two couples--each of whom suffered through November’s fires and January’s quake--when both couples decided to reconcile. “Together, they felt they could probably make it,” she said.

Researchers say this response is also common but warn that in instances where the “pre-disaster” state of the marriage was weak, old problems and issues are likely to recur, and perhaps even be exacerbated with new dilemmas arising from the disaster. In such marriages, the added pressure of a catastrophe may not be the primary factor fueling discord, but may well become the stress that finally overwhelms a struggling couple.

“There’s a real survival response, and people try to protect what is closest to them,” said Dr. John Freedy, who heads a $1.5-million National Institute of Mental Health study on the survivors of five major catastrophes, including hurricanes Andrew and Hugo. “But that could give way very quickly to depression, frustration and aggression between people if their needs aren’t being met.”

*

Consequently, Florida State’s Figley anticipates that the true effects of Hurricane Andrew on divorcing couples will be felt one to four years from now. “I expect the rates to be much higher later,” he said. “Right now, they’re still in the recovery stage.”

If so, such couples are only beginning to process their disaster experience. The Family Studies Center’s Shelton identifies four phases that those affected by disaster generally pass through on their way to recovery.

The first, she said, is a joining together in the face of crisis. This is often followed by a period of emotional and physical exhaustion as couples tire of managing the disaster--and each other. If the couple sticks together, Shelton said, the next phase is reorganization, in which normal routines are again enjoined in the aftermath of the crisis.

Finally, if this is successfully negotiated, couples may experience a renewal in which they gain new understandings from their experience. But because various and often conflicting emotions may be felt by people at different stages of the process, Shelton recommends that couples not make important life decisions until they have gone through all the phases toward recovery.

“Don’t ignore your feelings, but don’t make hasty decisions,” she said, adding that although judgments made in the heat of the moment can end up to be good ones, time is needed to absorb the impact of catastrophic events. “Disasters do present opportunity for growth.”