Ask the experts: My parents had a nasty divorce when I was eight – 25 years later they want to re-marry

It can be hard to accept the rekindling of a relationship between divorced parents. Photo / 123RF

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My parents divorced when I was 8. It was a messy separation and I spent years listening to them slag each other off. Now, 25 years later, they have rekindled their relationship and are looking to remarry. I'm having a hard time accepting and being supportive of it. What should I do? - Ben

Hello Ben,

Decades ago, when we trained as Family Court counsellors, a core principle we learned was that "every child is made up of half of their mother and half of their father". Consequently, if you denigrate one of their parents, you are telling the child that half of them is unacceptable. It must be galling to have years of that from your parents only to find that it was all for nothing.

The sad reality is that some people are so lacking in self-awareness and so caught up in their own pain that they cannot sustain a long-term relationship. To make matters worse for their kids, those same limitations may make them unskilful and unempathetic parents. So they are oblivious to the harm they do their kids as they throw their upset about separation around. Unfortunately, the research is clear that hostile or combative separations typically leave children distressed, conflicted and stuck in some simplistic thinking about their parent's relationship and why they separated.

If that description fits your parents, it is not surprising that you struggle to accept and support the rekindling of their relationship. Of course, it would be much easier for them (and maybe others in the family) if you did, but there's nothing that says you have to. If your parents made a series of choices over 25 years that damaged your trust, that's on them, not you.

However, we can appreciate that being distanced and distressed by your parents' renewed relationship is not a happy place for you either. Here are some suggestions to see if you can create a more workable situation for yourself.

The first is to see if you can find a place of compassionate understanding with which to view your parents' behaviour. At 33, you perhaps have had some relationship experience of your own. You may have experiences that will help you develop a more nuanced adult understanding of what the "slagging off" represented. Have you ever had a painful break-up yourself? The pain is often related to unresolved feelings.

Hating someone is a very engaged relationship. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. In our experience, when people simply no longer care for each other, they typically exhibit apathy toward each other rather than energetic hostility. When couples have truly stopped caring, their separation can have an inevitable feeling and come as a relief or a release. So is it possible for you to see that your parents' ongoing distress represented "unfinished business" with each other?

The slagging off may have indicated that your parents still cared deeply for each other and felt great distress that the relationship had ended. When humans experience emotional threat or pain, it triggers a frightened animal's "fight, flight or freeze" response. If you are indifferent to someone, you are unlikely to feel threatened by them. But the more they matter to you, the more not getting on with them seems like a threat. Getting angry and blaming or speaking unpleasantly about the other person becomes a defensive response to the emotional danger of someone you love hurting you.

If neither of them was ready to "look in their own mirror" and see what they needed to own about their unhelpful patterns in their relationship, then their only recourse was to blame and be judgemental. An excellent way to avoid self-responsibility is to blame it all on the other person.

There are two aspects to increasing your ability to accept their choice to remarry. One is whether they are willing to acknowledge what they have put you through in their selfish offloading of their pain about the separation. The other is them helping you make sense of it. We suspect the former may be the more critical piece.

You will have to make a judgement call about whether you think your parents have the self-awareness and courage to own the consequences for you of their behaviour. Even if you fear they aren't, it is almost certainly worth you making an initial attempt.

We suggest that you do some reflection on the impacts on you before you talk to them. Discuss with a friend, partner, sibling or therapist to clarify how you were affected. Alternatively, you could journal – explore your thoughts and feelings on paper or a screen. Write without censoring or judging what comes out.

Then invite your parents (either separately or together) to help you with an issue affecting your relationship with them. Ask if they are willing to hear how their anger and distress have impacted on you. You don't have to persist if they are immediately defensive or deflective. However, if they are open, share what their slagging off each other meant to you. Even if you end up with a defensive response from them, many people find it frees them up when they express their reality to those responsible.

The other discussion you might want is to ask them to help you understand how they could go from slagging each other off for years to remarrying. Try not to come across as interrogating, accusing or expressing incredulity. Instead, we recommend that you ask in a genuinely curious way if they could help you with your struggle to be understanding and supportive of this significant change in their attitude to each other. How did this happen to them? How do they make sense of the years of animosity and slagging off?

Psychologists Verity Thom and Nic Beets are specialist relationship and sex therapists. Photo / Dean Purcell

If they simply reply, "Things change", ask them to explain this further. How did it change for them? What do they think about the derogatory things they used to say about the other? Do they still stand by them as a fact about the other person or more as an expression of something else? If so, what was that "something else"?

It can be very liberating to step into an "adult-to-adult" reflective conversation with our ageing parents. Of course, there is a risk that they do not want to be open and vulnerable with you. Still, at least they will understand if you are not so enthusiastic in your support for what they are doing. You will have likely demonstrated more capacity to risk vulnerability than they were when they were around your age. There is even a possibility that they might respect you for taking the risk to try to connect more deeply with them both in their rekindled relationship.

• Verity & Nic are psychologists and family therapists who have specialised in relationship and sex therapy for more than 25 years. They have been working on their own relationship for more than 40 years and have two adult children.