Anyone grow up with a divorced family

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infilove
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01 Jun 2015, 11:06 am

Any of you guys grow up with divorced or separated parents? I have, I'm 30 and now suddenly feeling really mad that it happened. If you grew up with a separated family, do you think it effected you in a positive or negative way? Do you think it influenced your Aspergers?


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msnoname
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01 Jun 2015, 6:21 pm

My parents divorced when I was 11; I'm 24 now. Honestly I don't think it made much of a difference in my life, but my parents still acted like friends afterwards. They weren't like the TV divorcees who use their children as weapons and stuff like that. The effect of divorce is really something that changes drastically from person to person, I think. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' homes before the divorce, and I moved into my paternal grandmother's house after it; really the only negative impact the divorce had was letting me learn what a horrible person my paternal grandfather is. I don't know yet if I do have Aspergers, or any ASD at all so I can't comment on whether it affected that or not.



kraftiekortie
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02 Jun 2015, 2:44 pm

My parents separated when I was 11 (it might as well have been a divorce), then divorced when I was 17.

I actually don't think it made that much of a difference.



MLG4Ever
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02 Jun 2015, 4:13 pm

My parents divorced when I was only a little toddler
I actually thought that it was because my mom and dad had different parenting styles Dad was the strict one and my mom was just the typical soccer mom (overprotective and sweet)
But I kinda forgot the real reason why though
(which makes me hate my autism and ADHD)
the good thing is that I get to live in two homes



Agustin
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03 Jun 2015, 10:16 am

infilove wrote:
Any of you guys grow up with divorced or separated parents? I have, I'm 30 and now suddenly feeling really mad that it happened. If you grew up with a separated family, do you think it effected you in a positive or negative way? Do you think it influenced your Aspergers?


Yes, I grew up with divorced parents. My parents divorced when I was only a very small child.

I'd rather not explain here why they got divorced. The thing is they hate each other tremendously to this day and has effected me quite negatively. I do not think it influenced my Aspergers, though the hateful divorce certainly was no good.



Campin_Cat
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03 Jun 2015, 1:37 pm

Yep, I grew-up in a divorced family----I don't think it had / has any effect on me.

Are you, maybe, just "throwing darts" at anything you can think-of, that might be the cause of you feeling like you had / are having, a sucky life?










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03 Jun 2015, 2:17 pm

I was 12 when my parents got separated, and 15 when they officially divorced. For a long time beforehand and after, they did nothing but fight. But deep down, I knew they would break up. They're better off apart anyways.



redrobin62
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03 Jun 2015, 6:59 pm

My parents never divorced. My mother bounced when I was 6 and left us with the care of our father. He was a jobless alcoholic so split us kids up into separate homes. I rejoined my mother in America when I was 12 where she had shacked up with another man. She never divorced my father but married the new man anyway. I guess since we're from Trinidad her legal married status was never questioned. And, oh, yeah, life was hell but their separation neither helped nor hindered it.



androbot01
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03 Jun 2015, 8:12 pm

My Dad left me and my Mom when I was four. I've still not processed it. Being rejected by a parent at that age is hard to reconcile.



Richard Cole
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04 Jun 2015, 6:52 am

I grew up in a very abusive household. My father is a very sick, unstable person. For those familiar with Cluster B Disorders he's a severe APD. Thing of it is that my mother and I were the targets of his abuse, he showed his version of love to two of my brothers and has nothing to do with my youngest. In fact, his way of bonding with those two brothers was to get them (both younger than me) to gang up with him and take part abusing and harassing me. To this day one of my brothers still has that streak in him. He even killed my pets. When my mother took us away from that, it was one of the happiest days of my life until the courts intervened.

I can totally understand the rejection you feel and you are justified in feeling it. You deserve closure, even if it comes in the form of finally accepting that he left and making peace with that fact. I will never know why my father targeted me. This was in the 80's before autism or Asperger's Syndrome were common knowledge. Was it because I was different, is that I he referred to me as "brain damaged"? Or was it because, being the first born and him coming from a very Catholic upbringing I essentially ended his life as he knew it and for that he resents me? I don't know, and I don't care. He cannot justify his actions to me. I accept that it happened, it made me who I am and taught me about violence and psychological torture and what it does to people, which allows me to make better decisions about my own behavior.



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04 Jun 2015, 7:37 am

infilove wrote:
Any of you guys grow up with divorced or separated parents? I have, I'm 30 and now suddenly feeling really mad that it happened. If you grew up with a separated family, do you think it effected you in a positive or negative way? Do you think it influenced your Aspergers?


Yep, my parents were separated by the time I was 15. Which was not a bad thing. They never got along much after the time I was about 5. Just constant fighting. So when they finally split up, it was a big relief.


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MollyTroubletail
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04 Jun 2015, 8:40 am

My parents split up but then got together again. When they split up I only felt a huge relief, because it traumatized me to hear them screaming that they would kill each other with a knife in the middle of the night.



WitchsCat
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04 Jun 2015, 3:52 pm

My parents divorced when I was 10. To be honest, I was glad this happened, because my father was very abusive to my mom and would often beat her. He was also a very heavy drinker. My brother and I went with my mom to Ohio (we used to live in Maine) when they separated.


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08 Jun 2015, 10:36 am

My parents divorced pretty much right after I was born. I have no memories of living in a joint household.

They did their best for me and my sister, but I honestly think neither of them should have been parents (well maybe my mom but she basis a lot of her personality on the person she is dating so with the right partner it might have worked out better than it did in reality), not because of any abuse or even neglect, but just because they always seemed to put their lives first and I strongly believe if you are going to have children you should put them foremost (which is why I'm not having children, because that is something I do not believe I can do).

I do think going back and forth between them as a child and moving schools frequently did prevent me from getting diagnosed when I was younger--though I don't know if they would have realized it was AS as it was not as widely known when I was growing up, but they likely would have noticed more of my particularities if for no other reason than if they were still married there likely would have been one of them around more often to see them in effect and compare notes between each other. I don't believe them being together would have made me less Aspie, but it may have meant realizing what was wrong and getting help, learning coping strategies, at a younger age which could have greatly benefited me.



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08 Jun 2015, 12:05 pm

My parents divorced when I was seven. My mother remarried almost immediately after, but the man she married was bipolar and abusive toward her (I didn't find out until I was older; he never showed that side of himself to us kids). She divorced him when I was sixteen, and three years later remarried again, to the man she lives with now. He's very nice and easygoing, so the doubts I had initially have mostly subsided.

Growing up a "child of divorce" as they call it, definitely impacted me. It made me resentful of the institution of marriage, and skeptical that love could ever work out on a permanent basis. I now live with the cynical belief that there's no such thing as "true love" and that everyone will leave you eventually.

I don't know that the divorce did anything for my Asperger's, although it may have prevented me from getting diagnosed as a child. My mother noticed something was wrong when I was five, and suspected autism by age eight, but never did anything about it due to funding. It may also have had something to do with my crazy ex-stepdad and his need for power and control. I don't want to know what he would have thought upon finding out I was "defective".


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msnoname
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09 Jun 2015, 7:31 am

StarTrekker wrote:
Growing up a "child of divorce" as they call it, definitely impacted me. It made me resentful of the institution of marriage, and skeptical that love could ever work out on a permanent basis. I now live with the cynical belief that there's no such thing as "true love" and that everyone will leave you eventually.


I used to feel that way too, but have managed to get away from it. I think meeting my now-husband's family helped. His parents got married when they were twenty, and thirty years later they are still together and still happy. Same with my best friend's parents. They are still together, twenty-three years later, and still happy. I try to look at it more realistically now, though. Sometimes forever isn't forever, and sometimes it is. Just because a marriage ends in divorce does not mean the preceding years and the marriage as a whole were failures. As long as you have a lot of good memories and lessons learned, it was not a failure.

My dad has been with the same woman since my parents split thirteen years ago and she's great, though my mom has been through many men, with three main ones (two of whom she had chosen to live with). One of them was an abusive, manipulative sociopath whose behaviour has scarred my younger sister forever, another an insecure, racist old man, and the last one a recovering heroin addict. She's finally back to living by herself, hopefully rethinking her taste in men. I love my mom, but after the divorce (that she wanted), she developed just awful taste in men.