Getting a divorce can feel like your own personal train wreck. You can lose your home and your financial security. Sometimes, family and friends take sides. You can’t just blink twice and make all the confusion, loneliness and pain go away. Now imagine what your kids may feel like.  

“Children are caught in the crosshairs of a marriage breakdown, especially if there’s a lot of anger or strong emotion between mom and dad,” says Carolyn Ellis, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. and certified spiritual divorce coach.              

According to the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts, every year more than one million American children and more than 36,000 Canadian children find their lives disrupted by their parents’ divorce.            

When Ellis’ 20-year relationship ended, her heart broke as she watched her children, then three, six and nine, grapple with the fall-out. Eventually, she turned to a life coach to help her family cope. Getting around the guilt “At the time my marriage ended, I was on a very successful career track. There was a lot of information out there about how to thrive in your profession, but I couldn’t find information on how to help my children thrive after my divorce,” Ellis said. The advice she did get didn’t move her forward. “When you’re in a place of distress, you try to glom on to someone else’s solution but no one knows your life like you do,” Ellis said.                

Like many parents, part of Ellis’s distress was struggling with guilt over the idea that her divorce would “wreck her children’s lives.” She was aware of the statistics. Fatherless homes account for 63 percent of youth suicides, 90 percent of homeless/runaway children, 85 percent of children with behavior problems, 71 percent of high school dropouts, and 85 percent of youths in prison.                

Fatherlessness also accounts for more than 50 percent of teen mothers, according to U.S. divorce statistics. In fact, University of Chicago sexual behavior researcher Dr. Edward Laumann has found that, unlike before 1970 when the greatest deterrents to early sexual activity were being a Catholic or having a college educated mother, today the greatest deterrent is living in a home with both parents through the age of 14.                

Ellis reached a turning point one day when she screamed at one of her children over a trivial matter. “When I saw the pain in my child’s eyes, I realized I needed a whole new skill set to handle my new life,” she said.                

Ellis turned to a life coach to help her develop those skill sets. Ellis’ coach helped her disengage from her ex by teaching her how to communicate with him in what coaching calls “charge neutral language.” That’s communication that helps you speak the truth of what you are thinking without making the other person wrong for their way of thinking.                

The communication skills her coach taught her also helped her talk with her children about what was happening in their lives without feeling guilt over her divorce. Her coach also taught her healthy ways to work through the grief about the end of her marriage and create a new vision for her life. As her coach helped her rebuild her own personal foundations, she was able to help her children rebuild theirs.                

Today, seven years later, both Ellis and her children are thriving. Recently, as she was saying goodnight to her 16 year-old daughter, Erin, her daughter gave Ellis a hug and said, “Wow, mom, I feel like we are so much closer than we ever were before, and our relationship is so much better than it ever was!”