These two videos were made by David Sbarra of the University of Arizona with an actress (not a research participant) to illustrate how coping with a divorce could change over time. In the first video, the actor shows a person whose thoughts about the divorce are disorganized and who has not fully dealt with the experience. The second video shows how a person’s thoughts could become organized, and meaning and resolution is found. Sbarra’s study on marital transitions seeks to find out what coping mechanisms lead to a person recovering successfully from divorce.       

    Not everyone deals with divorce in the same way. Some see it as an opportunity for growth in their life. Others struggle through it and finally move on. And for some, it leads to serious depression.            

A researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson wants to know why. “There’s very consistent evidence that divorce poses a substantial risk for poor mental health and physical health outcomes,” said David Sbarra, assistant professor of clinical psychology and director of the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health. “But most people are ultimately resilient. They weather the storm and end up doing well. Then there’s a small group that really gets stuck.”            

Sbarra’s study – called the "Marital Dissolution and Adult Adjustment" project or marital transitions study – aims to learn the different coping mechanisms that lead to the way a person handles divorce and how they make sense of what has happened. The study’s funding comes from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Aging.            

“We want to know what is it that people who are doing well are doing. What are the variables that lead people to clinical episodes of depression,” he said. “We want to specifically look at how this unfolds and the variables involved.”            

Currently, 70 people are participating in the study, though Sbarra said he’d like to have at least twice that and is still recruiting participants, all of whom must be from the Tucson area. Participants must join the study within five months of the actual date of physical separation and be in generally good health. The study is scheduled to continue through March 2009.            

The coping responses of the participants are determined in a variety of ways over the first nine months of their separation experience, Sbarra said. They will visit the lab three times over those nine months and complete a series of exercises including stream-of-consciousness recordings, emotional or expressive writing, interviews and measurement of physical responses. Some of the data collected involves giving participants two minutes to think about their separation and then make a stream-of-consciousness recording. The recording is transcribed verbatim and then put through a text analyzer to look at the words the person used, such as how often they say “me,” “myself,” or “I.”            

The person is also interviewed and their heart rate, blood pressure and other indicators of autonomous nervous system functioning are measured. “They experience a heart rate increase with the use of the words me, myself and I,” he said. “There is a preoccupation with self focus. They’re going over and over how bad they feel and how they’ve been wronged. The words we use translate into physical reactions.”            

A person’s ability to create meaning from their experience and tell the story of what happened coherently seems to be one of the keys to successful coping, Sbarra said. “Divorce and separation become a story, and it needs some narration,” he said. “People who are stuck on the experience have trouble narrating what happened.”            

Other behaviors can make it more difficult to recover, he said, such as drinking and substance abuse, but also contact with the ex. A past study followed 58 college students for a month after a break-up. The students carried a beeper and were paged daily to rate their emotions. Sbarra said the study found that on days they had contact with their ex, they were feeling much worse than the days they didn’t. “It didn’t matter if the contact was positive or negative,” he said.            

The ultimate goal of the marital transitions study, Sbarra said, is to offer ways for people to successfully cope with the loss and stress of a divorce, starting as soon as possible after the separation. “We want to make it useful where it is really needed,” he said. “We want to be able to say these are the things that really work.”  

Stephanie Obley worked for several years as an award-winning journalist in Kansas, Florida and Utah, covering everything from crime to the environment. She now lives in South Carolina with her family and writes freelance articles.