The stress of divorce.

The desire to escape the stress of a troubled marriage is the underlying factor in most divorces. This year more than 1 million couples in America are expected to divorce. What many don't consider, however, is that as stressful as a marriage may be, divorce may be worse ! Jim Anderson, for example, remained married through more than a decade of conflict, but when he finally decided to get out, the stress that resuited was almost more than he could bear. Jim agonized over how to tell the kids. He was torn by their anger, disappointment, and rejection. Every vacation period brought renewed tension as he "bargained" with his ex-wife over where the kids would be and how much he could see them. For the next three years he grieved his loss of family. The ripple effect of the divorce seemed to go on and on.

His ex-wife, Jean, had her own set of stressors. Being the rejected party, she felt worthless. She feared the future. The overwhelming responsibility of making major decisions alone and having to accept the consequences for bad ones was frightening. One night she awakened from a bad dream realizing that she and the children no longer had medical insurance. AIthough she was thankful the dream had vanished, the reality of mounting bills and no steady job became a nightmare that lasted for almost two years.

Major long-term stress not only attacks your emotional health (causing anger, guilt, and depression), but eventually affects your physical health.

Major adjustments. Life-changing events, like divorce, force individuals to cope with change. The more adjustment required, the more stressful the event. The now-famous Holmes and Rahe's Life-changing Events Scale rates divorce at 73 life-changing units. Only death of a spouse surpasses this stressful event. A score of 200 or more life-changing units within a year significantly increases a person's probability of becoming vulnerable to illness.

Divorce can cause a business readjustment (39 life-changing units), a change in financial status (38 units), a change in work (36 units), a change in the number of arguments with your ex-spouse (35 units), a mortgage of more than $10,000 (31 units), a foreclosure of a mortgage or loan (30 units), children to leave home (29 units), trouble with in-laws (29 units), a change in living conditions (25 units), change in residence (20 units), change in social activities (18 units), change in number of family get-togethers (15 units)--and the list goes on and on.

With divorce it's not hard to push the life-changing units over the 200 mark. That's why so many people, two or three years after divorce, suffer from health problems such as ulcers, heart trouble, diabetes, or even cancer.

To a great extent, whether or not stress affects your physical health will depend on the choices you make during your divorce proceedings and after.

The stress caused by divorce, regardless of the circumstances, can be overwhelming. The fact is that although divorce is sometimes unavoidable, it is never good. Even if you both agree that divorce in your situation is best, it's only the best of many poor choices.

Stress busters. If you are in the midst of divorce, here are some ways to protect your emotional and physical health.

1. Don't cut yourself off from your friends. Find a support system of people who care about you, who will encourage and pray for you, but who won't try to cushion you from the pain of healing. In other words, they will allow you to experience the consequences of your choices enough so that you can learn from the experience.

2. Keep changes to a minimum. The stress caused by the changes divorce brings will be severe enough. Avoid selling your home, changing jobs, or signing major contracts during the first months after divorce. Life will look different two years from D-day. Don't make hasty decisions you will live to regret.

3. Make decisions you must make. The fear of making a wrong decision may cause you to make no decision at all. Indecision means living in limbo. And living in limbo--not knowing where you're going and how you'll get there- is stressful. Set a goal and make a short-term decision that will move you in the direction you want to go.

4. Let your emotions hang out! Holding in negative feelings will only cause them to fester and grow until you can no longer contain them, and then you explode. Open the escape hatch. Cry. Pound the kitchen table. Scream, if you must. But don't hold things in. Talk--to a trusted friend, to a counselor, to God. The process of talking will help you organize things in your mind, and you'll find it easier to make decisions.

5. Seek divorce counseling, even if you think you don't need it! A physician friend of mine, finally after a divorce from his second wife, was crushed enough to seek the counseling he didn't think he needed. In the process he found that he went off the scale in the area of control- and he learned what he could do to get rid of his relational pathology. He is a changed man today. He commented to me with tears in his eyes, "I just wish 1 had gone for divorce counseling with my first--then at least I could have saved my second!"

6. Insist that your children have at least six weeks of counseling--or as long as is necessary for them to begin to resolve issues that have been simmering in your dysfunctional family. Divorce is never good for children. Loss of a stable family is a loss that must be grieved. The pain and hurt of conflict have an effect on your children. Stop the cycle now, or at least try! And the pain of seeing your children suffer because of your decision to divorce can be softened through counseling.

7. Choose to dwell in the "pleasant" tense--and not the past-painful one. Choose to see the good in the bad. Think positively. Smile. Sing. Exercise. Praise the Lord.

8. Get involved in helping someone in need. Volunteer to help feed the homeless. Visit someone in a rest home or hospital. Speak to the lonely at church. Invite someone home for lunch.

9. Ask for forgiveness and then forgive the "guilty" party--and yourself. That's the only way to make the bitter better. Participating in a pity party won't help--because you're always the only one who will attend. One woman who chose divorce lamented, "The greatest grief of all was the self-abandonment. For 35 years I believed the myth that I didn't deserve anybody's love. My internal belief system was that I wasn't any good. And so I threw myself away. The stress of all that guilt and distorted self-perception was overwhelming. I've suffered tremendous sadness and grief over my decision to divorce and over what I put the children through. My heart broke as I watched the fear and insecurity in my children. Was it really fair what I did to my family?"

Fair or not, the decision has been made. The damage has been done. The answer now is forgiveness. If you have wronged your family, ask for forgiveness. Grant forgiveness to the one who has hurt you, even if that exspouse may never ask, and then forgive yourself. If God is willing to bury your mistakes as deep as the deepest sea--shouldn't you be willing to help Him by forgiving yourself?.

10. Recognize how valuable you are to God. Read Romans 8:16, 17, where it says that God's Spirit will let you know that you are God's child, and if you are God's child, then you will receive the blessings that He has for you. And when you begin to question if God really does love you and accept you, read Psalm 139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; John 3:16; 14:1-3; and I John 3:1.

These 10 stress busters won't save you from the consequences of a broken bond, a severed and mutilated love relationship, but they will help you accept what has happened and move on to discover life and healthy relationships once again.

Kay Kuzrna, Ed.D., is president of Family Matters, a radio, TV and seminar ministry in Cleveland, Tennessee. Elden M. Chalmers, Ph.D., is a counselor living in Columbia, Maryland.