Viagra for men and Niagra for women got these folks messed up?
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/24/282105...-divorce-trend
For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting : Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago.
But just because it's more common, doesn't mean it's not still painful.
Jim Campbell, 55, of Boulder, Colo., says he and his wife grew apart after 34 years together. "The No. 1 best thing in common that my ex-wife and I had was raising kids," Campbell says. When their two sons grew up, he says, "we just didn't have enough activities, passions, interests that were in common. And when the boys were gone, that just became more and more — to me — obvious."
He felt lonely. In 2012, he decided he had to leave. He told his wife while they were out for a walk. "And she was incredibly upset. And I left," he says. "And we haven't talked about emotions much since then."
But just because it was Campbell's decision to dissolve the marriage, that doesn't mean it wasn't tough. "It would be a tragedy if 34 years was not incredibly painful to get over," he says. "It hurt a lot."
He knew he needed to heal, so he went to a 10-week program called the Rebuilding Seminar in downtown Boulder. Thirty-five newly separated people meet on Sunday nights in a bland conference room, well-stocked with boxes of Kleenex. Judging by appearances, a majority of the participants seem to be boomers.
Therapist Norm Gibson founded the seminar in the 1990s. There can be a little bit of nervousness at the beginning of a session, so Gibson lightens the mood by naming each meeting for a country-western song. On this night, the guiding song is "My wife left town with my best friend and I miss him."
It gets a laugh, but that doesn't last long. Everybody knows what's coming. The topic for this evening is grief. Mary Harbison, a therapist and life coach who leads the seminar with Gibson, tells the group that often patients who are divorcing will ask her if they're clinically depressed. Her answer is that "it's part of our nature as human beings to experience grief, and so we want to make space for it and not pathologize that."
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