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Divorce can be a seismic event for the individuals who experience it. The challenges and hazards which it poses for all members of the family create risks to future well-being and require the mobilization of coping skills along with the right mix of ameliorative circumstances to allow for recovery and restabilization to take place. To the degree that these things occur, adults and their children seem often able to engage in productive lives and attain reasonable well-being, though not unaffected by the divorce. Others evidence long-term and significant psychological reactions that can shape their lives going forward.
Matrimonial attorneys will see in their work with clients a variety of reactions and changes in psychological functioning which are concomitant with the legal process. In fact, that process is in itself a highly significant stressor on the individuals who experience it directly, and by extension ripples out to impact the children of divorce whether or not they become actively involved in legal interactions. Where the effects are obvious to the lawyer he or she may try to find ways to address them so as to provide assistance to a client in need. Some of this author's previous articles in this journal have addressed ways to do so.1 2 3 In other cases the attorney may be unaware of what is transpiring in the families whose lives his work touches and most often cannot know the eventual outcomes that affect lives long after the legal fight has ended.
The purpose of this article and the ones to follow in this series, is to provide lawyers with a context in which to view their work. It is not intended that they should become therapists to their clients, though more skillful handling of clients' emotional responses and behavior and changes toward a more humane and family-sensitive system of divorce would reduce some of the damages to families that divorce creates. Rather, the series is meant to offer a broad overview of the nature of divorce so that those lawyers who are interested can have a holistic sense of what divorce really is and where the legal system fits into it. In this article I shall discuss the consequences of divorce for adults, relying heavily, though not exclusively, on the seminal...