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While
recovering from her own divorce, Raewyn Overton five years
ago returned to the Spreydon Baptist Church. She soon became
part of a team establishing the DivorceCare group, and now
co-ordinates the group and is assistant to the church pastor.
In her co-ordinator's role, she oversees 12 leaders who all
take part in presenting the course. The leaders have all been
through seperation themselves. Raewyn says this is essential
for an understanding of what seperated people go through.
About 20 church members went through the course to evaluate
its suitability for the rest of the community. The 13 week
course started in 1995. Since then, it has helped about 400
people deal with divorse and seperation and rebuild their
lives.
Although the programme is based on Biblical principles, participants
are accepted whether they are church members or not. Course
leaders take a non-judgemental role. The first concern is
to meet people in their pain and help them deal with it. "The
main prerequisite would be pain," says Raewyn Overton.
She says the male-to-female ratio of group participants is
interesting. When the group started, there were more women
than men. It is the other way around now."It varies from
one group to the next," she says. "It's amazing.
We are getting more men through the course, mainly through
word of mouth."
Just sitting in a group which has |
DivorceCare
group co-ordinator Raewyn Overton: "Children always
want their parents to get back together again."
experienced the same thing often enables people to feel
normal. Participants do not have to pretend or put on a
show, because everybody is in the same situation.
There is a "no dating other course participants"
rule throughout the course. Raewyn Overton says people who
got together caused the group dynamics to change.
Break
from dating scene
She encourages course participants to take
13 weeks out of the dating scene and spend it on their own
recovery.
One thing people discover is that when they suffer divorce,
83 per cent of their energy is taken up emotionally. Raewyn
Overton likens the energy drain to "open-heart surgery"
for the heart and its emotions.
"You wouldn't expect someone who has gone through open-heart
surgery to be up immediately running marathons, but we do
wrongly expect that of seperated people," she says.
Some television programmes and movies give a false view
of seperation. Often a character will go through a divorce
and be portrayed as sad for a day, then
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happily
off with someone else. Raewyn Overton says this gives people
unrealistic expectations that they will be over the pain in
a couple of months.
The course has two child-focused components. The first deals
with the emotional needs of the children when the parents
initially seperate.
Raewyn emphasises that the age of the children when the parents
seperate does not matter; they will still hit a crisis point
around 12 or 13 years. Teenagers can be profoundly affected,
and display their pain in ways such as taking drugs, leaving
school early, or getting into sexual activity at an earlier
age.
Anger can be manifested later in teenage years, even if the
divorce occurred when the child was two to five years old.
Many seperated people remarry - up to 95 per cent. Unfortunately,
many of the second marriages end in seperation. Around 75
per cent of second marriages fail within five years.
"Children always want their parents to get back together
again," says Raewyn Overton. "Oftten they will do
whatever it takes to break up their parent's second marriage."
the second child-focused component of the course deals with
long-term goals for children. Topics include helping children
through depression and increasing their self-esteem. Parents
who get into relationships prematurely after a divorce can
risk children feeling rejected again if the relationship does
not work out.
Raewyn Overton encourages people to look after themselves
as best they can so that they can be in the best position
to deal with their children's pain. Joining a support group,
talking to freinds, and keeping communications open will help
a person deal with the pain of seperation. |
