Re-Establishing “Holding” in Families of Divorce

“A mother, however, is long suffering. She does not willingly give up the hope that some good feeling possibly still exists in the heart of her only child … and even if that child was so long and cruelly estranged from me and has been brought up to detest her mother” (Stone 1993, p. 314). This excerpt from a letter by a mother to her young daughter was written, in fact, at the turn of the 19th century in the midst of a bitter, tumultuous custody battle. Sadly, the words ring true today and illustrate the painful, often protracted battles between parents for their children, as well as the psychological warfare that occurs with the children used as pawns.

Judith Wallerstein and her colleagues (1980, 1989) have almost single-handedly placed divorce and its impact on children and families in our consciousness. Recent studies indicate that divorce occurs in one of every two marriages in America and nearly 30 percent of American children have already experienced the break-up of their parents' marriage, most of them at a young age (Wallerstein and Reznikoff 1997). Children of these families are often characterized by their difficulties modulating aggression, sadness, and depression, separation problems, and identity difficulties. In more cases than not, the child is faced with diminished availability of both parents (custodial and noncustodial) as the adults are often preoccupied, depressed, and/ or angry. Such a loss, obviously, has ramifications for the child's ability to negotiate various developmental tasks, yet work with the parents of these children has often been given short shrift in the analytic literature. This despite the fact that, in most practices today, the child clinician often finds him- or herself working with children of divorced families and familial configurations (such as blended and stepfamilies) that would have made early attachment theorists' heads spin. This paper represents a preliminary effort to describe clinical work with such families, utilizi