What Are Your Values?: Part Two

In my psychiatric practice I am witnessing a major societal conflict about values. And it is happening in the lives of the individuals who are sitting on my couch, right in front of me.

Value One: The value of personal happiness: Shouldn’t I be entitled to be happy?

Value Two: There is the value of family and clan: My family needs me; I can’t consider breaking up my marriage!

Culture is powerful and with so many divorces catching our attention, whether it is Al and Tipper Gore, Tiger Woods or simply your best friend, we are all influenced.

What are your values? Are they to your happiness or to your family or a mix of both?

The Intelligent Divorce enters at this point. I believe that even if you are choosing divorce. Or if divorce has chosen you, there is another choice to be made. Can you choose a divorce with more functionality than you may have otherwise done, by consciously deciding to divorce intelligently?

Now, that is a value worth pursuing.

What Are Your Values?: Part One

According to the Federal Reserve Board's 1995 Survey of Consumer Finance, only 42 percent of children aged 14 to 18 live in an intact two-parent married family. This according to The Heritage Foundation (2000) has left many children at risk for a host of problems, from academic underperformance to mood issues like depression and self destructive behavior.

What we are seeing is a redefinition of commitment to family and children. Unhappy marriages also yield significant hazards to children, but with work and time some of these marriages improve. So what is happening?

We are slowly changing our values from commitment to family and clan to commitment to individual happiness. In a way we are all losing here. Divorce is now a perfectly fine option to an unpleasant marriage, and a nasty divorce is sometimes a “reasonable” option to a calm divorce in which you may not be getting everything that you want.

The philosophy of The Intelligent Divorce is to bring our values back to baseline. Our children need stability and a lost marriage does not mean an unending war. We must value the structure of the family, even if it now means the structure of a family has been reconfigured because of a divorce.