How common is it for people to consider divorce? Does a marriage have to be terrible for thoughts of divorce to come up? Are divorces increasing or decreasing? Dr. Hawkins has been studying divorce ideation and has plenty of answers for us!
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Jen: Welcome to the Parents Place podcast with Hillary and Jen.
Hilary: Welcome to our podcast today, we are excited to have you guys listening for this particular episode. I personally am thrilled because we have an incredibly special guest with us today. Dr. Alan Hopkins is with us. And as I was trying to decide how to best introduce him for this episode, honestly, I kept thinking to myself, the best way to describe Dr Hawkins is he is a rock star when it comes to the world of family life education. He has done so much in regard to study and research and bettering our knowledge base that we have in this field. And to be honest with you, we could have asked him to talk about essentially anything. But we have pinpointed one particular topic that we are going to spend our time at today. But before we do introduce that topic, I want to just turn the time over to him and let him introduce himself a little bit. And if you don't mind Dr Hopkins just kind of explaining where you're at and maybe what you tend to focus on in your field of study. I think that our listeners would love to know a little bit more about you.
Dr. Hopkins: Alright, thanks Hilary, very kind, very generous. I'm a professor of family life at Brigham Young University that's located in Provo, Utah. I've been here. I think I'm on my 33rd year, so a little bit of time. My Ph.D. is from Penn State University and Human Development and Family Studies, and I've been studying fatherhood and marriage for getting, you know, more than three decades now. And over the last 20 to 25 years, I've had a really applied focus on relationship education and how we can be effective at teaching these principles that can help couples to form and sustain healthy relationships and strong marriages. And my research has been primarily focused on the effectiveness of these kinds of programs, and I have published a lot in that area. I, you know, I don't I do a little bit of, you know, hands on family life, education, relationship education on my own, and I teach my students to do it . But I'm more kind of the bird's eye view looking at overall its effectiveness. So, I'm not associated with any specific program that people might know out there. I also have a little side interest in it, a topic I call divorce ideation, which is simply just thinking about divorced people who have some thoughts about divorce. It's really curious. We haven’t. I mean, it's going to sound strange, but we haven't studied people who are thinking about divorce very much. We we've studied divorce, but the process of thinking about it and making decisions is almost an empty set . And I've been trying to do some work in that area trying to understand what people are thinking about when they're thinking about divorce and which to me is also related to the primary interest of relationship education and helping people, you know, in in that stage who really have some questions and concerns and struggles. So that's my life. As a researcher, I say I'm an educator. I try to help students become good family life educators. And I get an enormous amount of satisfaction from doing that.
Hilary: Well, I speak on behalf of both Jen and myself, as well as not only the educators at the Family Place, but also family of educators as a whole , we're grateful that we have someone like you that , like I said , is not only spearheading the research but helping us to know best practices so that we then can help our participants in our clientele to the best of our abilities. So we love that. We appreciate that. Thanks. So, so Dr. Hopkins, you mentioned that, and we'll get to some of the resources that you have provided in this area. But we kind of want to focus in on that particular topic of divorce and what you mentioned as divorce ideation. So let's start here because I think divorce is one of those topics that, statistically speaking, we tend to hear. We tend to hear the infamous statistic of, you know, the 50 percent divorce rate. And quite honestly, to be quite honest with you, I've heard statistics saying that divorce is increasing and I've also heard that divorce is decreasing, right?
Dr. Hopkins: We’ve been doing some research in that area just the last few weeks and with a colleague of mine here who's very talented. He's a demographer. And yeah, there there's kind of different narratives out there. One is that, you know , divorces is increasing and out of hand in that sort of thing. The more common narrative these days is that divorce has been waning for decades. The divorce rate has been coming down. And indeed, researchers anyways have pretty much accepted that narrative. And frankly, there's not a lot of research going on about it focused on divorce these days, I think, because what we see is that the divorce rate has been going down for about 40 years now, and the divorce rate itself is at its lowest point in 50 years. But that tells a story that I think is different from what a lot of people are still seeing around them and are having a hard time believing. So we actually, instead of looking at the divorce rate, which is a technical term, that's the number of divorces per 1000 married women in the population at some strange, you know, technical demographers kind of statistic. We went for the more just simple, easy to interpret what proportion of first divorces and or excuse me, what proportion of first marriages end in divorce. You would be surprised how difficult it is to get that information. Our data collection on this statewide and nationwide has been neglectful. But using the best sources that we could, we start. We took a look at this and what we are finding among recent cohorts. So I'm not going to go back a generation. But among those marrying here in the last 20 years that, yes, the divorce rate is going down. But the evidence we have is that every marrying cohort in the last 20 years is still crossing or will cross the 50 percent divorce threshold within about 20 years. Now, the most recently, marrying folks are delaying that. Their marriages are lasting longer, you know, into that third decade. But still, they cross that 50 percent threshold, usually within about 20 to 25 years, so they delay a little longer than those who married a little earlier in this century. But it's really interesting that if you think about that, there's a sort of psychological effect that that has that says, well, my chances of staying married forever and ever. Amen is about 50-50. So it seems like a chance.
Hilary: Like flipping a coin.
Dr. Hopkins: Yes, just like flipping a coin. And psychologically, I think that's hard. And unfortunately, it looks like the divorce rate has been going down , but it was sky high 40 years ago. And so it has been gradually coming down, but unfortunately, it looks like we are still crossing that threshold. And so I think I understand why people out there are saying gee to a marriage still seems pretty fragile and pretty much a coin toss.
Hilary: Yeah, that's so interesting. And you know. Can I ask it and this is completely, you know, the speculation, so obviously. We can take our best guess, but you mentioned that that for many of these, these individuals, it's a little bit older when they get to or they've been in that marriage a little bit longer when they get to that point, do we notice as that as to maybe a why that's happening, why it's why it's happening at a later time in their marriage.
Dr. Hopkins: And that's a next step. And you know, I've been trying to write up these results, but I'm kind of stuck there and I've got I've got to think through that more carefully. Why might marriages be lasting longer, but still at a significant risk for ending? You know, and I'm almost I almost don't want to speculate yet. It may be, I'll just put one thing out there. There's no question that over this last generation, we have begun to expect more and more and more from our marriages. One colleague of mine first, it calls this, you know, high altitude marriages. You know, it's just we expect marriages to always be at the summit. We do everything for us. And it's hard to get to the summit and it's actually hard to stay up there and the air is a little bit thin. And we're such high expectations. It could very well be an issue of people as children from the union are beginning to leave home. There are thoughts that maybe there's something better out there for me. So, they believe we know that this generation of parents are just, you know, they're so invested in their children. And kudos for them for, you know, you know, not divorcing when their kids were 13, because that's rough. That's really rough on kids. And I think children are can handle a little bit better when that frontal cortex, that prefrontal cortex is a little better formed in their 20s, you know? So one speculation is they're waiting because they don't want to expose their children to divorce and because they really don't feel like that relationship has measured up to that summit of marriage that they were expecting.
Hilary: OK, that's so interesting. And I can see that as you describe that because I think we have all heard of scenarios where we have a couple that you're right, they're staying together for the children. And as soon as the children are to an adult age, that tie that was kind of holding them together is essentially nonexistent at that point. So, you know, I think you're right about that.
Dr. Hopkins: You know, so that's one possibility. But you know, I want to think a little bit more about that and see if there's a little bit more research out on that. I mean, we do know that the divorce rate actually has been going up a little bit for long term marriages. We think, however, that that is primarily, excuse me, not for long term marriages, but for older adults, and we're not sure, but we actually think that those are, for the most part, second marriages that are breaking up, not long term first marriages. I'm not sure that that rate has been going up, but and that may be just a cohort. You're looking at my generation and those right after and we were the most divorcing generation in history. And it just may be that now that we're looking at a strange group of people now, our down in another decade or so. But you know, you know, getting into your 50s and 60s is not necessarily a time to sit back and say, OK, nothing, nothing is going to happen to my marriage now. That's not quite right now.
Hilary: Yeah. So you have created this resource for individuals, and it's titled How or excuse me, “Should I try to work it out?” Speaking on behalf of a kind of this conundrum that many individuals are in when they're making that decision of staying or going. So, talk to us about that process that an individual goes through and kind of maybe the decisions they're making, maybe the mindset that they're in . Tell us a little bit of a little bit more about that.
Dr. Hopkins: Yeah, and we didn't know . We still have a lot more to learn, but we didn't know very much at all until I think some recent research, some that I've been involved in. First of all, we know that thinking about divorce when I call divorce ideation is common. As we've look to a large nationally representative sample on this question, a little more than half have said that at some point during their marriage, they've had serious thoughts, serious challenges and had thoughts about divorce. And we also ask it in a different way, he said. How about in the last six months and about half of those or, in other words, a quarter of married couples? Let me first clarify we're not looking at those couples. We looked at couples between the ages of 25 and 50 that that sort of prime divorcing time. So a quarter of those have had some kinds of thoughts about divorce in the last six months. You know, what that says to me is that thoughts about divorce are more common. You know what research shows? We use the term normative. Yeah, that's out there, and most people at some point are going to be in that situation. And but there are some there are some things about that that we've learned that I think are important for people to know. One is that those thoughts don't have to be scary. For one thing, most of the people who have had thoughts about divorce, they've been maybe what you would call just more episodic, more fleeting. And my point is how can people not think about divorce these days? You run into a problem and you can't not think about it. It's so dear in our culture that if you some kind of strange in some ways, are you exact cut off from culture that it doesn't even cross your mind? And so for most people, those thoughts are kind of fleeting and frankly to be expected. But I don't think they have to be as scary. Another thing we've known is that this notion that people, you know, have some kind of blow up and decide their marriage is over and they get divorced and you know, all of that within a few months or a year, it seems to be a bit of a myth . Our research suggests that people who have been thinking about divorce have been thinking about it for really quite some time. Usually sometimes very gentle and episodic, but sometimes much more serious and ongoing . But our research suggests that people don't just get fed up with their marriage and they're gone. These thoughts will linger over time. Unfortunately, our research also suggests that people kind of struggle to know what to do about it. We asked them, by the way , does your spouse know that you're thinking about divorce? And we got a lot of different answers. And if I'm remembering correctly, only about only about 40 percent of cases had they shared these thoughts with their spouse. Maybe one reason why they do it is because they're not particularly serious, so they don't want to throw that out. But a lot of times they're kind of not sharing these thoughts with their spouse.
We also know that they're not getting often not getting professional help seeking a counselor or going to a marriage enrichment seminar or something like that. Their help seeking tends to be a little more private. With this, with these questions and concerns that they have. So anyway, thinking about divorce is pretty common. And it's something that actually we've also seen can change over time. So we followed them over a year of period and those who are thinking about divorce. But I think it's about 30 percent. Almost a third of them next year say they haven't had thoughts about divorce in the last year. Unfortunately, about the same number who haven't thought about it a year before now say they've been thinking about it, so it's pretty dynamic. You know, these thoughts do come and go now. That's not to downplay the seriousness with some people. They are really, really struggling, though again, our research suggests that that's not something they rush to judgment on. They understand that feelings can go up and down, and they're generally being, I think, pretty patient with their concerns. So anyway, I think that's an important thing. Some important things that we've learned about people who are thinking about it. And maybe the last thing is most people who have been thinking about divorce will report to us that they're struggling to get clarity. You know, what does this mean? What should I do? That's where our work comes in, are our efforts to try and help those people. You know, you're really struggling to get clarity. Now, that shouldn't surprise us. You know, this can be these thoughts can be really scary. And then our lizard brain comes into play and we get really scared. And our and our rational thinking ability, you know, is diminished. And this can be really, really hard kinds of things, and our brain is just probably not functioning as well as it should be on one of the most important decisions that we would ever make in life. And so, what we've done is trying to put together a help, a resource, a guidebook that actually just functions as your external brain in some respects. You've got a zillion questions, but your brain is struggling to deal with the emotional upheaval that creates. So, we got this guidebook with just dozens and dozens of questions that are in people's minds, and we try to provide you what the research can help us understand. And I think some reasonable thoughts about how to deal with what you're thinking and your situation. So anyway, that's what we've been trying to do with our book.
Hilary: Oh, my goodness. Right at this moment, I am saying to myself, I need to get that like, I need to read that that sounds so incredible.
Dr. Hopkins: Great are wonderful. Now I'll tell you, we just finished a revision process, so I think we published the last one in 2013 . We felt like it needed to be freshened and updated, and it's a piece a few new things added. And so we just finished that manuscript and will go into production, and hopefully that will be available in a few weeks . We will we made the decision that we're going to self-publish this so that we can offer it as a free resource for those who want it. And it should be up and available in a few weeks. And I can give you that that website for people to download if they want a hard copy. I can give them where they can go to get a hard copy printed and mailed to them for. I think it's about ten dollars or something, but for those who just want an electronic resource that will be available soon.
Hilary: Perfect. And we will make sure that we provide all of that information in our show notes for our listeners so that they know where to go to get this resource. As you were talking, Alan , I am curious because I think so often . First of all, let me backtrack . I love the fact that you are bringing up the point that many people have these thoughts, and to an extent, they are normal. It's normal to question certain things. And I think that's something we've tried to bring up in this podcast is that sometimes we have a hard time with our kids and sometimes we feel stressed out and sometimes we get burned out and so just helping to normalize the parenting and marriage and family life in general can be difficult because I feel like so many people may have this. This thought in their head and think, well, something must be wrong with me. Yes, the fact that I'm thinking that.
Dr. Hopkins: And it can be very scary, but you know, and it's so trite, but all good things are hard. You know, I want to be able to achieve good things, just always requires hard work and even the risk of failure, you know, these are not these are not cheap. You know, families are not cheap.
Jen: I got married later in life. I was 42/43. We will celebrate six years in January, and, you know, I'd always heard marriage is hard. You got to have communication right until I said, I do, and lived together for a bit. You know, I never knew how hard it would be and how important communication is. Even on those days to where you may be thinking, did I make the right decision? But what I have found in my short six years, five and a half years of being married is, you know what? I've got to work at this just like any other decision that I have to work at.
Dr. Hopkins: And I think that's one of the very important messages that we provide out there in our relationship education efforts is that, yeah, you've taken on something pretty challenging. You know, it's great. It's wonderful. But yeah, it's hard work and we do have to work at it. You know, most people when and I think actually understand that. But our culture has sent so many other messages like, you know, that makes it seem like we're soulmates or this is natural. It’s, you know, being a mom is natural. And I, you know, I just thought that if it was at one point at eight, now you know, it just this is this is really hard stuff . And society seems to be getting more and more complicated. And, you know, so you take on, you know, a really significant challenge when you decide that you want to do these things and as you said, yeah , you got to work at it. I used the out and out the analogy, the metaphor of entropy that you learned in your physics class. You remember your physics class that the state of the universe is it's chaos. It's always falling apart unless there's some powerful force that's acting on things, trying and holding it together. And that's where your marriage is headed. If you just kind of just are not working on it, it's headed toward its entropy is going to eventually send your marriage into chaos. That's just the state of the universe. You gotta work. You got to put the energy into the system to keep the system ordered. And it's and it's just not natural and organic. Well, I will say I've been married now forty-five years or something like that. It only took me 35 to 40 years to kind of get to that place where I, you know, I think we've put in a lot of energy and we're in a really good place and it doesn't feel like I'm working hard. I still attend to things. I'm still, you know, very conscious of things, but it doesn't feel so much like work to me and all that. Most people can do it in 25 to 30 years, not for thirty-five to forty that it took me.
Hilary: So, Jen , we've got just a few more years to be able to make it.
Jen: Well I have a lot more than you do.
Hilary: So, Alan, I'm curious because I think there's a lot of individuals. And again, society has as almost taught us that when we talk about marriage, we use that that infamous phrase for better or worse. And so we recognize that marriage is going to be hard and we're going to go through those difficult times. But I also I think we also understand that there's a lot of individuals that are in that position where they're thinking, Do I keep going and hope that better comes out? When do I know? Yeah, when do I know when it's time for me to essentially leave because of safety, because of the fact that I'm in an unhealthy state of mind, because the my partner is unwilling to change? How does one differentiate between those two areas?
Dr. Hopkins: In our guidebook, we try hard to kind of surface those kinds of things. So I think the reality is most people really, really want their marriage to work. They're not casual about this. They want it to work, and they're willing to experience some pain for a time, you know, to get through hard times and to make it work. But there really is a really hard question of when do I know? And while I don't have a definitive answer to that, we certainly will raise with them some of those issues that we're irrational. The kind of analysis of the situation is probably going to bring it to a conclusion that this isn't going to work and for safety, emotional and physical. Safety reasons and perhaps other reasons, I do need to make the very hard decision to divorce, we also point out , you know, the divorce is at times a very rational decision about a situation I even think that that it's a moral decision. I think there are times when people are acting in ways in marriage in which they're acting outside the moral boundaries of what you committed to do in that relationship and if they're unwilling to change or unable to change in the case of sometimes addictions and things of that nature, then the moral choice is to say, the reality is this isn't this isn't a marriage. And we need to recognize it as such. And so we do try to help people understand those situations. Even though we do that, the emotions can still just be overwhelming. And so I do think people need support systems and people around them who are helping them, you know, kind of come to grips with what they're beginning to understand about the relationship.
Hilary: We said this to our previous guest, but an ongoing trend in our podcast is recognizing those people in our lives that can help out as additional resources. So, I'm glad that you up because I feel like that is addressed in almost every podcast episode we have. The importance of finding that support,
Dr. Hopkins: If you haven't already, you should actually do a podcast with Dr. Bill Dougherty at the University of Minnesota or Dr. Steve Harris there. They talk about how we can be supportive of people in these situations, but how we are often trying to be supportive but are not very supportive. There are ways to be that support system for those who are going through a very difficult decision time around the future of their marriage. Unfortunately, I think the research that Dr. Dougherty has done tends to suggest that people are almost too quick to say , Yeah, the guy's a jerk, you deserve better. And frankly, that actually tends not to be very helpful to the person in need there who's trying to make a decision because they'll actually kind of fly to the defense of that individual. There are ways that we can be supportive that can respect the sacredness of that relationship, but also understand the very real kinds of threats that can also exist when we're in unhealthy or just dead relationships. And that's another thing that we recognize is that sometimes we make mistakes over time and don't correct them, and we end up in a relationship that is just dead. And you can't revive it. And yes, there were things you could have done 10 years ago and 20 years ago, and but not now. And we recognize that situation as well.
Hilary: So, Dr Hopkins, I'm thinking about myself and I'm thinking about the times where my, my partner and I may be having a difficult time and often times during those stages it's may not always necessarily be our interaction together, but it's external stresses that are also playing a role. So our marriage is straining not just because of us, but because I'm having a rough time with my children and my job as a stress at this point. And I'm dealing with, you know, a friend's trauma, and there's these other external stressors that are playing a role. Do you provide any help for individuals to kind of help weed out weed out stressors to really focus in on what the potential problem is.
Dr. Hopkins: We certainly do in the book, you know, talk about that. That's a very common kind of experience. It's one that that my wife and I have gone through ourselves. Where just really difficult, external circumstances create a stressful life that just bleeds into the marriage. And so we do talk with him about how common that is and we actually give them writing exercises, writing and think, thinking and writing exercises to do to kind of work through some of it. Where are your stresses coming from? And, you know , are the problems really a part of the relationship? Or, you know, if those stresses were to go away, would you become your natural, wonderful selves again? And, you know, and things would feel much better. It's really an important concept that we do try to help people understand and separate those external stressors from those more internal relational problems that exist. And so we do have some exercises for them to do to try and think through those kinds of things.
Hilary: Perfect. I love that, and I appreciate the fact that in this resource, you're using applications so that are your individuals that are reading this resource guide, they're actually implementing it and thinking about themselves and their particular situation.
Dr. Hopkins: And again, our theory for that is that it it's really, it's really possible for the stress and the emotions of that incredibly challenging decision to really overwhelm our rational thinking processes. So, if we can give you the information in black and white right there and give you an opportunity, then think through some of these things and write down your answers. We're kind of helping your brain to re-engage in these issues and come to more clarity about what the right path is for you for this next month and this next year.
Hilary: And you mentioned as well, too , and I think that this should probably be re brought up, but for an individual that is using this guide as a reference and like you said, coming to this clarity, let's say that we have an individual that has gone through this resource and still at the end is thinking, well, I'm not quite sure what would be the next best step for them to go from there.
Dr. Hopkins: And let me clarify, I'm not a therapist and I don't play one on television. I don't try to be one on podcasts. But as a general sort of educational rule, if you've gone through all that and you don't have the clarity, you know, certainly one thing I would suggest is to find, you know, a good counselor. Maybe, maybe it's individually to meet with. And we actually give some pretty clear instructions for how to find a good therapist, one that can work with you and both, you know, help you with that decision, but also respect to marriage. One of the one of the things we know exists out there is that counselors often will go very quickly to a Yeah, your marriage sucks. Let's shift to divorce counseling. But one who will stay engaged with you on that, on that very serious question and will probably help you look for. What are those things, maybe in your own life, in your own situation, in your own mind, your own heart that is keeping you from being able to trust a decision? So it actually may be a situation where you want to explore, why can't I, what's you know, there's probably something that's holding me back now is another principle. I’m, you know, there are certainly safety issues that are real concern and you should attend to and you may need a support system, including a counselor to help you see that and get yourself to a safer place. The research suggests, though, that that's not the that's not the norm and the situation. Most of the time you're in a situation where you're safe, but you're just unhappy, and I don't think it's a bad strategy to say I haven't got clarity. Well, that means I need to keep kind of working on this and give yourself the space and the time. This is not a decision that you want to make. And you know that you want to just throw darts at a dart board or just throw your hands up and say, Well, OK, I guess that means I must I must get a divorce. If I can't make a decision, it must mean that I got a bad marriage. So your patients can really work, especially, and by the way, our research shows that this is fairly common, that people can have be having serious thoughts about divorce, but still call their marriage happy and be relatively satisfied. I think our standards are incredibly high. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's something we need to be aware of and understand is that we can be happy and be in a good marriage and still be unsatisfied and still be having these kinds of thoughts. And if that's the situation and you're struggling to get clarity, I think what one thing I would suggest, yeah, of get some help go to work. You've probably got a good thing. You just probably need to fix a few things. Needs a good tune up you and go to work on the relationship. If you do that and you still find that it's not, it's not good, it's not working, well, then you're in a different situation.
Jen: I really like just the conversation of working and trying to figure things out. I live in Layton and I work in Logan, so every day I drive home and I see this darn billboard that has two interlocking rings and it says, “Oops”
Dr. Hopkins: I just saw that yesterday on my I was up in Logan and I just saw that billboard yesterday. I had the exact same reaction to it. It's a divorce lawyer. Yeah, I, if I almost turned around, went back and wrote down the phone number because I didn't get it and so that I could complain.
Jen: But I think that every single time I drive by and I'm like, That is such a wrong billboard to be putting out there . And that message is just an “oops”.
Dr. Hopkins: Yeah, it's an oops . We made a mistake. Now I will admit there are there is a small percentage of marriages that are oops. But for the vast majority of cases, I don't think that's appropriate to say. First of all, none of us are smart enough to make a brilliant decision about who we marry and when we're not smart enough to do that. The reality is we find a good person and we make a commitment to a process and to a relationship and we work on it. And I think 90 percent of people, 95 percent of people in that situation, you know, they do those things. You can make it work. So oops, is the wrong. It's the wrong way to approach that. And yeah, that really rev me wrong. You know, Jen, because I saw that for the first time yesterday.
Hilary: Yeah, after our podcast is over, we'll plan a time to get the billboard down.
Jen: I’ll go and find it.
Dr. Hopkins: Yeah. And the way they frame that with, you know, yeah, the two interlocked rings that draws your attention and and turn that into the word. Oops, that just, frustrating.
Jen: Yeah.
Hilary: Yeah. Well, Dr Hawkins, as we are nearing the end of our time, let's go ahead and just review where our listeners can get this resource, when it will become available. The audience that it's for give us just kind of a quick , brief rundown of how to access that.
Dr. Hopkins: We are going to post a PDF copy of the book on a website called Stronger Marriage.org. All one-word stronger marriage , dot org . And they will kind of be the host for it. And not only will they over time, you know, just host a downloadable PDF, but I think they're going to do some, some blogs and kind of chunk the book up and into some smaller bites, which I think will make it more accessible for people. And also, there'll be a link there, if people would actually there are old fashioned people in the world still like me who like to, you know, to hold the book in front of them. And I still I'm still in love with highlighters, yellow highlighters. So for those who want to do that, they can order it. The primary audience is really what we've been talking about. Those who at some point and at some level have been having some thoughts about divorce and how to face this question. Should I keep trying to work it out? And we think we've covered a pretty full range of questions that go through people's minds, plus some questions probably that should go through that maybe don't sometimes. And that's the audience. Now, if there's a secondary audience, it would be those who are trying to be that support system for friends or loved ones who are struggling in that divorce ideation space. So what can they know that they could be a help and a resource to those individuals. One other audience that we've been talking about, I mean, it's not like we've been actively marketing, but we think this is a wonderful resource for marriage counselors out there who could make use of this and say, Gee, you know I think I could be even more effective helping you with this. If you would kind of systematically go through these questions, especially if you know you've kind of made a commitment, we're going to work on the relationship here. And so I think it could be a good counseling tool. There are also relationship education classes that are focused on kind of couples in crisis who are who have let it be known that yes, we're trying to decide whether or not to stay married or get divorced, and we're in that kind of crisis decision making time. And there are wonderful educators and coaches, maybe not coaches, but relationship educators that want to give people a safe space for a weekend or for a few weeks to think about this and think about whether or not there's one more avenue that they haven't tried. And so maybe it could be a resource for those as well. I think those are the audiences that we are thinking about for this book.
Hilary: I was just going to say thank you for doing that, and just as a reminder, we will include that link in our show notes so that our viewers will know where to go for that.
Jen: Yeah, I just love that we were able to talk about this today and share some information for those of who may be thinking this to get them out of their reptilian brain as their brain and kind of thinking things through. I encourage people. I'm a huge advocate, of course, for education on any topic. But since my backgrounds and family life, I really think that. We don't have to be in a bad space to learn some information. And so huge advocate for education and appreciate you coming on and sharing your book and offering it for free. That is super awesome and I know it will be soon. Well, will be really helpful for those who do read it. We appreciate you listening to us today. Remember to be kind to yourself and to others, and we will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Parents' Place podcast, if you would like to reach us, you can at parents@thefamilyplaceutah.org or you can reach Jen on Facebook. Jen Daly – The Family Place. Please check out our show notes for any additional information. Our website is TheFamilyPlaceUtah.org. If you're interested in any of our upcoming virtual classes. We'd love to see you there.
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