Honest Christian Conversations
A weekly podcast dealing with cultural and spiritual issues within the Christian faith.
Honest Christian Conversations
Stop Saying "I'm Fine"
Kent Darcie never expected to become "the divorce guy" at parties. Yet, through his painful journey as a child of divorce, he discovered a largely unaddressed ministry field - helping adult children of divorced parents recognize and heal from the wounds they often don't realize they're carrying.
Visit Kent's Website: https://hope4adp.com/
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Hey friends, welcome to Honest Christian Conversations. I'm your host, anna Murby. This is the beginning of my tribute to masculinity. This is an awesome guest that I have for you today. I could have thought of nobody better to have opened this conversation than my new friend, kent Darcy. He is a phenomenal man who has a heart for a very unique ministry that, as he says, makes them really fun at parties. He meant that, obviously, as a joke, but the seriousness of what he does with his ministry is no joke and it has helped many.
Speaker 1:It is going to change your heart and your mind today, for sure, and I just ask you to have an open heart and an open mind when you listen to this. Be real with yourself, be honest with yourself while you listen to this and allow God's Holy Spirit to do the prompting and the leading that you need to, because you are not here listening to this or watching this on accident. You are here on purpose. God is looking to do something new in you as a man, as a woman, whoever is listening to this. Women, don't think that you're out of this podcast for the next two months, because this is stuff that could also help you as well. I want to show the world. There are still godly men out there and they are doing amazing things for the kingdom, and this guest, kent Darcy, is no different. So you are really going to enjoy this episode. You are going to love his ministry work and maybe you're going to even want to get involved by the end of it.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the conversation. Let's get to it. Get involved by the end of it. Enjoy the conversation. Let's get to it Before the episode starts. Make sure you follow the show so you never miss another episode. Hi Kent, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk with me today about a very unique perspective on a very hot topic situation, which is divorce. But before we get into this and exactly what you do with your unique ministry, why don't you share with us your testimony of how you came to Christ?
Speaker 2:Well, Anna, it's great to be here with you and yeah, this topic is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:I'm a real hit at parties sometimes. I'll tell you.
Speaker 2:But basically I was raised in the church, but a more liberal church, and when my parents got divorced, church stopped and when they divorced, when I was 13. And around 19, 20, I was really going through a rough time, very, very rough time, and I was basically trained that when you have a rough time you go back to the church. And I went to the church and was kind of okay, but then I stumbled into another church and really started learning about God and you know the scripture and Jesus. But that still wasn't it. It was when, after I got married, there was a couple that was ministering to me, witnessing to me, and said you know what? You really need to go to this play.
Speaker 2:And the play was called Hell's Flames and Heaven's Bells and basically the theme of the play was you don't know if you have tomorrow.
Speaker 2:And on my way out to driving it was about an hour from where we lived at the time and we were on the freeway going about 70 miles an hour and this deer jarred it across the freeway freeway going about 70 miles an hour and this deer jarred it across the freeway and I clipped the tail of this thing, swerving it on my way to a play that said you don't know if you have tomorrow, you can't guarantee that, and you know I'm not the sharpest pencil in the drawer.
Speaker 2:But I was starting to connect the dots and at that point my attitude was basically, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I wasn't hostile to the gospel but I was like, yeah, it makes sense, but I've got time and at pretty much some minute I didn't. So I gave my life to Christ that evening. I went down forward and still kind of wallowed along for a little bit and then we landed in a church, a Calvary Chapel. I was in retail, we transferred maybe a couple of years and I ended up south of Pittsburgh in a little dinky town in a Calvary chapel that taught verse by verse, and just exploded my mind with the power of God, the sufficiency of his word, and we never looked back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a crazy story. And yeah, I can't imagine I've had that hubris of, oh, I have time or oh, I don't need to do this yet. God, I hear what you're saying. That's how I came back to Christ too. When I strayed from him, I heard the sermon and it felt like we were having a one-on-one conversation and he was talking to me and I said I hear everything you're saying, god, but I'm still going to do what I want to do.
Speaker 1:And then a week later, my second husband was like oh, I'm leaving you, I already have an apartment, we're done. And that was just like, wow, that was my deer tail incident. So that woke me up pretty quick and, yeah, we never know how much time we have. We're not guaranteed anything, and that should be a sobering thought for everybody who's listening, and unfortunately for many it's not, which is really sad, and he loves you and He'll pursue you, but he isn't going to force you. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:You know, when I came to Christ I kind of I like to say he was my savior for a few years but he became my Lord. When I got into that good, solid Bible teaching church, that really showed me the power and the love that God has for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, he definitely is a long-suffering God with some of us.
Speaker 2:I think I'm in the poster on that one.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned that your parents got divorced when you were 13. My parents got divorced when I was 12. Okay, so about the same age. Is that why you have a heart for the ministry that you do now, which is what? Go ahead and tell everybody, because I'm sure they're sitting here trying to figure out what does he do and why aren't they talking about it yet so go ahead and share with us.
Speaker 2:What I do is I have a ministry for adults with divorced parents and what that basically is is providing resources for adults who have divorced parents, because there are certain issues that the cycle of divorce because my dad was a child of divorce, his dad was a child of divorce, his dad was a child of divorce and that's very, very common. So basically, our ministry supplies resources to help people become have a more healthy relationship with God themselves, their spouse and others.
Speaker 1:And that is a very beautiful ministry because, like I said, it's unique in the sense that nobody really talks about the person who's going through a divorce as an adult. They don't get talked about how they handle it. Even if their parents didn't divorce until they were an adult, or even they grew up from divorced parents, Nobody talks about how they are when they're an adult. It's really weird. It's just not a thing that we discuss, and to have a ministry that actually helps people with that, I think is very encouraging and very, very special. It's definitely needed. Divorce is rampant. Everyone's getting divorced, it's everywhere. It's everywhere you can do it. I just I don't understand why people just so easily get into marriage with the idea of oh, if I don't like it, I'll just get divorced. Marriage with the idea of, oh, if I don't like it, I'll just get divorced, and that probably stems from something that happened as a child or that they saw in their parents, and I bet you address that in your ministries right?
Speaker 2:Well, I do. And coming back to the reason why my parents divorced when I was 13. I know a lot of people didn't have a good relationship with their dads, but I did. I had a great relationship with him and I went from seeing him every day to maybe three or four times a year. He moved out of state and that was really hard. But if you had asked me if the divorce was affecting me, I would have given you a categorical no, I'm good. Oh, the holidays are a hassle and you know I miss my dad and all.
Speaker 2:And my situation was a little bit interesting because he was married to my mom for almost 25 years. He was married to my first stepmom for almost 25 years and he was married to my second stepmom for almost 25 years, and that's because he passed away before they hit 25 years, just before 25 years. So we had a lot of overlap. But if you had said is it Now? I had some anger issues, but I, you know that was my wife's fault, the job, you know the world we're in, my you know, my boss, all that sort of stuff. But we were at a marriage retreat and the Lord said Kent, if you don't get your act together. You're on the same emotional path as your dad and that scared the bejeebers out of me, because I loved my wife and, like all of us, we don't want to put our kids through what we went through. And yet the Lord's going. If you don't take intentional steps to change, we've got a bad path here. So I'm basically a researcher at heart and did a lot of research, interviewed counselors and adults with divorced parents and authors, and I was serving on the deacon board at the time and basically said we need to let people know about this and they said go for it. So I did my first all-day seminar back in 2004. And ever since I've been helping people identify what the issues are and overcome those issues through the power of Christ.
Speaker 2:And some of those issues the big one is anger, and you alluded to something that's important to just kind of delineate here and there's divorce when we're kids and there's divorce when we're adults. Divorce when we're adults is called gray divorce. Divorce when we're kids is just we're adult children of divorce and there's different ways that they impact us and I want to address that. But I also want to just do one quick thing, because I always say this at the beginning when I do a talk, and that is that if you're listening and you're divorced, this is not about bashing you. We're not going to throw stones at you. I'm not going to talk about the theology of divorce, the right or wrong reasons of divorce. You're divorced. Relax, because that is not the heart of my ministry. I mean, the Bible is very clear, no-transcript or knocking people who are divorced. This is about trying to prevent another generation from blindly walking down the path of divorce and not knowing why. And my ministry steps in with the why and some of the issues.
Speaker 2:For adult children, divorce include anger. It is the number one issue that we have unresolved anger. We have nowhere to go with our anger and a couple of those causes can be blame. We blame somebody. It can be loss. Up until the divorce, the world kind of revolves around us. After the divorce it revolves around the parents. We lose friends, we can lose sports, we can lose a whole side of the family, we can lose our home, and there's an anger that there's changes that are beyond our control and there's no place to go with the anger and we kind of drag it into our adulthood.
Speaker 2:There's also fears, a number of fears Fear of abandonment, fear of conflict, fear of doom, fear of inadequacy, fear of marriage, fear of divorce. I mean, the list goes on and on with fears. And one of the things that's interesting is that when you look through the Bible, one of the things the Bible talks about over and over and over again is don't fear. And yet there's this programming that's just kind of under the radar, that we're not aware of that. We are in fear, we fear being abandoned, and when we're fearing being abandoned we become either clingy we hold onto the relationship and squeeze it within an inch of its life and we don't let go, or we become avoidant and just when the relationship becomes good we break it off, because it's better to break off the relationship than to be abandoned, and some of this is just very it's sad.
Speaker 2:In some ways, the fear of doom is particularly interesting because basically we go through life waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under us. I like to say Jesus said he's come to give us life and give it to us more abundantly. I call that zero to 10 life. Some things are really really crummy and some things are really really great.
Speaker 2:But with adult children of divorce we tend to live between four and seven. We don't want to get too high because we're only going to be disappointed anyway, and we don't want to get too low because we feel if we really think about this, we're going to just turn into jello and we're going to lose it. So we live between four and seven because it's kind of safe. But we also tend to become control freaks because we believe that if we can just hold on everything and just manage everything, then everything's going to be okay. But that tends to not work either. So that's a couple of the issues. Did you want to say anything about that before I get to the other issues you are like labeling me.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not picking on you. No, seriously everything that you're saying.
Speaker 1:I have been that way at one point or another or I'm still struggling through some of those things. Control freak hello, that is me. I like to control as many things as I possibly can. I don't need anyone's help. I don't want anyone's help. I do it best. Let me do it. That's just how I have felt like I've always been.
Speaker 1:I've always been secluded, wanting to be by myself. Before my parents got divorced, my brother and I would play together, but I also was cool playing by myself. After they got divorced, my brother stayed with my dad and I stayed with my mom. My, my mom, my brother and I were really, really close and we didn't really have a strong relationship with my dad. So I thought it was weird that my brother wanted to stay, but he said he didn't want him to be alone, which I look back on that and I respect that. But it was a hard thing for a 10 year old to make that decision, you know, and it strained my relationship with my brother and created all this. Just, I just liked being by myself at that point. I didn't need friends. I didn't want friends. I liked doing a whole bunch of things by myself, Like I just introverted big time, Like I was just in myself, but at the same time I still had a lot of anger.
Speaker 1:I would hold it into my bottle, push it down, push it down, push it down and then poof and come out at random times at random people and it's just, it's so crazy and we don't think of the ramifications of what may have happened in our past or we're like, oh well, I already forgave them. I'm an adult, now I understand. You know that they did what they thought was best and yeah, but you still have symptoms from this. You got to get that fixed, or you're just carrying that on and it's crazy, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it's also interesting that, because we're going to deal with a couple more issues and if you go to a marriage conference or listen to marriage, you know things on social media, whatever they'll go through four or five things that if you want a healthy marriage, this is what you want to do.
Speaker 2:Well when you go through the list of things that impact adults with divorced parents, they are the very things that undermine healthy marriages, and Nicholas Wolfinger had some interesting research. It showed that if an adult child of divorce marries somebody from an intact family, the odds of the marriage failing increases 50% as compared to two people from intact families. If you in denial, like I was, no, I'm good, I'm fine and we're not fine because our programming is distorted. And that brings me to another big issue that messes with relationships, and that is trust.
Speaker 2:Trust, basically it starts with there's certain rules that kids have the parents will always be together, the parents will always supply our needs, the parents will always provide a safe environment. Those are unwritten child rules. And when the divorce happens, a lot of those rules are contingent on a timely support check or whatever. And after a while we just don't trust and we drag that into our adulthood, where we're always poking people with a stick. We either keep them at arm's length or we're in a relationship and we'll poke them with a stick, poke them with a stick, poke them with a stick to see if we can trust them, and poke them with a stick and poke them with a stick, and eventually they get tired of getting poked. I'm out of here and we go see. Told you we couldn't trust them.
Speaker 2:And it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing. That is just a huge issue. We just don't trust. We really make people earn our trust and in a relationship, if you're entering a marriage not trusting your spouse, we're launching the marriage sideways, which is very problematic. But another issue is that it distorts our view of God. And this is kind of the thing is, if you can't trust the two people who you can see, who are most important to you, how do you trust a God who you can't see? And if you're a child who allowed this to happen, how can you trust them? And we start to come to the place where the only person we trust is ourself.
Speaker 2:And Elizabeth Markhart did some really interesting research on this whole perspective of God thing and basically, you know, ephesians 6 says honor your father and your mother, first commandment with a promise. But a lot of us will be sitting in the pew going well, that may be true for you and that may be true for you, but honor my dad, honor my mother Are you kidding me? And we start to cherry pick which scriptures apply and which ones don't. She had an interesting perspective in her research on the prodigal son, that the prodigal son story, the son lives, has a prodigal life, then comes back to his father who's waiting for him. Well, she found that a number of adults with divorced parents hear the prodigal son story, as it's the parent who left and we're waiting for them to come back. I just spoke with somebody because I'm also a licensed professional counselor, so that's kind of my day job.
Speaker 1:And then I have the ministry.
Speaker 2:But I was just speaking with somebody and they were saying that after I want to say 45 years, their parents have been divorced, they're adults, the parents are remarried and all that, but they still have this little voice that says if my parents could just get back together again, get their act together and get back together again, that would be so great. And they know it's irrational, they know it's not going to happen and all that. But that's the little voices there and I hear that over and over and over again and we just we have this desire to restore things and sometimes, when it doesn't happen, we kind of blame God. But when I do a presentation, one of the things I talk about is Adam and Eve and basically Adam and Eve had a choice they could do things God's way or or they could do things their own way, and one or both of them decided to do things their own way and we've been dealing with the consequences ever since.
Speaker 2:So I like to encourage people it is not about God not being trustworthy or Him not loving us or Him not being for us. It's that he's given us your parents and us the ability to choose and that's really the key. So I'm so glad you're listening to this program today because you're getting information that most of your peers and there are millions of them out there are not aware of. So you have now the opportunity to choose as we get to. Some helps, but you can choose to not be like I was, which was in denial for decades. No-transcript to talk about on that side, but I want to see if you had any thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:I think it's very important for everyone who's listening to take that reflective moment that Kent is talking about and think about it, really think about it. Do you have these issues? And if you do, you need to own that. There's nothing wrong with owning it. You're in the club of all the other adults who have been through a divorce.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of us. You're not singled out, but you do have to own that in order to heal. That's what they say about addiction. The first step in healing is admitting you have one. If you don't, then you're not ready to be healed. No-transcript. So own those and say yes, now I'm ready for the help, I want that help, and then you can get it. You just got to. You got to be honest, you got to let go of your pride and you got to be vulnerable to allow God. The only person we divorce looks like you know where is he what's?
Speaker 1:going on here.
Speaker 2:He's there and he's with you and he's never going to leave you or forsake you. He's going to hang in there with you. In fact, he's been with you. That's why you've done as well as you have up until this point you know.
Speaker 2:So he's there. One last quick issue on adult-children divorce is father hunger. Father hunger, in a nutshell, is missing dad, but there's a couple of things that go with it For the ladies now anger and father hunger. If I do workshops, a lot of times I'll just do an overview, like we're doing today. But if I do workshops I'll do one on anger and one on father hunger, because they both affect guys and gals, but anger comes out more destructively with guys. Father hunger will affect guys and gals, but it comes out more destructively with the ladies.
Speaker 2:And basically the ladies are looking for the answer to two questions Am I beautiful and am I special? And it's not beautiful. You know the supermodel beauty. It is beautiful in the eyes of my dad. Am I special to his heart? And if we don't get the answers to those questions in a constructive way, unfortunately too often the ladies will get the answers in places that aren't healthy and aren't constructive and create even more damage. And with guys, they're asking the question do I have what it takes to be a guy? Do I have what it takes to be a man? You know, when I was going through my parental divorce, you know when my parents divorced, back then there wasn't this 50-50 custody. You were with the mom and my mom was with me and my two younger sisters, and she's a woman. So guess what? She filters things through a woman's grid. There's no malice or anything. She's a woman.
Speaker 1:There's this question that comes up do we have what it takes to be a man? And we need that healthy image as well. We have the ultimate image through Jesus, through our Heavenly Father, but when we're coming through and we're kind of exploring, unfortunately we'll get those images from distortions of what a healthy man is, what a healthy father is, what a healthy husband is. So father hunger is also a big issue for adults with divorced parents. Yeah, I can definitely see how it affected me when I was going through my parents' divorce, and it's affecting my eldest and she's always looking for his approval. She's 18 now and she still hasn't gotten it and she's finally accepted that she probably never will, which makes me really sad for her and her dad because they don't have a great relationship, and it's not for lack of trying on her part.
Speaker 2:It's the way he is. But, yeah, these are crazy issues and I'm noticing that. I have them and you're not alone. You know. One quick thing, though, for your daughter, because she's 18. There's a book called Daughters of Divorce by Terry Gaspard Excellent, excellent book for women who have experienced parental divorce, and it deals with the issues. In fact, it's an interesting book, but she wrote it with her daughter and she's a social worker, psychologist and works with a lot of women, and she went through a divorce. But her daughter also helped with the book and she went through her parents' divorce. So you have the mom and the daughter who experienced it and the book is really excellent on dealing with the issues that affect women whose parents are divorced. So that might be something to consider as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Hey, friends, have you joined the Honest Christian Conversations online group yet? If you haven't, you're missing out on a perfect opportunity to grow your relationship with Jesus Christ. This is a community for those who want to go deeper in their relationship. You can do Bible studies together, ask the questions you have biblically and get the answers that you might need or maybe you're somebody who has answers to somebody else's questions. You can leave your prayer requests. You can leave your praise reports.
Speaker 1:This is a community. This is what church is supposed to be, and I am so glad that I finally took that step to make this group so that people's lives can flourish in Jesus name. Also, if you haven't signed up for the mailing list, you're missing out on an opportunity there as well. I send out a weekly email chocked full of so much awesome content that I don't have time right now to share it all with you. But when you do sign up for that mailing list, you get my seven-day free devotional that I created just for those who sign up for the mailing list. If you haven't joined either of these, you can go to my website honestchristianconversationscom and sign up there, or you can use the links for it in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Now, how are we doing time-wise? We got time to talk about great divorce a little bit.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we got all the time oh okay, we got all the time. This is an important issue. We will stay here all day if we have to. The listeners are like what. I don't have that time. No, just kidding. But we do have more time, definitely to discuss this, because it is an important issue and I already feel that it's going to be a very powerhouse episode that is helping a lot of people break off chains that they may not even have known they had hanging on.
Speaker 2:Awareness is the key. Well, everything we've talked about so far and we've just skimmed it is for adults like us whose parents divorced when we were kids. The biggest area of divorce right now one in three is gray divorce and that's basically the 15 overcrowd. They call them gray divorce, silver hair if you will. You know you're seeing those silver single commercials and all this sort of stuff. It's huge. Right now it's the single biggest area of divorce. People are going away to college and then getting a call. You know we're breaking up.
Speaker 2:I just did a conference and talked with people. 38 years her parents were married, then got divorced. I've had I think the longest one I've had is 48 years that the parents were married and then got divorced, and that's gray divorce. Now, gray divorce and we'll do just a quick overview creates a whole myriad of other issues. First of all, it's rampant right now. It had doubled between 1990 and 2010,. Expected to triple between now and 2030. It is double digits. And the other thing is divorce. For many years, the number one issue was infidelity and that stopped 10, 15 years ago. Now the number one issue for divorce is I'm just not getting my needs met.
Speaker 1:And great divorce is fueling that. Thanks to what? Is it? No contested divorce?
Speaker 2:I think that's what it is, yeah that doesn't help, but a lot of it right now is we're living longer and basically people are saying you know what? I got 30 years left. I don't want to live with this bomb or this witch for the rest of my life. I want to be happy and they are that it is not going to have a negative impact on their kids because they're grown. And that is not the case, and that is why great divorce in some ways is worse. It's better because cognitively we are able to process it as an adult. So we don't do things like blame ourselves for the divorce, because we know, unless the parents say well, we only stay together because of you, which is a whole other thing that we got to deal with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard that before I hear it all the time.
Speaker 2:I've been doing this for 20 years. But the big issues with great divorce are first, there's no support. If you go to the workplace and say, well, what's the matter with you? I just got to call my mom's leaving my dad They've been married for 37 years the response you're going to get is, well, what's the big deal? I mean, they're adults. Shouldn't they be happy? Or well, you're not living there anymore. So what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is we now have two Christmases. We've got birthdays coming up where one doesn't want to come if the other one is there. Before, you took your kids to grandparents' house. Now it's which grandparents' house? And now you're dealing with adult your parents are. You know, one of the things that creates anger is I call it the loyalty challenge. Basically, which parent do you love better, me or her?
Speaker 2:me or him. And that's worse, with great of worse, because you're old enough to understand why the other person is a bum or why the other person is doing whatever, and they don't treat you as a child. They treat you as an adult, as a friend. And that leads to the second issue. That's a problem with great divorce. It's TMI.
Speaker 1:We don't have good boundaries.
Speaker 2:I don't want to know that you're not satisfied and whatever, and all this.
Speaker 2:I don't want to hear this stuff and yet they don't even think twice about talking about this sort of stuff. And boundaries is one of the big things I teach when I do a session on great divorce, because we have to have emotional boundaries for our sanity. One of the things that I think most bothers me about great divorce is doubt. There's basically, if they've hung in there 37, 38 years or whatever and you're having problems in your marriage, you can say well, you know, dad can put up with that or mom can put up with that, you know we can get through this. When that marriage collapses after 42 years, satan comes in and goes. Well, if they couldn't make it after all these years and they went to church, how are you going to make it with all your problems? And you start to get cracks in the concrete and it is just a bad thing and it also can distort our view of God Because, again, mom went to church all these years, dad went to church all these years. Why are you letting this happen? Why didn't you stop dad or mom from running off with whoever? What's the deal and the problem is and for those of you who don't have divorced parents, this is really key, listen, of you who don't have divorced parents. This is really key. Listen to these people, because they have nobody to talk to.
Speaker 2:If you're in a small group and they're talking about Ephesians, and oh yeah, it's an honor your father and your mother, and somebody goes, honor my father and mother, are you kidding me? How would you respond? Well, what do you mean? That you don't honor your father and your mother? It's the only promise you know. What do you mean? That you don't honor your father, your mother? It's the only promise you know. At least come out with a promise. You've got to do that. No, and that's all true, but it's you know what. My parents have been married forever and I can't even fathom feeling like that. But I'd love to know a little bit more of your story. How about we grab a cup of coffee?
Speaker 2:It is really, really important, particularly with people impacted by gray divorce, that they have somewhere to go and unfortunately, in the church big C, we have been behind the eight ball on this one. The only thing less popular I think you addressed it at the top of the program the only thing less popular than talking about divorce in the church is that it may have had a negative impact on the kids and the reality of it is is it does and it can. And you know, my ministry isn't about beating up you know divorced people. It's about the divorce happened. What is the impact on the kids when they grow up and how can we overcome that impact? We have to face this because it is well. 40% of our families in the church today are blended families. A million children a year are still experiencing annulment or separation or divorce.
Speaker 1:So this is still a huge issue and it is an issue in the church as well, and nobody's talking about this take it from this approach of oh, your parents were divorced, let's tackle that first, rather than whatever issues you're going through in your marriage. I feel like that would be a better marriage counseling approach. Find out, were your parents divorced? That should be one of the first questions they ask, because I feel like you're going to take your marriage counseling in a different direction. If one was but the other wasn't, or both of them were or neither of them were, all three of those scenarios are going to be different ways of counseling Because depending on who it is, they're going to need different type of counseling.
Speaker 1:No-transcript he's winning right now and you look at the stats and you probably think he was and you'd feel really depressed and you just want to lay it down and be all boo-hoo. But we cannot do that with things that are big issues. This is affecting the church, which means it's affecting our witness to the world. We are supposed to be the salt and the light of the world. We're supposed to be the reflection of Jesus. The church is supposed to be the bride of Christ, the perfect bride of Christ. We are tripping over our gown. It's getting ripped, it's getting dirty because we aren't tackling the tough issues that are infiltrating the church. We're just shrugging it off.
Speaker 1:Oh, you've been divorced, so have I. Okay, but let's see where we can fix each other and where we can help others who have been, instead of just saying, it's okay, we love you. They need to hear that, true, but we need to go. We love you they need to hear that, true, but we need to go deeper than that and we need to not let them stay in those feelings and ask them what are you going through? What can we help you with? If they're coming to you and saying I need counseling, ask them why.
Speaker 1:If you hear someone say I'm just always triggered by anger or I never can hold down a relationship, ask them deeper questions. Or I never can hold down a relationship. Ask them deeper questions. We have to be more willing to be engaged with people and talk to them, and I love this ministry that you have. I think it's a brilliant idea, yeah, such an impactful one that will have a lasting effect, not just for the people who have been through their parents' divorce, but for the children that they have, for their spouses, and to tackle this head on so that they don't have to go through what they went through.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I can't stress the importance of this enough. I mean, I come from a family that's very you know. We've had divorce in our family since my grandparents on one side and then on my other side. Nobody on my dad's side, nobody in his family, has been divorced, except for my dad, who's been remarried twice, just like me, but my brother is still married to his wife, but they're not Christians. So it's like all these different factors in my family. It's so crazy. It's just.
Speaker 1:It's there, though, and there's things that happen between how I responded to it and how my brother responded to it, and I feel maybe it's affected me more than my brother. I don't know. I don't have a healthy relationship with my brother to know how he dealt with things. We just don't talk anymore. So there's so much that goes into your parents' divorce that a lot of times, when they're getting divorced, they say, oh, the kids just want us to be happy, they'll understand. They get to have two Christmases, they get to have two houses, and these are just things that the adults tell themselves to make themselves feel better about what they're about to do, and I can speak from that, because I also did the same thing. I was very selfish with how I was, and I've been married three times. I'm on my third marriage, so I'm not absolved of this spiritual crime, if you will. So I'm not trying to bash anyone. I'm just saying if you're making those justifications, then you must know that what you're doing to your children isn't for their benefit. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because, first, I love that God is a today. God Give us this day our daily bread. This is the day the Lord has made, don't worry about tomorrow. I love that because, regardless of what happened yesterday, you know there'll be consequences residual but we can start fresh. Yeah, I love that when we get the information we can start fresh. The other thing is that we want to make sure that we access good resources and I want to kind of we'll turn us in that kind of direction.
Speaker 2:It's funny because you mentioned the marriage thing and now, if we don't do it, we're not doing it. Well, actually, my next book is it's in editing right now is the pre. Well, the working title is the Pre-Marital Counseling Guide for Adults with Divorced Parents. Because of everything you said, I mean I should have recorded all that because it's perfect. You know, it's exactly everything you said. That needs to be done is exactly what's in that book. It raises the issues. Here's what's probably going on. You know. Here's what you need to talk about.
Speaker 2:It goes with questions about is there an affair? Because one of the reasons I wrote the book was because you're exactly right, we don't talk about this, we don't. I mean, I said, I'm a counselor, you know a couple days a week I do. You know depression and whatever and all that. But occasionally I'll get people that are in premarital, they're going to get married and I'll say, well, did your person ask about the divorce? No, well, wait a minute. How do you? I deal with people that sometimes the first time the parents have been in the same room in years is at the rehearsal dinner. Do you have any idea the amount of anxiety that puts on the person? Are they enjoying the most important day of their life or are they worried about these two people that may or may not do away? Or where's the girlfriend? Is she going to say something and get mom all upset? And this is the most important day of our life and we're more focused on them than we are on us.
Speaker 1:I have an example, a perfect example, of this. When I was having my first child, I was in the hospital and I was in the middle of labor. One of my parents was in there. I don't remember which one was there first, if it was my mom or my dad, but there was a lot of tension between them all the time. And as soon as the other parent walked in, my friend said she looked at the monitor. She said my heart rate and my blood pressure just went sky high.
Speaker 1:They didn't even say anything, they literally just walked in. They were in the same room breathing the same air, and that just happened, and that's always how it is. I just don't like tension of any kind from anywhere, and that's probably where it stems from. But yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And boundaries. You know, one of the things we talk about you know, particularly with gray divorce, but even with adults that you know their parents divorced when they were kids is emotional and relational boundaries. It is really, really important. There's a lot of stuff on the website that talks about boundaries. I think I've got some YouTube videos on that as well, because we one of the things that we don't have going through the divorce is power. We have not. They decide what's going on. They decide and they did before, but now it's big stuff that's going on. Now we're not going to go to the cottage we went to every year for decades. There's a lot of stuff that we just don't have control over. So we tend to, because of that parent-child relationship, we tend to think we still don't have power. But as we leave and cleave, we now have a new set of rules. We now have, you know, one of the rules that I teach all the time is the grandparents are not allowed to bash each other within earshot of the kids period Ever. That just is unacceptable, and most parents and again we started talking about how this is not about bashing divorced parents. This is not about, you know, whatever we talk about real stuff. That can be problematic and I could tell you stories. I could tell you some stories. Tell you stories, I could tell you some stories. Which is kind of ironic because when I first started this ministry 20 years ago earlier actually, when I was doing the research, I kind of thought, well, you know what that's got to be the exception. You'd read stuff, you'd hear stuff and you go, wow, that's probably way out there on the bell curve. It just is not. Now a lot of this stuff is right smack in the middle of the bell curve. I had a person a couple of weeks ago tell me that when they were eight or nine their dad said who do you want to live with me or mom? I mean, really, really. I mean we have that sort of stuff, you know. So it's really important that we get good resources. You know that book's coming out.
Speaker 2:I have a book called Choose a Better Path Overcoming the Impact with your Parents' Divorce, and basically it is a user-friendly devotional that just walks the reader through the various issues that can impact us, because a lot of us don't know, it's kind of under the radar and we don't really know. So it deals with anger and unforgiveness and bitterness and grieving and father hunger and great divorce and a lot of the issues. But basically it's kind of a narrative. There's a place for prayer and a place for journaling and you can do you know, each day you can do a different one and that's a really good resource If you have gray divorce, if you're experiencing divorce when your parents were, when you were an adult. There's a book called Home Will Never Be the Same Again. It's by Hewes and Friedenberg. It's a secular book but it's the best book I've seen right now on great divorce and there's nothing anti-God or anti-Christian or anything. But it's a very, very good book dealing with the issues that those who are impacted by great divorce experience and I highly recommend that.
Speaker 2:It's really important that you work through these issues. It's also important that you address these issues through the lens of scripture. You know a lot of what we talked about is fear-based. You know fear of conflict, fear of abandonment, fear that we're going to cross our parents or whatever. There's a lot of fear going on and Proverbs 29, 25 says the fear of man is a snare, but those who trust in the Lord will be safe. And when you're dealing with parental divorce, there's a whole lot of fear going around, a lot of fear. Are they going to say this? Is that we're going to get together. What about? You know? The whole thing is just crazy.
Speaker 2:So be aware of the scriptures. You know the scriptures that say you know I will never leave you or forsake you. How he feels about the fatherless and the widows. You know. Really get a feel for God Trusting. Are you having troubles trusting God today? Look at how trustworthy he is. Look at what he did for us, that while we were still sinners, he sent his son here to die for us, not because we were worth it, but because he loves us. And remember that we have the choice to go through this information and apply it or not. You know, with great divorce, don't compare your relationship to your parents. Keep them separate. They made their choices.
Speaker 2:There's plenty, plenty of excellent marriage materials out there. There's a million websites. There's a million social media things. If you want to strengthen your marriage, there's a ton of information out there. So if they choose to not apply those, it doesn't mean that your marriage is in trouble. Choose to go to a marriage conference, choose to get a marriage strengthening book, but definitely first. If you're listening to this and your parents are divorced, find out how it affected you, because that's really, really important.
Speaker 2:And then, if there's bigger issues, my ministry is more geared towards the center of the bell curve. What's a hassle? The holidays, the new tension, all that sort of stuff. I don't deal with the outlier, neglect, abuse, those sort of things. If you're dealing with that sort of stuff, I would encourage you to get professional counseling. You know a Christian counselor, a Christian Christian counselor, one that stands on the truth of the word, and get healing because we serve the healer. But it's really important to know what areas need healing. So get some help on that and learn the scriptures, but, most of all, don't be like I was, don't be in denial.
Speaker 1:Don't listen to this and go well yeah, what's for dinner?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's not a. I don't believe in coincidences, I only believe in God, incidences. And you didn't click on this thing because, eh, we'll just listen to something. You clicked on it because the spirit went you really need to listen to this, or your heart was drawn to it. So now act on it. First pray to the Lord. Now act on it. First pray to the Lord. Lord, I don't know what to just, and you know what he processes the Holy Spirit translates that it's really cool. Yeah, he knows the heart. And then act on this, because it was 20 years.
Speaker 2:I was in denial and, man, I had some anger issues. I had some anger issues and I am so thankful. And the other issue is that we talked about honoring our father and our mother. I honor my father I mean, they both passed now but I honored my father and my mother far more, having worked through this stuff, than prior to it. Don't be afraid that if you open this can of worms, if you will, that it's going to cut. No, it's just the opposite. If anything, it will bring you healing and allow you to see clearer how you can minister to others and truly love your parents. Now, that's with boundaries and that's another conversation sometime. But you'll be able to love in the way that God calls us to love, through his strength, to his glory.
Speaker 1:Amen. I don't know what to say. I'm in awe. I definitely have benefited from everything you've said and I know the listeners are as well. Where can they get in touch with you if they have other questions, if they want your resources, if they're local and they want to get involved in your ministry? Somehow can they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:The best way is to go through the website. It's Hope4ADPcom Adults with divorced parents. Hope4adpcom. It has blogs and podcasts and videos and also there's resources on there, a lot of resources, and I like to say it's not the Kent Darcy show. Basically, I find the best resources that can help the various issues that we're dealing with. You know Terry Gaspard's book's on there. You know the Hughes and Friedenberg book is on there. There's some very good books on there on gray divorce and on childhood and anger and abuse and whatever. So I would encourage you and I can be reached through the website as well hope4adpcom and the four the number four stands for having healthy relationships with God, our spouse, others and ourself.
Speaker 1:Very nice. All right, Kent, before we go, I really enjoyed hearing well, I don't want to say enjoyed, because I know it was a hard question you had to say to yourself but it stuck in me for this whole interview. When you mentioned when you were a teenager going through your parents' divorce am I man enough? And considering this is the beginning of my tribute to masculinity, that really, really hit me in a way that breaks my heart, because there's a lot of men out there who are probably asking this question and they're afraid to actually talk about it or get answers to that question.
Speaker 2:So do you have any specific resources that could be helpful for those that are asking that question? Yeah, actually. On the website HopeForADPcom, the first 10 podcasts are programs that I recorded for Transworld Radio and basically the programs were for Christian men and they are an overview of the issues that impact adults with divorced parents, so it sounds like that would be a perfect fit. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:All right, men, if you're listening, definitely go check that out. And you said that you're a lover of research, so, ladies and gentlemen listening, you better believe that his resources have been thoroughly analyzed and he's got nothing but the best on there. So definitely take a look. Thank you again, kent, for coming on and tackling this very needed and very controversial subject that nobody likes to go super deep on, but we need to. So thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation with me.
Speaker 2:It has been my pleasure. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a review for the podcast wherever you are listening, or click the link in the show notes. If you have feedback for me, use the leave a message or voicemail links also in the show notes. You can check out my website honestchristianconversationscom to leave a review or feedback as well. Join the community and become part of something bigger than yourself. Lastly, sign up for the mailing list and get the free seven-day devotional as a thank you gift. Once again, thanks for listening. I look forward to our next conversation.
