MORE ON WHY YOU SHOULD GET A DIVORCE!

Over a year ago, I wrote a piece for the FPL blog entitled, "HAVING CHILDREN? GET A DIVORCE!" It spun off an article by Elizabeth LaMotte, LCSW, called, "DIVORCE'S LITTLE SECRET", in which she outlined the benefits to parents of being in a divorced situation.

Today, in the Huffington Post, there is a piece entitled, "Divorce And Kids: 5 Ways Divorce Benefits Kids", by Shoshana Bennett, Ph.D., in which Dr. Bennett outlines divorces benefits to children.

Both of these articles are worth reading, folks. Really.


The point is, and my regular readers are very familiar with my observations on these matters, most people's reasons for getting married and having kids are at best flawed, generally suspect, and motivated by the compulsions of character structure and ego, so of course, marriage and parenting as we've institutionally constructed them are disasters. If the goal of marriage is to enhance love, Eros and sex between two people in love, and if the goal of parenting is to facilitate the self-actualization of growing human beings, then by even the lowest bar, marriage and parenting are abject failures. 


None of the traditional, structured aspects of marriage and parenting support healthy development or selfhood. If they did, we would have a lot of happy adults running things instead of the psychopaths, crooks and liars we currently have, and healthy, happy, joyfully expressive children would populate our schoolyards instead of the hyper, depressed, medicated version of kids we currently have, right?! 


And don't be fooled - none of the supposed "non-traditional" approaches to the above, such as stilted variations of polyamory, where "puppy piles" pass for actual openness and intimacy, or the nearly psychotic concept of hip parenting currently in the news, "Attachment Parenting," support growth either, because they are merely disguised ways to mask massive schizoid disconnection and rampant co-dependence.


There are no substitutes for the real things in life, folks. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not only our inalienable rights, they are the road to creating a world where peace, prosperity and harmony rule, but you cannot get there by avoiding the self-work necessary to clear away the mental and emotional debris of your character structures... and everybody has a character structure... unless you were born on another planet.


Meanwhile, if you're married or have kids, and are still refusing to do the self-work, at least think about splitting up. If you're not married with kids... well, you get it. I hope!