Along with exploring divorce’s emotional effects, mental health clinicians can help people think through practical implications of divorce in the years to come, such as the impact on caregiving and medical decision-making plans, said Carol Hughes, PhD, a psychotherapist in Laguna Hills, California, who counsels adults going through divorce after age 50 who have adult children.
If divorced adults remain single, these caregiving and other legal responsibilities may fall on any children they have or other close relatives, Hughes said. If a divorced adult finds a new partner, there may be emotional and financial reverberations, she said. For instance, when the parent wants the new spouse to be the primary medical decision-maker, their adult children “can feel 100% abandoned,” Hughes said.
“You’re grieving the loss of that relationship with your parent, as your biological kin, that [a newcomer] in your life has the power to say whether your parent lives or dies,” Hughes said. Practitioners can work with these adult children to validate their feelings of grief and loss, so they can move along, ideally, to some point closer to acceptance, she said.
[Related: Navigating divorce after 50]
Emotions and finances also can quickly become intertwined in these reconfigured families, when a new stepparent is on the scene, said Deborah Carr, PhD, a Boston University sociology professor who has studied later-life families. “Every penny that is spent on long-term care affects the potential inheritance of the children,” she noted. A new spouse, for example, may decide to sell the family home to pay for the parent’s long-term care, which may not sit well with the children, who were anticipating inheriting that home one day, she said.
Before such crises flare, psychologists can encourage family members “to have conversations about these kind-of-bleak topics early and often,” Carr said. They can ask the older adults to think through, she suggested, who they consider to be their family. Who do they trust? Who do they prefer to become their caregiver if physical care one day is required? Online resources can assist with these end-of-life discussions, such as Five Wishes and The Conversation Project.
“Psychologists really can play an important role because these are difficult conversations to have,” Carr said. “It is very difficult for someone at the dinner table to say, ‘Let’s talk about my aging and impending death.’ And it might be all the more so in a recently reconfigured family.”
Once older adults have made their decisions, practitioners can assist them with sharing the specifics, including why they have selected certain family members to play a financial or health care–related role, Carr said. It may be that someone has a particular expertise or lives nearby, she said.
Psychologists may also be able to help families see how these conflicts can be more deeply rooted, Carr said. “Therapy can be helpful in figuring out those long-term lingering patterns of interaction that go back decades that might bear on end-of-life [decisions].”
