I am writing from a deep place in my heart that is crying out, pleading to be heard, like the persistent widow who cries out until justice is hers. (Cf. Luke 18:1-8). If I could make my voice as loud as thunder, I would cry out to every bishop, priest, deacon, and lay pastoral leader to consider if they are doing what is necessary to accompany the newly married, the divorced, and the children from broken families.

No couple gets married looking forward to being unhappy in their marriage. But no couple avoids times in marriage where one or both spouses feel unsatisfied, restless, lonely, or just plain unhappy. Does that mean they have fallen out of love? Should they doubt their commitment? What should an unhappy couple do about their unhappiness?

However, the whole point of Lent is to do things that bring us closer to the heart of Jesus. And, if I want to be free to love someone in the vocation of marriage one day, how will I be able to do that if I am still carrying around resentful anger towards my parents? Do they deserve this reaction? Probably, but God loves them just the same as He loves me. So I embarked on a forty plus day journey of loving my parents through the eyes of Jesus Christ, whose love was so big that He died on the Cross for sins that He did not commit (cf CCC 598).

For those not married who believe they are called to marriage, you may know quite well the brokenness that keeps you in patterns that delay your readiness for the type of relationship that would lead into marriage.  In whichever category you find yourself, I submit that marriage has the potential to offer you significant healing.  For those who are married, when your marriage becomes difficult, and it will, the key is to turn toward – not from – your spouse.  The more you turn toward your spouse, with Christ, the more healing you will find.  This is because holy matrimony is a sacrament that heals, and it heals through the communion and sacrificial suffering modeled after Christ’s own sacrificial suffering to restore communion between us and God.

The story of the Presentation of Jesus, as found in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 2, has always been one of my favorites, and has held a special place in my spiritual life as an adult child of divorce. When our parents are divorced, separated, or in a difficult marriage, the struggles in their relationship become the dominant force in the house. … In this beautiful mystery of the Presentation, let us look at the Holy Family, and allow them to teach us and heal us in those places in need of the Lord’s light.

Every human soul is of more value than the entire universe put together, and each person is created in the image and likeness of God.  No human being can escape the loving gaze of God, no matter what the circumstances of his or her origin.  No Catholic, and no person, should ever deem oneself of lesser value if he or she comes from an “irregular” situation, for God sees all, knows all, loves all, and desires to save all (1 Timothy 2:3-4).

Last Friday, June 16th, I was blessed to attend the wedding of a dear friend of my husband's. Like me, my husband's friend is an ACoD. When I realized earlier this week that his wedding date coincided with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, I decided that I wanted to make a special wedding card for the couple.

If you come from a background of family brokenness, I would like to offer encouragement as you look ahead to your wedding day. Brides and grooms—choose wedding customs and traditions that are meaningful to you. You have the freedom to make the choices that express who you are and what you hope for your future marriage and how you want to remember or to celebrate your past.

So, when we pray to forgive those that have hurt us, whether it’s the first time we are forgiving them or the seventy-seventh time we have forgiven them for the same offense, let us ask the Lord for the forgiveness powerful enough to conquer sin and death in our loved one.

When my future husband Raphy asked me if I would like to enter into a courtship with him to discern marriage together, I was excited but also scared because I didn’t know what this journey would entail. I also didn’t know if I would be truly ready to say “yes” to marriage. I desired to be married, but would I be able to do my part in it?

What I am about to write, I honestly thought I would go to my grave with, and never discuss it out loud. It is truly a grace that I have the courage to say what I am about to say. I want to share how I went from being a child of fear to a child of God.

I learned to forgive my father over time. It started with a question, “How can I forgive him?” and developed from there. I realized that he had done what he thought was right, and that he never meant to harm me. Even though I felt rejected and abandoned by him, I knew that he never stopped loving me, and realized how much I had stopped trying to love him.

When the home is shattered by the brokenness of divorce, one must boldly turn to the Church. And so, for those leaders in the Church who come into contact with adult children of divorce, here are five ways that you can help bring them Christ’s healing truth.

This year, my husband went on a Life-Giving Wounds retreat, and I am now forever grateful to this ministry. My husband left with a lack of understanding of his pain and his story, but returned to me and our family with the gifts of knowledge of himself and his pain, and a deeper understanding of his story. He was understood on the level of the heart that only something like this ministry can give. He came home with a correction of “oh, it doesn’t affect me” to “it affects everything in my life.”

In addition to this invaluable spiritual support, we need to shore up strengths and acquire new skills to heighten and expand our ability to love. Understanding our temperament can help us do this. This is not a theory of fixed personality traits identifying unchanging characteristics that put people in a box. Rather, understanding temperament helps us identify our strong and weak tendencies to react in certain ways in certain situations. 

I was at a crossroads. My heart ached for this love to be true, I wanted so badly to believe it was for me, but I was so scared what that might mean. How silly! My life had changed 180 degrees over those 7 years, so what the heck was I waiting for? What was I scared of? I was scared that God would change his mind, like I thought love did when my parents divorced when I just a baby...

This is a poem about my parents’ divorce. The title “Flight 1015” refers to their wedding anniversary on October 15th and in the poem their love is metaphorically described as both the turbulence and the airplane itself. The poem is also a modern dialogue with Robert Frost’s famous poem about marriage entitled “The Master Speed.”

One of the most common requests we receive in Life-Giving Wounds ministry is that we speak more to the issue of annulments. Even though this would be a great topic for a support group meeting (and may well be addressed in that format in the future), I thought I’d share my own thoughts on the matter. In this post, I hope to provide a few pointers and some encouragement.

The year we got married, Dan’s parents completed their divorce proceedings, which had begun more than a decade earlier when they separated while he was in middle school. It felt ironic and deeply sad that we were beginning our life together as his parents were definitively ending theirs. And it caused some anxiety in us: Could we make it work? Would we last?