All of us at Life-Giving Wounds were thrilled to launch a chapter in Denver this May! We held a three-day retreat high in the Rocky Mountains May 7-9, with thirty-seven retreatants and a fabulous team of ten from Denver and four of us on the traveling retreat team, from the DC area.

Here are five of my personal takeaways from the retreat weekend:

Oftentimes adult children of divorce feel abandoned by one parent even if that parent was still active in their lives. These feelings of abandonment, or the experience of actually being abandoned, stay with us. ... Each incident reinforces for us what we already think about ourselves: People will always leave us, and we are unlovable.

I went to my first Legion of Mary meeting as a freshman in college... I loved it. It was like a perfect little home comprised of all these people who were unrelated to each other but who had a common purpose...I only got to be in the Legion of Mary for a few months; I couldn't return to college for my sophomore year due to my parents’ divorce causing utter chaos.