Your feelings can eat you up or set you free. If you keep them bottled up inside of you, then they can eat away at you, and you can end up acting out (read up on acting out here). For instance, Antonio didn’t like his parents’ divorce one bit, but he never said a word about it. He clammed up, shut down and went on with life, shutting everyone out.  He was so hurt by what happened that he never allowed himself to open up to other people and found himself feeling pretty lonely and, over time, it felt harder and harder to connect with people because he was simply out of practice. 

Meanwhile, Marcus went through a similar divorce and told his friends about it when they played hoops each Friday night. Releasing the energy through basketball and talking to his friends made him feel a lot better. Nothing was bottled up and he felt free to be himself. 

So, yes, you may feel awful. You may feel a whole lot of feelings, but identifying and expressing them in positive ways will likely feel a lot better than ignoring them or stuffing them. Talking to your friends may not be your way of handling your feelings (everyone has different ways to manage their emotions… you read the YSS books, right?), but the important thing is to acknowledge how you are feeling.  So take a second and think of five feelings you have about your parents divorce (if your parents are divorced, of course). 

Good job. Just saying how you feel is a huge step in the right direction. 

Another step may be to accept your current situation.  You may not be happy about your parents divorcing. In fact, you may be really, really angry about it, but the thing is, you can’t control whether they divorce or not.  So accepting the reality that they are getting a divorce may help you to focus on managing your feelings rather than fighting against something that is not in your control.