From the author: Sometimes it seems that children react “calmly” to the loss of their father, and there are even more such children than those who do not show external reactions to the divorce of the parents itself. Turning to the previous “acts of divorce,” we can once again remember that the loss of a father for a child means a partial loss of oneself, one’s identity, accompanied by the fear of being separated from him forever. A child is able to find peace of mind if terrible fears are not justified. The psychological significance of losing a father extends far beyond the post-divorce phase. The sons not only lose part of their primary identification, they will now and in the future do without it. And daughters not only suffer due to separation from the Oedipal love object, they will also in the future do without the love of an adult male representative. At the same time, there is the fact that the father is absent as a triangular object - which inevitably leads to conflicts with the mother. The result is quarrels, depressive moods, aggression, problems at school, and sometimes somatic illnesses. Children experience the breakdown of post-divorce contact with their father no less painfully. The previously assumed trauma now becomes reality. This is also sad for children who did not suffer too much neurotically during the post-divorce crisis. A new loss of restored peace of mind means that the child's wounds are reopened and he is forced to go through the divorce again. This is as tragic as losing a father immediately after a divorce. The child loses confidence, because the parents did not keep their promises, and he believed too much in the “fairy tale” that there would be no separation from dad. Nothing has helped him, he is lonely and has no one to lean on/rely on in his life! In this regard, the child loses most of his sense of self-worth and trust in love objects. But even in this situation, there are children whose external behavior does not reveal the drama of their intrapsychic experiences. The calmness that many mothers interpret as indifference to the final breakdown of the relationship with the father is in fact a mixture of repression and resignation. At the same time, the mental development of the child also suffers. An important role is played not only by the actual reasons for the breakdown of relationships, but also by the meaning that the child himself gives to them (it does not always coincide with the ideas of adults). For example, the mother may interfere with contact with the father, and the child may have the impression that the father avoids their relationship; or the father does not call or come for a long time, and the child, meanwhile, blames the mother for “surviving” the father; or the child, as a result of his feelings of guilt or as a result of his conflict of loyalty, refuses to meet with his father, consciously explaining this by the fact that the father, they say, is a bad person and he does not want to hear anything about him. These subjective reasons influence long-term traumatic development and do not change anything, because... the delayed loss of a father is just as deeply traumatizing to the child. But, if the mother openly forbids the child to communicate with the father, then he knows that the father wants their relationship, and to some extent he manages to resist the mother. This does not lessen the pain of separation, but the child knows that he has a father who loves him and thinks about him. However, this situation destroys the relationship between mother and child, and children, in return for the traumatic loss of their father, experience the traumatic loss of their “inner” mother. They stop believing in their mother's love, and this affects their own feelings of love for her. And the child is forced to live with the parent with whom they no longer have a loving relationship, but the one he really loves is absent from his life. If the tense relationship between the parents continues after the divorce (even when the child maintains external contact with the father in the form of telephone calls), then the resulting conflicts of loyalty make it very difficult for the child to escape from.