Friendships Don’t Have to Be a Casualty of Divorce : A Garden Grove woman’s recently published book gives advice to those who want to be there for someone going through a divorce--but don’t know how.

For a long time after Dave’s wife left him, he couldn’t talk about it without crying.

They’d been together for five years, and he was planning to make it forever. Then, without warning, she announced that the marriage was over. The next day she was gone.

Dave, a Brea resident who asked for anonymity, desperately needed the support he thought he would get from his close friends. But they didn’t know how to react when they saw him in a state so vulnerable he was liable to break down at any moment.

“Most of them seemed to believe that I was losing control of myself, almost as if it was wrong for a male to shed tears or show emotions,” he says.

They tried to offer words of comfort, but caused him more pain by saying things like:

“Forget about her--why be concerned about someone who didn’t want you?”

“It’s better that it happened now rather than later.”

“Obviously, she must have a lover.”

Dave ended up feeling that if he wanted real support, he’d have to pay for it, and he eventually started seeing a counselor.

Like many people going through divorce, Dave found out who his real friends were. And some of those he thought he knew best were not among them.

Although it may not be deliberate, friends of divorcing couples often say and do things that hurt more than help. They may withdraw completely, take one spouse’s side and cut off the other, offer misguided advice or try to get people to bury their pain and plunge into single life prematurely.

Sharon Marshall, a 47-year-old Garden Grove resident, experienced all of the above after her husband left her about 15 years ago.

She says he was an alcoholic who went on a drinking binge one day and never returned home. The couple’s 4 1/2-month-old baby had died a month earlier from a congenital condition that caused severe brain damage, and Marshall says she was left to raise their first-born son alone with no financial support.

She says it took her about seven years to reach a point where she was on top of her life again, and for the first two years her self-esteem was so low that she didn’t feel she deserved anyone’s support.

Many of her friends stood by her when she was at her worst--but some didn’t. What she learned from their responses to her divorce prompted her to write a recently published book called “When a Friend Gets a Divorce: What Can You Do?”

The answer, according to Marshall, is plenty--if you can be nonjudgmental as well as compassionate. And if you keep trying instead of withdrawing when you feel uncertain how to react or the support you offer isn’t well-received.

In the introduction of a paperback filled with spiritual references reflecting her deep Christian faith, Marshall tells readers that one of the most frustrating emotions friends of divorcing couples feel is impotence. She writes: “We may simply avoid our hurting friends because we don’t know what to say. . . . Our silence is leaden; our words are misunderstood. We care so deeply that we are almost as distraught as the victim(s). Nothing we do seems right. Doing nothing is wrong.”

Often, the problem is that friends try to do too much; they end up counseling those getting a divorce instead of encouraging them to make their own decisions or get professional help, says Marshall, an educator who gives secular and religious talks on such topics as grieving and building self-esteem.

Friends who take sides or voice their own opinions instead of serving as sounding boards risk being blamed later for interfering, she cautions.

The friends who helped Marshall most were the ones who said, “We love you, we care and we want to help,” then listened to whatever she needed to say without giving advice or making judgments.

She also appreciated those who asked her to watch their kids or do other small things for them, because “it helped to be needed when I felt so useless.”

And she was grateful to the friends who kept inviting her to social gatherings even when she was prone to bitter outbursts about her ex-husband. “They let me ruin their dinner parties--and kept inviting me back,” she says. “Friends can help by keeping you involved in life.”

Marshall and her ex-husband were close to five other couples with whom they spent holidays and took turns having dinner parties.

After her divorce, one of those couples dropped out of her life completely. And she found that some of the women who remained close were nervous about having a single woman around at social gatherings.

“When divorce invades circles where it hasn’t been, it leaves other couples thinking, ‘They were like us. This could happen to me.’ It scares them,” Marshall says.

The other couples continued to involve Marshall and her son in their social circle, but they admitted that her divorce made them feel more vulnerable and prompted them to pay more attention to their own marriages. Some even sought marital counseling.

Marshall feels fortunate that many of her friends kept reaching out to her in spite of their discomfort over her divorce. Jane, a 36-year-old Orange County resident who asked to remain anonymous, hasn’t been as lucky. Most of the couples she saw when she was married have stopped inviting her and her children to social gatherings.

“That’s real, real hard for me. I have never been so lonely,” she says, stressing that she doesn’t want to have to limit her friendships to single people just because she’s no longer married.

She suspects some of her friends became impatient with her because she didn’t recover from her bitter divorce as quickly as they thought she should.

A year after the separation, people were telling her, “You should be over this by now.” They were ignoring the fact that the mother of three, who is barely surviving on welfare, was still fighting for child support and was going through an emotional setback after every court appearance.

“I needed someone to say, ‘I know this is hard and frustrating, but you’ll make it,’ ” says Jane, who had been married for 13 years. “The people who gave me permission to have the feelings I had for as long as I needed to were the most helpful.”

One friend urged her to call any time. Often, it was after midnight when Jane picked up the phone. Fortunately, her friend’s offer was genuine, and those early-morning talks were a lifeline that kept her going when she was most depressed. “I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Jane says.

It also helped to have friends who tried to remain neutral because, Jane says, “it took the heat out of it and helped me get a better perspective.”

Tom, a 56-year-old Anaheim resident who asked for anonymity, points out that children of divorcing couples suffer more when friends take sides.

“What people need to do is to remain supportive of both people and become big brothers and big sisters to help the kids through this,” says Tom, who has five children from a long marriage that ended in 1974.

Friends shouldn’t assume that they know what’s really going on in someone else’s family, he cautions. “You’re not living in a home and you don’t know all the problems. Back off and love the people where they are, and realize there’s a deep-seated problem going on there. Don’t blame, but listen, support, care and love.”

That’s just what Sue Netzer’s friends did after her marriage ended about a year ago. The 51-year-old Irvine resident says she’s grateful that her friends never made her feel she had done anything wrong.

“They listened to me when I needed to talk, walked the beach when I needed to walk, let me cry when I needed to cry,” she says. “They let me grieve the loss of a 30-year marriage and realized, as I did, that it is almost worse than a death. Most of all, they never made me feel like half of anything, but always saw me as a whole person.”