Collaborative Divorce Process - How To Have Satisfied Clients

The collaborative divorce process is often said to improve the family's legal outcomes. While the focus is not on "winning" in collaborative process, there are still raw emotions to deal with during the process. All the team members will have to assist the divorcing spouses deal with emotions.

Here are some suggestions for collaborative professionals to have satisfied clients:

• For clients, divorce is emotional process, not a legal one. The team needs to understand the clients’ psychological state and to know how to use it to promote the best legal outcome. The goal is not to help the client manage his or her personal feelings.

• Recognize clients’ distortions. Clients project feelings and traits onto the team members. That projection serves the client's psychological needs (i.e. to be taken care of) but are not based on reality. Confront the distortions and bring the client back to the real relationship.Maintain a neutral and nonjudgmental stance when confronting clients

• Allow a controlled amount of emotional ventilation while maintaining structure. Know when to bring the client’s attention back to the issues. Studies have shown that up to 40% of a divorce lawyer's time is spent tending to clients' emotions. The mental health professional should assist the lawyers in maintaining the focus of meetings while allowing some venting.

• If the structure is not enough to contain the clients’ feelings and impulses, it may be necessary to refer the client for counseling outside the team. It will be difficult to move the process forward when one spouse is stuck in acute emotional distress.

• Maintain enough psychological distance to be able to listen closely to the client. Empathy is important but over-identification with the client will interfere with neutrality. Boundaries between client and team must be clear.

• Accept feelings towards clients as inevitable. The Collaborative professional shouldn’t react behaviorally. Instead, use the emotions as data to understand the client and to restore focus to the process. 

All the team members will deal with client emotions. By recognizing those emotions and working with them in a constructive way, the collaborative team can assist the clients to move forward. In the end, such actions will lead to satisfied collaborative divorce process clients.