Collaborative Divorce Law of the Palm Beaches

Collaborative Divorce & Your Future

After your divorce is over how do you want to feel?

While it may seem weird to start with a vision of your future, often times its the best way to figure out how to proceed now. Collaborative divorce participants are concerned with how the divorce process itself affects the family members. How you feel after the divorce is an important part of a collaborative divorce.

Once you have a clear vision of your future, you can evaluate how your actions now help you achieve your vision. And of course, if the action you're thinking about does not move you toward the vision of your future, you can decide whether it's worth taking.

Divorce can be a grueling process emotionally. Holding a vision of your future can help you move through the process more smoothly. Will it be easy? Probably not. But with a clear vision for your future after divorce, you can move through the divorce process knowing that you are working toward your goals.

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.

Collaborative Divorce: Stepping Forward

The Collaborative law process recognizes emotional issues exist in divorce cases that cannot be addressed by the legal system. For the adversarial area of Florida family law, this is a "paradigm shift." Psychologist Abraham Maslow said that in any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety. The collaborative divorce process lets you step forward into growth.

Collaborative divorce law is different from a traditional Florida divorce court battle. Litigation, by its nature, is adversarial and combative. Litigation results in the parties and the attorneys focusing on attacking one another and wearing each other down, using a "take no prisoners" approach. The resulting fall out is often negative and far-reaching, particularly when children or privacy issues are involved.

The Florida collaborative divorce law process is geared from day one to make it possible for creative, respectful collective problem-solving to happen. It is quicker, more creative, more

Collaborative Divorce Process - Which is More Important - Money or Fairness?

One of my favorite bloggers, Melani Ward, posted this article today. It seems applicable to the collaborative process, doesn't it? The whole post is reprinted below, but you can also click on the title to read it at Melani's blog.

Money or Fairness – Which is More Important?

02 December 2008 | Brain | admin

Did you know that social pain and physical pain light up the same regions of the brain on an MRI and that as far as the brain goes, social pain is just as harmful as physical pain?

The brain also finds fairness intrinsically important. When people’s brains are being monitored, scientist have concluded that when people judge a situation to be fair, reward centers of the brain light up just like they do when they see a loved one or taste great food.

On the other hand, unfair situations generate significant fear and light up a region of the brain that is stimulated when we feel disgust. In one study they found that fairness was more important to the brain than money. What a relief! I was beginning to think money was all anyone cared about.

So, how can you apply this information at work or in your personal life?

Healthy work environments and healthy relationships are a result of instilling fairness and setting up rewards that make people feel positive.

When you embrace social fairness and apply it to every relationship you have, you are essentially dousing everyone with whom you come in contact with serotonin. Serotonin opens the mind and makes people feel great and successful. In return, you’ll be rewarded with individuals who want to be with you more, learn more from you, and do more for you.

On the flip side, if you diminish someone, it’s like you’re injecting them with high levels of cortisol which will shut the brain down and close it off to new ideas and a willingness to help you out.

So, in every relationship you have, think about how you can inject a little more “social fairness” into the equation. Are your words, actions, feelings, and energy generating positive thoughts and positive responses? Are you praising those who work for you or under you? Are you showing and telling them how grateful you are for them? Are you showing gratitude to those you’re in relationships with?

Imagine yourself with a Serotonin Soaker and see how much more satisfying and productive all your interactions can be.

Check out this article on How the Brain Works.

Sometimes It's Tempting...

Collaborative or not, divorce is emotional business. When you are annoyed with your spouse, it can be tempting to bad mouth them to others. Resist the urge. It can be difficult to do, especially if others are willing to goad you on. The video below discusses this issue and why you should avoid it.

The legal consequences of bad mouthing the other parent can be severe under the new best interest of the child factors in Florida law. One of the clear points of the new factors is to get the children out of the middle. Bad mouthing the other parent can be used against you when deciding parental responsibility and timesharing schedules.

Assume Compassion

Today's post is not divorce related but fits with the collaborative divorce process.
                            

            

I was sitting at the park one day with a friend of mine when we started talking about family. He asked me how many brothers and sisters I had and I said 2. I always say 2, even though my sister died when we were young. To say one make me feel like I'm not acknowledging her existence. Then he asked me where they lived and I said, "My brother lives in Chicago but my sister died when we were young." So he started asking a bunch of questions about it and I started getting a bit upset, which I always do. Not upset in a dwelling type of way, more just overwhelmed with her presence because I feel it so deeply whenever I think of her.  Anyway, after he fed his curiosity he said this, "Well, do you even remember her? How much could you really remember her anyway at that age?" I was really taken back. Where did that come from? I began to explain it but then stopped and realized if I needed to explain it, he wasn't going to get it. I just let it go. However, later that day we were hanging out with my family and it just so happened that a couple of my cousins were playing near us. They were just about the ages my sister and I were when she died, 9 and 6. So, I said to my friend, "Do you think "Timmy" would remember anything about "Sally" if she died today?" He said "Oh, wow, I guess you're right. I'm sorry." Then, just recently I was talking to someone about some things that were going on in my life, one thing she just doesn't understand and one she is passionate about herself. There was a huge distinction between how she listened and gave feedback on the two issues. When I was talking about one issue it was all she could do to look at me. On the other, she was all fired up and encouraging me like crazy. But, I'll tell you, the only thing that came through was judgment. The judgment was "Look Mel, one of these things matter to me and other doesn't." Well, the truth was that the one that mattered more to me was not the one she judged to be worthy of discussion. So, here's the lesson I was reminded of. When someone comes to me to share a win or a goal or a story, the least effective thing I can do is let how I feel about IT play into the conversation. What needs to be considered is how I feel about the person talking. Do I love that person? Do I care about that person? If so, then what they say should have very little impact on my response. I may "think" it's stupid, irrational, a waste of their time, boring or any number of things but if I am truly holding the space for them to work something out, my beliefs about good or bad or right or wrong are totally irrelevant. My mind was not asked to solve the problem or pass judgment. Rather, that person was counting on my love for her to be able to hold the space. A couple of days later I was given the chance to practice myself. One of my girlfriends called me to talk about her miserable job. Normally this is a topic that gets me pretty emotional because I care about this friend very much and I hate seeing how much this job

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