Collaborative Alternatives

DIVORCE: DOES IT HAVE TO BE DESTRUCTIVE?
By Nancy J. Ross, LCSW

Their story was all too familiar. Several months ago the couple now sitting in my office had begun a divorce process. Each had hired an attorney to represent their interests. Now, many thousands of dollars later, with no end in sight, they were enmeshed in a family court service process attempting to determine how to divide custody of their two children.

Unable to even look at his wife Susan, John began by saying that each of their attorneys had instructed them not to talk to each other and had expressly forbidden them to see a mutual psychotherapist, fearing it could jeopardize their respective cases. Only the fear that their children were being seriously damaged by an increasingly adversarial process had brought them to my office.

"How can we resolve anything," he asked, "if we're not supposed to talk to each other?"

Once I would have been reluctant to work with couples like John and Susie, concerned that the open sharing of ideas and feelings in therapy might be used as ammunition in a court proceeding. In the past, the legal and therapeutic fields have often worked at cross purposes with each other, with adversarial attorneys, fearing therapists would interfere with their task of representing their clients, ignoring the "best interests" of the family as a whole, especially the children.

Often, the only way to insure that a couple received the emotional support they needed for themselves and their children has been to work with them outside the adversarial process. A couple with few assets and the ability to compromise might choose a "do it yourself" divorce, using paralegal or attorneys only as consultants. Others might choose a mediator, whereby a single attorney facilitated their divorce. For many couples these are viable choices. For many others, like John and Susie, who either lack communication skills or fear they will not be represented fairly, there has been no other option. Until now.

Within the last few years, a core group of attorneys committed to help these couples have developed a new alternative called Collaborative Law. In Collaborative Law each spouse has his or her own attorney pledged to work with each other and the couple in a cooperative structure and resolve their issues outside the court system.

At the same time, a group of family therapists in the North, East and South Bay, working with these attorneys, have developed a unique concept called Collaborative Divorce. In Collaborative Divorce, the three fields of law, finance and psychotherapy work cooperatively together to create a new opportunity for divorcing couples to minimize not only the emotional and financial impact on themselves, but their children as well.

For John and Susie, this meant dismissing their adversarial attorneys and agreeing to work within the collaborative divorce process. They received coaching on how to talk to their children about their divorce, worked with a financial advisor to sort out their financial issues, and learned how to talk with each other to co-parent effectively. A children's counselor worked with their children to help them voce their concerns about the divorce.

I wish I could say that John and Susie successfully completed the Collaborative Divorce/Collaborative Law process, but after learning how to communicate effectively for the first time in their married life, they decided to stay together. Not all things worked out as planned.

Nancy Ross is the South Bay/Peninsula Director of Collaborative Divorce. She is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice with Bauer, Shepherd & Ross and Associates in Cupertino. Information about Collaborative Divorce can be obtained by calling (408) 973-8372 (South Bay) or (510) 253-0700 (North Bay).

Originally published in The Women's Voice Magazine-December 96 / January 97 Edition

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