safety and emotional readiness

by | Oct 15, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

When people start contemplating separation, their first thought is usually about the money. They want to know who gets the house and what happens to the pension.

There is likely a reason you’re contemplating separation. Things aren’t working. You want out of this painful period as soon as possible. Get the money sorted, you think. Tell me how bad it’s going to be, and then let’s get on with it.

Those questions matter. They are not the first ones.

I will say it plainly. If you move into a money conversation with your partner too quickly, you can end up in a situation that harms you.

Safety comes first

First, ask yourself whether you have any safety concerns. If you think your partner may react badly to a separation, or may harm you, talk to someone who understands separation and intimate partner violence before you take any other step. Those steps include anything your partner could see: a text, an email, a new bank account, a search on a shared device.

Do not do anything until you talk to a professional who understands what can happen when one partner tells the other they want to separate. In BC, you can contact BWSS at 1-855-687-1868.

At a minimum, if your partner controls the family finances, put protections in place before you discuss money. Money control is one of the most common forms of control in a relationship. It can make leaving impossible.

In an emergency, call 911. VictimLinkBC (1-800-563-0808) is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day in many languages. It serves anyone, of any gender.

This is why I wrote Screening 101. A professional who doesn’t screen for family violence can walk you into a process that isn’t safe for you.

Once you are safe, ask a second question. Can you afford housing and basic needs while you work through this? If you can’t answer yes yet, that is the next thing to solve. You can’t make good decisions about property while you are worried about where you will sleep.

When both answers are yes, you can start learning about the next steps to separate financially.

Your emotions are part of the process

Most people assume separation is about dividing money. Money is central, but the process is deeply emotional.

It is easier to talk about property, child support and spousal support when you are not in the middle of a crisis. It is easier, though still not easy. Professionals who centre your well-being will tell you to build emotional support before you dive into legal and financial matters. That is your first signal that a professional is the right fit. They know that legal protection and financial security only work if you can absorb and act on the advice you are given.

Here is where I start.

  • Validate your feelings. Grief, anger, relief and fear can all show up in the same afternoon. None of them mean you are doing this wrong.
  • Be kind to yourself. You are doing something hard.
  • Find people who have been where you are. Look for someone who came out of separation steady, with less conflict with their former spouse than they had before. That is your model. Ask what helped them. Ask who they used for emotional support. If the conversation goes well, ask whether they’d be willing to mentor you. They can point you to the groups and professionals that worked, and you may find helpful groups in your community along the way. A mentor is for emotional support, not legal or financial advice. What worked for them may not fit your situation.
  • Choose a professional who understands family violence. Look for a coach or therapist trained in family violence and coercive control who screens for it. Unfortunately, this training isn’t always required. Ask people you trust for referrals.
  • Build a support circle. Friends and family can listen, but they likely don’t understand how the justice system works or how coercive control operates. Choose people who can listen without taking sides or trying to fix it.
  • Check in with your children. They need time to adjust. They will take their cues from you.

Why this is a money issue

Emotion drives conflict. Conflict drives cost, and it also drives more conflict.

If you don’t address the underlying conflict productively, your separation will cost you thousands now. It will cost you again when you try to rebuild your life on reactive decisions instead of collaborative ones.

Most high legal fees come from conflict, not from the complexity of dividing property. A clear-headed person uses a professional’s time well. A person in crisis uses it to be heard, and that is an expensive way to get support. A lawyer is not the right place for it.

Coaches and therapists trained in divorce understand the impact of a separation. They can give you tools to navigate the process. Lawyers may have picked up some of these tools over the years. They may not have. It’s not their training. Hire someone to support you emotionally. I explain who does what, and what each costs, in Choosing a Family Justice Professional.

The most effective way to lower the cost of your separation is to support yourself emotionally throughout. It sounds soft, but it is the most practical advice I have.

What this looks like in practice

Before you meet with anyone about the legal or financial side, check three things.

  1. Are you safe? (Talk to a professional if you have any doubt.)
  2. Can you cover housing and basic needs?
  3. Who is on your side emotionally?

If you can answer all three, you are ready to start. If you can’t, work on those first. Most of the process will still be there. Some deadlines apply, though. The Basics post covers them.

Next in the series: Understanding the Basics.

The Job Nobody Trained Me For

by | Sep 25, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

The Job Nobody Trained Me For

I have a professional designation for numbers. Nobody gave me one for what actually happens in a separation process.

Split the assets, calculate the support, file the paperwork. Almost nobody makes those decisions from a place of clarity. They make them from fear. Fear of losing the house, fear of what the ex will do next, fear that the sister who died two years ago and the friend who died this year mean their own body is next. The math is the easy part. Fear is what’s actually driving the decisions.

I’ve watched this pattern for years now, with different clients, different situations, the same shape every time. Someone hires me for the financial piece, the piece I’m actually qualified for. Then, slowly, I become the person they text at 6:40 in the morning to ask if their ex was emotionally abusive. Not because I offered to be that person. Because I was there and competent, but most of all, I listened. That gets mistaken for capacity.

It is not capacity. I am not a therapist. I have never claimed to be one, but for a long time, I kept trying to help because no one else was. When the system doesn’t provide anyone else, people reach for whoever is closest and paying attention, and I do care for the people I’m helping, yes, even the ones who behave badly. I can understand why; I’ve been there. There is always a reason underneath the behaviour.

I used to think the answer was to be a better boundary-setter. Write the email to the client explaining how they really needed a therapist or a coach, then hold the line. And that helps, some. But it treats the problem as mine to manage, one relationship at a time, instead of what it actually is: a gap in the system itself. Nobody going through a separation is routed toward the emotional support they need alongside the legal and financial process. They’re routed toward lawyers and mediators and, if they’re lucky, someone like me, who can help them get clear on the finances once the fear isn’t running the show. Otherwise, fear sits there, unaddressed, and keeps making the decisions.

I don’t have an answer for this yet. I keep writing the boundary emails. I keep believing the system needs to build in what it currently leaves out. Both are true at the same time, and I don’t think they will ever resolve into a single lesson.

September

September

by | Sep 3, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

September

September

September. Labour Day. A day of transition, and that’s underselling it.

If you’re a parent to school-aged kids, September can be a lot. If you’re separated or divorced and sharing parenting with a co-parent, September can be too much.

It can be too many decisions, and too many decisions to implement, especially when you have to navigate them with someone you no longer live with. It really can be too much. But does it have to be? It depends on how you approach it.

Let me tell you a story about two parents with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, heading back to school.

Both parents had recently signed their separation agreement. Both believed the agreement was the clear document they needed to make decisions. They’d spent a lot of money and done a ton of work to finalize it. They were pinning their hopes on it.

I’m sorry to say they were a bit deluded. They had a separation agreement. That was all they had. They didn’t share an understanding of how to interpret it, and they didn’t have a process for building one.

What did they have? A lot of anger, grief, and blame directed at each other. And a joint decision to make.

Which parent would buy the back-to-school shoes?

Seriously. Was buying shoes the big decision? Yes.

Parent A, call them type A, had always done the back-to-school shopping. Parent B, type B, had worked outside the home and, in the past, had paid for it. Under the new agreement, they were meant to share both parenting and its costs, but they had very different ideas of what that looked like.

Parent A went from full-time parent to part-time parent, trying to find work to cover a part-time single-parent household. The bills got covered. There was nothing left for extras.

Parent B had gone from full-time employee to full-time employee with a new part-time parenting job that felt full-time. Money felt tight too, running two households on one income while Parent A was still job hunting, and while paying child support on top of it.

Cue the back-to-school shopping.

Parent A had bought the summer shoes. It was Parent B’s turn. Parent A was tired of being taken for granted, tired of no one giving credit for years of unpaid work at home. That was going to change. Parent B could buy the shoes.

Parent B had just sent child support. Child support is supposed to cover the basics. Shoes are basics. Parent A needed to understand how hard it was to fund two households. Parent A could buy the shoes.

The first day of school approached. The kids were still in their Crocs. “Has Parent B taken you shoe shopping?” Parent A asked. “Nope,” the kids said.

To keep them out of the middle, though the kids likely noticed the eye-roll that followed “nope,” Parent A called Parent B. “It’s your turn to buy the shoes, but I know you’re busy, so I’ll buy them if you pay me back.”

Parent B disagreed.

Well, Parent A thought, the kids can go to school without new shoes. Maybe then Parent B will finally understand the work I did all those years and stop taking me for granted.

So the kids didn’t get new shoes. The teachers sent notes home. The kids said they needed running shoes. Parent A and Parent B dug in.

“I just gave you child support,” Parent B said. “You can buy the shoes.”

“I’ll buy them if you pay me to,” Parent A said. “I bought them last time. It’s your turn, based on our fifty-fifty split. I charge fifty dollars an hour for parenting services, and I’ll gladly do this on your behalf if you cover the rate.”

This argument happened at the five-year-old’s first soccer game, in front of both kids.

Eventually the shoes got bought. The kids also got put squarely in the middle and watched their parents have an embarrassing fight at a five-year-old’s soccer game.

Parent A and Parent B hadn’t figured out how to have these conversations differently. They were still using the old method: someone wins, someone loses. So the next joint decision went the same way. And the one after that.

Every simple decision took days, weeks, months. This is exhausting, both of them thought separately. Life is hard enough running a single-parent household without a difficult co-parent on top of it. Do simple decisions really have to take this long?

Back-to-school. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Birthdays. Spring break. Summer. It was already stressful enough without the decision-making battles layered on top.

Both parents knew it couldn’t keep going this way. They tried different things. Counselling. Coaching. Separately at first, then together, once they’d learned how to be in a room with each other again.

Parent A and Parent B have been separated for five and a half years now, divorced for four. Their kids are twelve and nine. They are not the parents they used to be. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment they became true co-parents. I know it wasn’t the day they signed the agreement.

September. Labour Day. A day that reminds them how much easier decisions are now. Which is a relief, since the decisions never stop, and if anything, there are more of them with each passing September.

Communication – Rules for Life

Communication – Rules for Life

by | Nov 3, 2017 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.

Ex Flare-Ups

by | Jan 10, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Ex Flare-Ups

Some things in life flare up on you. No warning, no pattern you can predict; they’re just suddenly there.

That’s how I’ve come to think of dealing with my ex. Not constant, not even frequent, but when it happens, it happens fast and hits harder than you’d expect for something so infrequent.

I’ve noticed these flare-ups tend to cluster around the predictable stress points: birthdays, holidays, the usual suspects. And I have exactly as much control over the timing as you’d expect: none.

I know the honest counterargument here: I chose to marry him, and whether something he says or does actually counts as a “flare-up” is really just my own interpretation. It’s not an illness. It’s a reaction. That distinction matters, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But the useful part of the comparison holds anyway: whether something is a genuine crisis or just my own reaction to it, having a strategy for managing the reaction still matters. So over time, I built one.

The flare-ups come on suddenly, out of nowhere, infrequent but sharp. I never see them coming. Instead, I built a response system for after they hit.

First, I write out my full, unfiltered, knee-jerk emotional reaction, everything, no editing, no restraint, in an email. I ensure the “to” field is empty before I even start typing, so there’s no chance of accidentally sending it to him. When I’m done, I send it to a dummy account of my own instead. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it does. Something about hitting send, even into the void, gets it out of my system.

Then I give myself time. I don’t run straight to my support network to vent about whatever the latest thing was, not for a few days at least.

I breathe. I try to meditate. I remind myself that things rarely turn out as badly as my imagination insists they will.

None of this makes the flare-up disappear. But it does take the edge off the worst symptoms, the sleeplessness, the short temper, all of it.

More importantly, it gets me to a place where I can actually deal with him productively. Before I had any of this in place, my instinct was either to fight or to avoid entirely. Fighting feeds the flare-up. Avoiding leaves you sitting in dread, waiting for the next one.

So this time, I emailed him and proposed we talk in person, with some ground rules set in advance to keep the conversation collaborative.

After a few conversations, things settled. We’re back in a good routine, and I’m still working on ways to keep these flare-ups further and further apart.