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.

Choosing a family Justice professional

by | Oct 2, 2026 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

How to Choose a Family Justice Professional

People usually don’t think about which process they want until they’re already in crisis, and by then, the first professional they call often becomes the path they’re on, whether or not it’s the right fit.

There isn’t one right way to separate. There are several, and they trade off cost, control, and how much conflict you’re willing to walk through along the way.

Traditional separation and divorce. Each spouse hires a lawyer and pays a retainer. The lawyers manage the process, and most will try to negotiate a settlement before court, since court itself is slow and expensive. This is the path most people default into, mostly because it’s the one everyone’s heard of.

Unbundled legal services. Instead of handing the whole process to a lawyer, you hire one for specific pieces only, reviewing a document, filling out a form, representing you at a single hearing, and handling the rest yourself. Cheaper, but it asks more of you.

Mediation. A mediator helps both people reach an agreement but can’t give legal advice to either side. This works best when each person has already met separately with their own lawyer to understand their rights, and both are actually willing to negotiate in good faith.

The Collaborative Process. Each person hires a Collaborative lawyer, and the team typically includes divorce coaches and a financial neutral, which is the role I used to play. Everyone gets the same information at the same time. It can look expensive on paper- several professionals at once- but it’s often efficient precisely because nothing gets relitigated or re-explained later. Most Collaborative professionals also offer a lighter version of the process for simpler situations.

Kitchen table divorce. Both people do their own research and negotiate directly, with no professionals mediating the conversation itself. This takes the most self-direction, and works best when both people are on relatively equal footing and can actually talk to each other without it going sideways.

What drives the cost isn’t really the process you pick. It’s whether the process is contested, how complicated your assets and debts are, whether kids are involved, and, more than anything, how much conflict is running underneath it.

As a rough guide: lawyers typically run $250 to $600 an hour. Divorce coaches typically charge $200 to $300 an hour. Financial professionals fall in roughly the same range as lawyers, often $250 to $500. The right move is matching the professional to the actual task: lawyers for your rights and entitlements, financial professionals for financial clarity, coaches for communication, emotional support, and help building parenting plans, rather than asking one person to do all three.

Court is expensive specifically because it’s slow and because it escalates conflict rather than resolving it. Processes built around consent tend to be more efficient simply because everyone has the same information at the same time, and the professionals involved are trained to keep the temperature down so people can actually reach an agreement.

Here’s the part that matters most, and the part a lot of people miss entirely when choosing who to hire: not every professional centres your emotional or mental well-being, and that’s worth checking for directly before you hire anyone. Those who understand how emotional, financial, and mental well-being interact are worth more than those who only know the law.

The single most effective way to lower the cost of your separation isn’t picking the cheapest process. It’s supporting yourself emotionally through it. Emotion drives conflict. Conflict drives cost. Everything else follows from there.

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

by | Sep 2, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

When telling the story of my divorce, at some point I say: I was lucky that when my spouse and I separated, the news was spotlighting the Collaborative Process. A news article led us to find the lawyers who helped us transform our lives and get us back on track.

When I discovered my spouse had filed for divorce, I was in a terrible emotional state. I spent my days anxious. What would become of our children, and us? Where would we live? How would we survive? Some days I seriously wondered if I’d make it to the next one, half-convinced I might have a heart attack from the stress alone. Our seven-year-old and four-year-old sons picked up on it all. Our eldest broke out in cold sores and started isolating himself from the rest of us. Our youngest had frequent breakdowns, more screaming, more hitting than we’d ever seen from him.

After my first consultation with the lawyer who’d become my Collaborative lawyer, I actually considered hiring a bulldog instead. But everything I kept reading said the same thing: children suffer most when their parents have a high-conflict divorce.

Choosing a Collaborative lawyer was a hard call at the time because I genuinely believed I was right and that I’d win if I took my spouse to court. I didn’t understand yet that when one spouse wins, the children lose.

I also didn’t think a Collaborative lawyer could actually get my spouse to engage honestly and productively. What I didn’t understand was that the law here already has a strong default built in: the starting point for financial separation is fifty-fifty on assets and income. Policy and case law have built a family law process specifically designed to leave both spouses starting from roughly the same financial position afterward. A bulldog lawyer might have made my spouse look bad in front of a judge, but it wouldn’t have moved the financial outcome much at all. It would have cost me thousands more, and bought nothing but more conflict inside my own family.

Our lawyers helped us reach something we could both grudgingly live with, and helped keep our conflict away from our kids.

Today our children are sixteen and thirteen. We just celebrated our eldest’s birthday together: pitch and putt, dinner at his favourite restaurant.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and juggling full-time parenting on a part-time basis has never been easy. My ex and I have navigated plenty of hard parenting decisions over the past nine years, but fortunately, we navigated them together, for our kids.

I’m grateful we found lawyers who understood that the real work of separating is keeping the family together while the finances come apart.

And I’m doing what I can to make sure luck stops being the deciding factor for families going through this. It shouldn’t come down to chance. The default family law system needs to put families and children first, as a baseline, not as something you happen to stumble into.

Evolution Vs. Change

Evolution Vs. Change

by | Feb 3, 2024 | Divorce and Separation

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” “Life is beautiful.”

I stare at both mantras daily as I eat dinner with my kids. They stare out at me from placemats my parents gave me for Christmas ten years ago.

I wholeheartedly agree with my placemats, but I haven’t lived my life like a journey, despite that agreement. Instead, I’m always packing my bags to get somewhere, still figuring out what to take with me. Every day I sort through my “stuff” and fret that I’ve forgotten something or packed incorrectly.

But something has shifted this past year.

Defining what has shifted is hard. It’s more of a feeling. What has changed? I can only identify it by noticing what is missing, and what is missing is anxiety, and anxiety’s friend, depression. It is ironic, but I had anxiety that my anxiety was missing for about six months. I felt oddly “flat,” and I wondered if I was depressed for a few more months. I’ve still had many moments of anger, grief, happiness, and boredom over the past few months, but they’ve felt different. The emotions lasted as long as they needed to, then they were gone. The anxiety, depression, and drive that pushed me onward, which usually took over from the first emotional trigger, had disappeared.

What happened?

For a while I kept trying to find an answer to why I felt different. Something clear and concrete must have suddenly caused me to change. The headaches I started to develop, most likely caused by perimenopause, were perhaps a sign of brain cancer, and maybe brain cancer was impacting my emotions  (one thought I had). Or maybe the transition from peri to post-menopause had caused a sudden shift.

I looked for one thing to explain the shift, and I minimized all the subtle changes I’d made over the past ten years. I did not acknowledge that the shift could relate to my work to live in alignment with my values, to slow down, to live in the present. I didn’t recognize the ten years of life experience and daily challenges I’d given myself through day-to-day living as a full-time single parent on a part-time basis, navigating new relationships, and building my own business. I forgot about the ten years of coaching and training, the mistakes I had to address and hold myself accountable for, and the successes that taught me what works and what doesn’t.

Instead, I assumed I had magically changed, or imagined something was wrong.

Our world celebrates social media-worthy, groundbreaking change with fireworks and celebration. Our world treats change like a destination we suddenly arrive at, not an evolution that took years.

Then, when we don’t change, and our world doesn’t change, we give up. We throw up our hands, say it’s impossible, and succumb to anxiety or depression. We carry on as we always have, feeling heavy, assuming nothing will ever change, living to survive and hoping that one day we’ll find that elusive life destination where we’re happy, where everything works as it should, where we’ll finally be done. Where we’ll have accomplished “life.”

Change takes time.

In life, we search for that defining moment, a single catalyst that transforms us into a new version of ourselves. But change isn’t a destination. It’s an evolution, and most of it happens while you’re too busy packing your bags to notice.

The Slowest Way (But Really, It’s Faster)

by | Dec 27, 2023 | Divorce and Separation

The Slow Way (But Really, It’s the Fastest)

There’s a version of my own separation agreement on page five that laid out my plan to get my old job back. It was there because everyone around me- lawyers, family, well-meaning friends- assumed that was obviously the right direction. I assumed it too, for a while. It took me years to notice that plan wasn’t actually mine. It was just the most well-worn path in sight, and I’d stepped onto it without really choosing it.

I think that’s how most people get stuck. Not because they lack options, but because the only paths they can see are the ones everyone else is already walking.

From what I’ve seen, people usually try one of three ways out.

The first is waiting to be rescued, waiting for something outside yourself- a partner, a job, a lucky break- to show up and fix what feels broken. This rarely works, mostly because you’re handing the change itself to something you don’t control. And even when it does work for a while- a new relationship, a new hobby, a fresh distraction- the lift is usually temporary. Eventually you’re back where you started, except now there’s one more person or pursuit tangled up in the mess too.

The second is fixing yourself to match somebody else’s picture of a good life. This was my path. I had a version of my future handed to me, mostly built from other people’s expectations, and I spent real effort trying to make myself fit it, rather than asking whether it fit me. This path can look like real progress from the outside: you’re working hard, achieving things, checking boxes, but it’s often just as unmoored as staying still, because none of it is actually pointed anywhere you chose. The particular cruelty of this path is that even when you reach the destination, you usually find out you’re still unhappy, and now you’ve spent years getting there.

The third is blowing it all up. Something dramatic, a sudden decision made out of built-up anger or exhaustion from the first two paths not working. It does get you moving. But you rarely get to choose what happens next, and the fallout from that kind of change can take years to clean up, sometimes longer than it would have taken to walk away from the wrong path more carefully in the first place.

There’s a fourth way, though it’s harder to spot, because from the outside it looks exactly like standing still. Mostly because it is, for long stretches. The difference is what’s happening underneath: one decision at a time, so gradual you can’t actually see the path forming until you’re already partway down it.

Standing still is uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like progress, and everything in you wants to grab the next visible direction just to feel like you’re moving again. But trust the stillness long enough, and something shifts. You notice you’re already closer to your own path than you thought, not because you found it somewhere out there, but because you finally stopped long enough to see it was already forming underneath you.

I eventually got off my own version of path two. Not through any dramatic reckoning, just an ordinary Tuesday where I finally looked at the life I was building and realized none of it was mine. I hadn’t chosen the job, hadn’t chosen the version of “fine” I was aiming for, hadn’t chosen most of what I was working so hard to become. Once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

The other three paths feel faster. They rarely are. Path one costs you the time spent waiting, however long that turns out to be. Path two costs you years spent becoming someone you weren’t. Path three costs you however long it takes to clean up whatever the explosion left behind. None of them show you the bill upfront.

The slow way is the opposite. It feels like it’s taking forever precisely because you can feel it happening in real time. The cost is visible from the start instead of arriving later, all at once, disguised as something else.