Why i almost didn’t believe in the collaborative process

by | Sep 26, 2016 | Family Justice Advocacy

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Why I Almost Didn’t Believe in the Collaborative Process

My own divorce was a Collaborative Divorce, meaning we agreed to stay out of court. That was the pitch at the time: family law in BC was changing, lawyers were newly required to tell clients about alternative dispute resolution, and everyone we talked to called Collaborative the new, better way to do this. New and better were persuasive enough that my husband and I decided to try it.

I hated it.

Divorce is stressful enough on its own, and reaching an agreement with someone you’re in conflict with is hard regardless of the process. But I hated the Collaborative Approach even more than I expected to hate the alternative, an all-out fight.

I’d spent my whole life avoiding conflict, the way a lot of people do. I also believed I was reasonable, someone who could handle almost anything calmly. What that meant was that I let things go, over and over, except I didn’t let them go. I buried them until I couldn’t anymore, and then I exploded. That was exactly where I was standing when I had to sit down and negotiate my own divorce.

The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the war most of us picture when we think “divorce”: courtrooms, revenge, a clear winner and a clear loser. At our first four-way meeting, with lawyers on both sides in the room with us, I nearly had a coronary. The pace felt glacial. The content felt like kindergarten, here’s why sharing matters, while I sat there thinking about how much two lawyers’ hourly rates were costing us to learn about manners.

I already knew what I wanted the outcome to be, so I sat through eight months of this until we got there. The agreement we landed on was close enough to what I’d wanted that I walked away thinking, well, that worked.

What I didn’t realize until much later was that I’d never actually understood what “Collaborative” meant, even after the whole process was supposedly done.

Looking back now, I know the professionals explained it clearly, at the start, throughout, and at the end. Something in me just wasn’t able to hear it. I’d spent forty years learning one way to handle conflict: avoid it until it became unavoidable, then fight to win. So instead of recognizing that we’d resolved things through an actually different method, I quietly filed the whole experience under my old framework. I avoided the separation as long as I could, then found a solution and forced it through, because underneath it all, I believed I was driving the process. I made the meetings happen. I made sure my ex did his part. I made sure the agreement got signed.

You can’t really learn a new way to handle conflict when you’re at the most emotional point of your life. I wasn’t calm or rational. I swung between sad and angry by the minute, sharing a house with someone I no longer wanted anything to do with, worried sick about my two young kids. I wasn’t in any state to absorb something new.

So while we technically used the Collaborative Approach, it only worked on the surface. We stayed out of court during the divorce. Afterward, once we were released from that structured process, we ended up in court anyway, still in conflict, having reverted fully to our old patterns the moment no one was holding the space for us anymore.

That’s true for a lot of people. Some people come into the Collaborative Process already wired for it, and it clicks immediately. The rest of us, trained our whole lives to do conflict differently, need more. We need to be told, repeatedly, what it actually means and how it works, because it’s a genuinely hard concept to absorb in the middle of emotional upheaval, against forty years of the opposite training.

I only really understood what Collaborative meant about a year after my divorce was finalized, once I’d started training to become a Collaborative professional myself.

Since then, working with people going through their own Collaborative Divorces, I’ve heard the exact words I once said: the meetings feel slow, nothing seems to be getting addressed, the process isn’t moving. Those words are a signal I’ve learned to sit up for. I have to remind myself how long it took me to understand this, and remember that the best thing I can do isn’t swoop in and solve their problem for them; it’s help them reach the same understanding I eventually found so that they can move forward on their own terms.

How do You Know When to Pull the Plug on Your Marriage?

by | Sep 13, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Two Fears That Almost Kept Me Married

When do you decide to give up on a marriage, actually call it quits, and ask for a divorce?

I ask because I honestly don’t know the answer. I never made that decision myself; my ex made it for both of us. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed until death do us part. I have a high tolerance for pain, and I’ve always preferred trying to fix things over walking away from them. I still want an answer, even though I’m slowly learning there isn’t a clean one, which is basically why I’m writing this at all. When do you actually call it quits?

Put another way: what’s actually stopping you from initiating a divorce, if part of you wants to?

From what I’ve seen, mostly fear. Two fears in particular tend to do the heaviest lifting: money and the kids.

Let’s take them head-on.

Fear One: You’ll Be Much Worse Off Financially

Being poor was one of my fears too. Combined, my husband and I could live comfortably in an expensive city on one income. Divorced, that math falls apart. I’d need a job, we’d need childcare, we’d need to split assets and fund two households instead of one. Both our standards of living would drop. That was a genuinely depressing thought, enough on its own to keep divorce off the table. I’d rather be unhappy and financially stable than happy and broke, or so I believed at the time.

My divorce happened anyway, and yes, my net worth dropped. My cash flow took a real hit. That brought real anxiety with it. I used to build monthly budgets just to confirm, yet again, that there wasn’t enough coming in to cover what was going out, which only fed the anxiety further, until I finally made the connection that stressing myself into a spiral wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

Eventually I realized I’d always managed, one way or another. I cut my spending, found ways to bring in more money, made decisions, and kept moving forward in a direction that matched what I wanted for my life. For some people that means earning more. For others, it means spending less. Either way, there’s usually a path through.

Three years out, I can say plainly: being happier on my own is worth far more than what the divorce cost me financially.

Fear Two: The Kids Will Suffer

I’d been the primary caregiver for our two kids, four and six at the time we separated. I genuinely couldn’t picture their dad managing them alone for half their lives. Surely they’d go unfed, unbathed, put to bed late, and laundry would pile up forever. And beyond the logistics: my kids wouldn’t be with me for half their lives. They were four and six. They needed their mother. I needed them. They were, in a lot of ways, my whole purpose.

To be clear, my kids wanted us to stay together. My youngest once cooked up a plan where I’d rent an apartment in the same building as his dad, so we could live down the hall from each other. Adjusting to only having one parent around at a time was hard on them at first. But they adjusted. Honestly, it wasn’t even that different from before; my ex and I had barely occupied the same room together for the two years leading up to our separation anyway. They still have to manage two different sets of house rules, switching gears twice a week, but that’s just life. We all have to manage shifting expectations across different parts of our lives, jobs, family, everything. Kids of divorce just get more practice at it earlier than most.

It was harder on us, the parents, I think. I missed my kids desperately for a full three years after the divorce; I have the blog posts to prove it. It took my mom asking me this past summer, while the kids were away for their two-week stretch with their dad, “Do you miss your kids?” for me to actually notice something had shifted. I said, “No, I don’t miss them,” and then really sat with what I’d just said. The old version of me would have felt like a traitor for saying that out loud, wondering what kind of mother doesn’t miss her kids. Instead, I recognized it for what it actually was: a real milestone, for me, for their dad, and for them.

It took three years to build a life that could actually make me happy while my kids were away, and three years to genuinely trust they’d be fine with their dad. What I’ve come to believe, in that time, is that kids do better with two parents who are both actually capable of caring for them. Yes, it takes more coordination, and the back-and-forth between households is tiring, sometimes a little painful. But now they have two parents who can feed them, get them to school, sign them up for activities, and arrange their own plans. Two parents genuinely involved in their lives. I probably still do more, if I’m honest, but their dad is doing far more than he ever did while we were together. If we’d stayed married, I’d likely still be doing everything, and he’d likely still be on the sidelines. Now I have my own life, and a life as a mom, both. Time for my own things, my own work, my own growth, alongside real trust that my kids are being cared for by someone who loves them. That’s a genuinely good outcome.

It took three years to get here, though. Three years to understand that their dad does love them, and that doing things differently than I would isn’t the same as doing them worse. It’s just different. How do you even judge what good parenting looks like? The best I’ve landed on: a good parent is someone who loves their kids and is genuinely trying to do right by them.

Three years out, the fears that kept me in my marriage turned out to be mostly unfounded. I’m grateful my ex worked through his own version of those same fears and finally ended things. The marriage had run its course. We were done. We’re better for being divorced.

No Hobbies

by | Jan 27, 2016 | Money

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No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.

Marriage Is a Credit Card

by | Dec 21, 2015 | Money

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Marriage Is a Credit Card

I’ve been getting some strong reminders lately about the importance of planning. Very strong.

The core lesson keeps repeating itself: skip the upfront planning on something important, and things can go badly wrong. Do a little work ahead of time instead, and life tends to go a lot more smoothly.

One place I don’t think enough planning happens is marriage. Plenty of wedding planning, sure, but not nearly enough marriage planning.

Here’s my evidence: ask anyone who’s been through a divorce, and they’ll likely agree that getting married is a walk in the park compared to getting divorced. Divorce is hard enough that some people just stay in unhappy marriages rather than face it. No escape plan, so they simply don’t leave.

A good comparison is credit cards and credit card debt.

Credit cards are easy to get, and a lot of fun if you haven’t thought much about what happens once the statement shows up. You get the card, you go shopping, and the first couple of months feel great. Then reality lands: wait, I have to pay this back? Plus interest? And if I don’t, I’ll be paying it off for decades?

At that point, getting out of the hole takes real, sustained effort. Getting into it was effortless.

Marriage works the same way. It was easy to get married when I was practicing, roughly a hundred dollars for the license, a few hundred more for someone to say the actual words that make it official. And then you’re married.

I hope you did some planning together about what the marriage would actually look like, and even more planning around what happens if it goes wrong. Because getting out is nowhere near as simple as getting in. You can’t just tear up the license.

You need a separation agreement, and those are hard to get precisely when you need them most. Once you and your spouse have reached the point of divorcing, you’re usually not getting along especially well, which makes agreeing on anything harder. So you hire help: a lawyer, a mediator, a counsellor, a financial planner, an accountant. Those professionals charge considerably more than the marriage commissioner did- several hundred dollars an hour, in my experience- and reaching an agreement could take a long time.

Or you skip all that and let the courts decide, representing yourself and leaving your future in the hands of a judge who’s never met you. Most people don’t take that gamble and hire a lawyer instead. A court divorce generally costs thousands more than a mediated or collaborative one.

The way around all of it is planning. Build a marriage agreement with a qualified professional before the wedding, not after things fall apart.

Yes, it costs money, and no, planning for a hypothetical future divorce isn’t remotely romantic.

But look at it this way: reaching a marriage agreement takes far fewer billable hours, because at that point you and your soon-to-be spouse are still on the same page. You’re about to get married, after all.

Not on the same page? Struggling to reach that agreement?

Then I have to ask: why are you getting married?

Step 9

by | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Step 9

Divorce is usually the end result of a fairly typical progression:

  1. You get married.
  2. You begin navigating married life together.
  3. You and your partner start facing real challenges.
  4. You realize you approach those challenges differently.
  5. You try to negotiate a way through it together.
  6. That negotiation fails, sometimes slowly, over a long stretch of time.
  7. One or both of you decide the marriage is over. By now you’re both emotionally exhausted.

Then comes the hard part. People often get stuck right at step 7. They know the marriage is done but have no idea what to actually do next. It can feel so daunting that some people just stay married anyway. Others hand it entirely to lawyers. Some try mediation or the Collaborative Approach. Others simply live apart while staying legally married.

At step 7, my ex and I tried a bit of everything. Lawyers, mediators, and eventually we landed on the Collaborative Approach, because we figured the obvious next step, step 8, had to be getting a separation agreement. You need one to get divorced, after all. We wanted to stay out of court, and Collaborative seemed like the best route there.

By this point in the process, both partners are usually running on empty, and neither one particularly wants to sit down and hash things out with the person they can barely stand at that moment. It’s a fair bet that if you’ve reached this stage, you dislike your spouse enough that working with them on anything feels unbearable. You couldn’t agree inside the marriage. Why would drafting its ending go any better?

Still, the separation agreement had lodged itself in both our heads as the obvious next milestone. We worked hard at it, nine months with our Collaborative team. I wanted that agreement at almost any cost, because once I knew we were done, I needed the whole thing sewn up and settled. My ex wanted the same. We both wanted a rulebook that would define how our new lives would work.

We got our agreement. Done, right?

Not even close. We had a document, but two very different understandings of what it actually said. We spent another three months arguing over its meaning and made almost no progress actually implementing any of it.

Every time we tried to work through a section, I’d get angry, and I know he did too. We kept hitting deadlock, and the conflict never really eased. Eventually we ended up in court over a single disputed section. We were supposed to be finished. Instead, here we were.

Turns out having the agreement didn’t mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.

I wasn’t done with my own anger, and I still couldn’t have a level conversation with him. Judging by his emails, he wasn’t done with his either.

Which brought me to a step nobody had listed: step 9, heal and let go.

That step took a long time, and it had plenty of sub-steps of its own. But now that I’m actually through it, our divorce finally feels done. Truly done.

Plenty of people had told me to do step 9 first, and at the time, I simply wasn’t able to. Looking back, I wonder if that order would have served us better. If we’d both been in a steadier emotional place, we might have actually heard each other, and the agreement we built together might have reflected something we both genuinely understood the same way.

I’m not sure it’s realistic for most people to fully heal before starting the separation agreement process. With hindsight, I’d probably choose a different order if I could do it again. But at the time, I wanted that agreement, whatever it cost me.

Where are you in the process? And what steps are you choosing to take next?