Many divorce clients want their attorney to fight for them. That can mean a lot of things. In my experience what most people really want is an attorney that will help them obtain the best possible outcome. “Fight” is just an easy one-word way of saying that.
But, if your attorney is fighting for you, they have to fight against something. The question then becomes: What are you fighting against? How do you define your “enemy”?
In the traditional, adversarial, litigation based divorce process the enemy is typically defined as your spouse. Therefore, you fight your spouse. Your time, money, energy and emotion are spent fighting your spouse. And, your spouse’s time, money, energy and emotion are spent fighting you. (And what happens to the kids in the midst of all that fighting?)
The adversarial way of handling a divorce assumes that dumping all of these resources into fighting each other will produce a “fair” result. And, fair generally means equally bad for both of you. In fact, divorce attorneys love to say, “A good result is one that everybody is equally unhappy with.”
In contrast, the Collaborative Divorce Process does not make your spouse the enemy. Instead, for each spouse, the enemy is the set of challenges and practical issues that can make divorce so difficult for you and your family.
Instead of using your resources to fight against the mother or father of your children, collaborative divorces use the combined resources of both spouses to fight against the practical problems that frequently come with divorce. These issues (and others) are most often the real enemies to a divorcing couple:
- Insufficient money to support two households
- Emotions that derail effective decision making
- Practical difficulties in co-parenting children from two households
- Differing parenting styles in two households
- Complicated valuation issues for assets or debts
- Overwhelming debt that cripples each party financially
- Blending new relationships into the family
- Paying for college and meeting financial needs of family
- Planning for retirement while meeting financial needs of family
The adversarial process most often produces a result that is equally bad for each party without solving any of these problems.
The Collaborative Process most often produces a result that is beneficial for both parties (and their kids) and solves many, if not all, of the issues in that list.
In divorce, the reality is that the enemy is not really your spouse; the enemy is the set of problems that come with divorcing your spouse. So, it makes sense to choose a process that recognizes the real enemy and focuses your resources on defeating those issues, instead of trying to defeat each other. Collaborative Divorce is that process.
(Special thanks to Michael Kothakota of Wolfbridge Financial, a combat veteran, for introducing the concept of “defining the enemy” to me.)
