The Truth About Children and Divorce: Dealing with the Emotions So You and Your Children Can Thrive by Emery Robert

Author:Emery, Robert [Emery, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2006-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

No Pain, No Gain

The idea of negotiating the legal details of your divorce with your ex probably makes you feel angry, frightened, sad, hopeful, guilty, unsettled, or all of these feelings at once. The idea of actually reaching an agreement surely provokes strong feelings, too. You may be afraid about agreeing to something that might be unfair, may not work, and cannot be changed. Depending upon whether you were the leaver or the left, the thought of reaching an agreement may make you feel relieved about the prospect of ending your legal negotiations—or despondent about the prospect of ending your marriage.

Despite the potential benefits of cooperating, all these feelings may drive you toward a more adversarial approach. As with Cindy and Scott, your raw emotions may want you to scream at your ex, “I’ll see you in court!” Or maybe you just do not want to deal with the negotiations because you are afraid of making a mistake. Or maybe you do not want to sit down at the table with your ex because he or she still does not get it about your feelings. Maybe you are devastated about ending your marriage while your ex seems only too happy to be wrapping up the legal details. Or maybe you want to do business—finally—and your ex keeps dragging his feet and bringing up the past.

I need to be honest with you, and you need to be honest with yourself. For you, and for your ex, too, negotiating more cooperatively is probably going to be harder emotionally, not easier, than a more adversarial approach in the short run. Negotiating cooperatively goes against the grain of your grief. Working cooperatively with your ex does not let you settle on the anger that protects you from your hurt, the anger that can give you the distance and help you to heal.

Negotiating cooperatively forces you to deal with your ex, and doing this is likely to kick up a lot of emotional stuff for you. Some of the stuff will be hurt, some will be anger, some will be guilt, and some will be sadness. Ambivalence is another feeling that negotiating cooperatively is likely to bring up. If you can work out a settlement cooperatively and work together for your kids, you may grow more uncertain about whether or not you really want to end your relationship. After all, you may wonder, if we can work this out, why couldn’t we have saved our marriage?

In other words, negotiating cooperatively may temporarily impede your moving forward in your grief. It may raise old questions and old feelings, even old hopes and dreams, that you thought you had left behind. Even after a year or more of negotiating, as you’re about to sign off on a final agreement, you might find yourself asking, “Should we really be doing this?” In fact, this powerful underlying feeling may cause you or your ex to find something wrong with the agreement, not because there really is anything wrong, but so you can put off making your settlement (and your divorce) final.

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