How Collaborative Divorce Can Help Couples Who Are “Stuck”

If you’re feeling “stuck” in your marriage (or in your divorce proceedings), collaborative divorce can help you. 

We ran across an interesting article recently from the folks at the Tennessee Collaborative Divorce Blog about couples who are “stuck” and have come to begrudgingly accept their own “stuck stories.” These couples, according to the article, have a narrative in which they’re out of sync, unable to communicate, and unable to reconcile their differences. If these couples choose to divorce in a courtroom, they’re likely to have a contentious battle, and if they have children, the courtroom will send them on a path of difficult co-parenting. If they try to negotiate a divorce, there’s the potential for a couple with “stuck stories” to find themselves “stuck” in the process of trying to hammer out an agreement.

The article goes on to talk about how collaborative divorce gives couples a way to get unstuck, to arrive at a divorce agreement, and to learn how to better communicate with each other. For those who will be co-parenting after divorce, the ability to communicate with each other is obviously important.

Here’s the key part of the article that talks about that:

One of the ways Collaborative Divorce can be an effective process is through the divorce professionals working with the parties to help them create a different story for themselves on the other side of the divorce.  Instead of spending so much time and energy ruminating on the past and all of the things that were wrong, Collaborative Divorce actively encourages forward thinking, focusing on the future and how that unformed future can be better than the not-so-great past.

For example, the coach [or mental health professional, as Texas Collaborative Divorce professionals call it] can work with the parties to help them communicate differently (which often means communicating much less, at least at first) as an important foundational reboot for their relationship.  If the parties have children together, this ability to communicate more effectively after the divorce will not only help their children for the obvious reasons, but it will also reduce the parents’ own stress around being in constant conflict with their children’s other parent.  Parties often find they have a lot more internal capacity to parent their children well when they are not being depleted by the unhelpful dynamics of the marriage on a day to day basis.  So Collaborative Divorce sometimes helps clients see that they are actually better parents (and are happier generally) when they are co-parenting in different homes.

For couples who feel stuck, this guide on our website is helpful in getting started. Texas Collaborative Divorce lawyers will be able to bring a mental health professional to the team to help facilitate discussions, no matter how difficult they might be. Collaborative divorce involves a team trying to get the couple to an acceptable settlement, all working together rather than against each other to help the couple get to the other side of a divorce.