Negotiation and Contracts is Basically More of the Same
Many counselors are taught to use negotiation skills and contracts to help resolve conflicts. While these methods sometimes help, their benefit is often short-term. Using contracts and negotiation tends to civilize the power struggle for a period of time — until those very contracts become another expression of the basic power struggle. Focusing on ‘tit for tat’ or on the content of the issues (money, children, sex, etc.) is at best a band-aid, and at worst, in contractual form fuel for the fire. Therapy in which each partner tells their story to the therapist with the therapist acting as a kind of mediator also tends to have short-term benefits. Long after a couple leaves a courtroom or a therapist’s office, they continue to interact with each other and their children. Court orders, contracts or agreements, in or outside of therapy set parameters for the power struggle, but do not give couples the tools to move through and beyond it. Learning those skills is an important key to the parents’ ‘best interest’ and especially, to that of their children.
Does Counseling Help?
How can attorneys, mediators, and judges, then, assist a couple in repairing their relationship in order to either stay together and create a fulfilling relationship for both, or, at least, to communicate and work together after a divorce for the best interest of their children? Legal professionals often refer or order parents to marriage counseling, but many times, little seems to change. The same dynamics of conflict and discord continue throughout the legal process and long after agreements and orders are made. Successful marriage counseling teaches the couple practical skills to effectively move beyond the power struggle in their relationship and to heal the causes of that power struggle.
Learn Skills that Help You Step Out of the Power Struggle
Over the past 20 years, I have learned that teaching couples concrete, practical, skills that help them use frustration and conflict as an opportunity for growth and healing for both partners, instead of a weapon for more wounding, results in long-term improvement in the relationship. Instead of the tools remaining in the hands of a therapist, they are taught to and practiced by the couple. In this way, couples can move from automatically reacting to each other in ways that are hurtful or hostile, to intentional, safe, and healing communication and behavior.
What if the Decision to Divorce is Already Final?
If a couple remains firm in their decision to divorce, the work I do with couples offers the tools to communicate and interact in ways that are healthy for both parents and their children during and after the divorce. It also provides a good-bye process that helps create an emotional closure for both parties. A legal document does not mean that a couple is divorced on an emotional level, particularly when one or both parties is ambivalent about the divorce. One study found that after ten and even fifteen years after divorce, close to half of the men and women had not given up the hopes and disappointments attached to their previous marriage. Half of the women and one third of the men still felt intensely angry with their former spouse ten years after their divorce.
