Breaking Up Without Breaking Down: Preserving Your Health, Your Wealth and Your Family

There are many ways couples can end up in court or in adversarial negotiations, but there are just as many ways to avoid ending up that way. Sometimes the issues that cause people to go to court look large, like where the children will live or who will get the house, and sometimes they can look small but feel huge. What all family court cases have in common is intense emotion; emotion that is disguised as an argument about ‘facts’, because you can’t really have an argument about emotion in a court, can you?
Where couples are embroiled in the court system for years, where disputes grow so bitter that former spouses cannot even be in the same room, where the legal battle costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and where both adult children and younger children are hurt by what’s gone on between their parents.
Ultimately, a bad divorce hurts everyone in the family, the extended family and the friendship circle.
Your children could get caught in the middle of arguments, and find themselves in the role of messenger or peacekeeper. They may withdraw from the pain of family life by whatever means they have, through silence, spending a lot of time elsewhere, travel or moving out. They may decide to assert themselves as much as possible, and sometimes retreat into substance abuse or a strong flirtation with ‘the wrong crowd’.