“I hope we can be friends.” This is not an uncommon wish of one or both people when going through a divorce. Sometimes, however, there is a lot of pain and anguish going on for at least one of them and significant negative energy between the couple. “How did we get like this?” is another frequent question I hear in my practice. So how do we answer the question and can you become friends? It is helpful to think about how relationships develop in order to answer the question. I heard Isolina Ricci, speak to a group of mental health professionals and attorneys about her research around divorce and families a couple years ago. She introduced a very helpful concept that I often share with clients to help them understand whether and how they can be friends.
When we meet people, we start with a business relationship. We use more formal language, make few assumptions, make clear agreements, have minimal expectations and are not very attached to or invested in the relationship. Ricci notes that we are private, explicit, cool and reserved. As we get to know someone and move to friendship, we are less formal, begin to make assumptions and have expectations and are therefore more invested in the relationship. When the relationship becomes intimate, we become very informal with each other, act based on assumptions formed from past experiences with the individual, give the benefit of the doubt, and are very invested in the relationship. Ricci notes that we are vulnerable, implicit, hot and intense. However, when we reach the point of divorce, the relationship has moved from one of positive intimacy to negative intimacy. We move from the positive qualities of intimacy to the opposite of those qualities, (i.e., shared to abused confidences, loyalty and trust to disloyalty and distrust, positive assumptions to negative assumptions, benefit-of-doubt to suspicion and blame, for example). What we need to realize is that when we are in a place of negative intimacy, we cannot simply go back to friendship. In order to become friends, we need to move from negative intimacy back to the business relationship and then rebuild to friendship from there. Ricci calls this the detox-negative-intimacy, where we reset to a business-like relationship. In the Collaborative process, we actually help people learn how to step back to the business relationship by modeling respectful communication, not make assumptions but ask questions to clarify, strive to be trustworthy, make clear agreements, create healthy boundaries relating to times and means of communication, and sticking to facts rather than being emotionally reactive. And this is very hard work! But, by making the intentional effort to go back to a business relationship, we can start rebuilding trust by honoring agreements, getting rid of unproductive assumptions by asking clarifying questions, and redeveloping a give-and-take relationship. Over time, it is possible to create a business like friendly relationship.- Distributive bargaining, also known as “win-lose,” “zero-sum,” and “divide-the-pie” negotiation, assumes that resources are fixed and that future relationship between the parties is unimportant. Everyday examples include buying a house or car.
- Integrative bargaining, also known as “win-win,” “interest-based,” and “expand-the-pie” negotiation, can lead to better outcomes when issues are complex and the parties value their future relationship.
I had a familiar conversation recently, this time on the golf course. As with life, golf is both precise and random: precise because there are exactly 18 holes to play, and random because a golfer never quite knows how the ball will fly from time to time nor with whom the starter will pair you up to play. We were paired with two great golfers who both happened to be named Sean.
Sean #1 asked what I did for a living. I gave him my elevator speech about being a Neutral Child Specialist in Collaborative Team Practice and he said, “Wow, that sounds awesome…..it must be really hard work.” My response is always that sometimes it’s hard work, but mostly it’s very rewarding to help families make the difficult transition from married to unmarried with less acrimony and stress for kids. Sean got a faraway look in his eyes and said, “I can sure see that.”
What he was seeing in his mind’s eye, I can only imagine. But often I will hear from young adults with whom I share my work that they wished Collaborative Team Practice had been available to their family when their parents were getting divorced. I have yet to meet anyone who said, “Well, I for one am very grateful that my parents’ divorce was highly acrimonious and adversarial because it was so character-building for me.”
We can’t pretend that ending a marriage will be a pain-free proposition, especially if there are children involved. Divorce is a life crisis for all family members. Collaborative Team Practice is designed to help keep the crisis of divorce from ever becoming a trauma for a child, because there is a profound difference how each impacts the child’s resilience and sense of hope.
If you are a golfer, here’s another way to think about it. Collaborative Team Practice is both precise and random: precise because there is a structured, supportive format for the process and random because of unique family circumstances and unpredictable challenges that arise from time to time. But the pairing of a family with a Collaborative team has great potential value. Collaborative Team Practice helps parents keep their eye on the ball and the ball on the fairway, away from hazards and deep rough where it could easily get lost.
I was reminded of this recently when a client I represented in a Collaborative divorce five years ago sent me a note. I have always remembered him because of the great shift in his attitude toward his wife by the time the case was over. When we began his divorce, he stated in an early meeting that the couple’s property should be divided in his favor, since he had always earned more than his wife (which is NOT the way the law looks at it). The statement was not well-received, either by his wife OR her attorney.
The couple had been married more than 30 years. As the case drew to a close, it became obvious that her job at a prominent Minnesota corporation, her debt-free house, and the even division of their property and substantial retirement assets would provide for her just fine. The only question left was spousal maintenance. We often see a spouse who doesn’t need financial assistance waiving maintenance—in fact, often the couple mutually agree to take jurisdiction over maintenance away from the court altogether, for all time. When I asked whether she had given any thought to waiving maintenance, she glanced at her veteran lawyer, then shyly said she would waive it. In the next instant, we were all stunned to hear my nuts-and-bolts, cut-and-dried, professional engineer client say, in a voice of genuine warmth, “I don’t think you should do that. You never know. You might need it some day.”
Approaching the end of their marriage as a family-centered problem-solving exercise, rather than a combat, allowed this wife to give up a claim I would have assumed she would keep. And it allowed her husband to decline her offer, in the interest of her potential long-term welfare, a gesture no one would have predicted. Their mutual trust of each other, reaffirmed during their weeks of working together, ultimately allowed them both to make decisions that considered each other’s welfare as much as their own.