Why I Almost Didn’t Believe in the Collaborative Process

My own divorce was a Collaborative Divorce, meaning we agreed to stay out of court. That was the pitch at the time: family law in BC was changing, lawyers were newly required to tell clients about alternative dispute resolution, and everyone we talked to called Collaborative the new, better way to do this. New and better were persuasive enough that my husband and I decided to try it.

I hated it.

Divorce is stressful enough on its own, and reaching an agreement with someone you’re in conflict with is hard regardless of the process. But I hated the Collaborative Approach even more than I expected to hate the alternative, an all-out fight.

I’d spent my whole life avoiding conflict, the way a lot of people do. I also believed I was reasonable, someone who could handle almost anything calmly. What that meant was that I let things go, over and over, except I didn’t let them go. I buried them until I couldn’t anymore, and then I exploded. That was exactly where I was standing when I had to sit down and negotiate my own divorce.

The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the war most of us picture when we think “divorce”: courtrooms, revenge, a clear winner and a clear loser. At our first four-way meeting, with lawyers on both sides in the room with us, I nearly had a coronary. The pace felt glacial. The content felt like kindergarten, here’s why sharing matters, while I sat there thinking about how much two lawyers’ hourly rates were costing us to learn about manners.

I already knew what I wanted the outcome to be, so I sat through eight months of this until we got there. The agreement we landed on was close enough to what I’d wanted that I walked away thinking, well, that worked.

What I didn’t realize until much later was that I’d never actually understood what “Collaborative” meant, even after the whole process was supposedly done.

Looking back now, I know the professionals explained it clearly, at the start, throughout, and at the end. Something in me just wasn’t able to hear it. I’d spent forty years learning one way to handle conflict: avoid it until it became unavoidable, then fight to win. So instead of recognizing that we’d resolved things through an actually different method, I quietly filed the whole experience under my old framework. I avoided the separation as long as I could, then found a solution and forced it through, because underneath it all, I believed I was driving the process. I made the meetings happen. I made sure my ex did his part. I made sure the agreement got signed.

You can’t really learn a new way to handle conflict when you’re at the most emotional point of your life. I wasn’t calm or rational. I swung between sad and angry by the minute, sharing a house with someone I no longer wanted anything to do with, worried sick about my two young kids. I wasn’t in any state to absorb something new.

So while we technically used the Collaborative Approach, it only worked on the surface. We stayed out of court during the divorce. Afterward, once we were released from that structured process, we ended up in court anyway, still in conflict, having reverted fully to our old patterns the moment no one was holding the space for us anymore.

That’s true for a lot of people. Some people come into the Collaborative Process already wired for it, and it clicks immediately. The rest of us, trained our whole lives to do conflict differently, need more. We need to be told, repeatedly, what it actually means and how it works, because it’s a genuinely hard concept to absorb in the middle of emotional upheaval, against forty years of the opposite training.

I only really understood what Collaborative meant about a year after my divorce was finalized, once I’d started training to become a Collaborative professional myself.

Since then, working with people going through their own Collaborative Divorces, I’ve heard the exact words I once said: the meetings feel slow, nothing seems to be getting addressed, the process isn’t moving. Those words are a signal I’ve learned to sit up for. I have to remind myself how long it took me to understand this, and remember that the best thing I can do isn’t swoop in and solve their problem for them; it’s help them reach the same understanding I eventually found so that they can move forward on their own terms.