Extortion, By any other name

by | Nov 19, 2023 | Advocacy

Extortion, By Another Name

Systems are insidious. They keep us trapped even when we know better. How do we escape one? I don’t know. I’m part of this one. It surrounds me; I can’t elude it, and I’m forced to be complicit.

The family justice system is one of those systems. It works the same way extortion works, and my own divorce is where I first recognized it.

The family justice system forced me to choose between two evils: agree to shared parenting, or have it forced on me through the courts anyway. If I hadn’t agreed, my former spouse could have gone to court and gotten the same result. Shared parenting is the system’s default answer to nearly every parenting dispute, and I’d have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and deepened conflict in my family to get the exact outcome I could have agreed to. So I capitulated, all the while knowing what my family actually needed was mental health and emotional support, not a court order.

I met with a group of moms this past weekend, all currently navigating their own separations. One woman was new to it, still believing she’d be awarded primary custody. Her soon-to-be ex had never really parented their young children; he travels extensively for work. The other moms, further down this road, laughed wistfully. “Oh, he’ll get fifty-fifty. The only thing that stops fifty-fifty is if your co-parent’s in jail.”

A lawyer in the room and I both told her the best thing she could do for her kids was to stay out of court. And the only way to do that was to agree to fifty-fifty parenting anyway. That’s the extortion, right there, stated plainly by the people meant to be helping her.

Extortion has kept me complicit. It’s kept me quiet.

Every decision I’ve made about my own children has been the lesser of two evils, and that’s the only kind of decision this system leaves room for.

It carries into my work too. I help clients divide their finances, or they go to court; those are the only two options the system gives them. Dividing the money doesn’t resolve what’s actually wrong. Their financial and emotional pain continues long after the paperwork is signed, because the real problem was never really about the money. It doesn’t go away until the underlying conflict does, and financial work alone was never built to touch that.

I’ve kept doing this work anyway, because I think about my clients’ children. If I stood my ground and said, no, you need mental health support before financial planning, they’d go to court instead, and their kids would be worse off for it. That’s the system finding one more way to extort compliance, this time from me. And underneath that, I have my own kids to support financially, which is its own quieter form of the same pressure.

But there’s a point where staying quiet starts costing more than it saves. It wears a person down from the inside.

So I’m done staying quiet.

The current family justice system in BC perpetuates trauma at every level, in children, in parents, in the professionals working inside it. It has to change.

A push is underway to transform the system. It’s not enough. The people doing that work are doing it in their spare time, and there is no spare time, not when you’re also trying to run a practice, raise kids, or hold your own life together. The collective applies for grants and receives laughably small amounts, twenty thousand dollars here and there, which is roughly the cost of a single day in court for one family.

I’m calling on the BC government to properly fund the family justice system: real money directed at keeping families out of the courts and into the mental health and parenting support they actually need. The people already doing this transformation work have the knowledge and the will to fix this. What they don’t have is the funding to do it at the scale the problem demands.

Why i almost didn’t believe in the collaborative process

by | Sep 26, 2016 | Advocacy

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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.

Divorcing Better

by | Nov 5, 2015 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

Divorcing Better

When I was freshly separated, I was under terrible stress and in extreme emotional pain. My days were consumed with anger and sadness, and I remember wondering if anything could be worse than going through a divorce.

According to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, death of a spouse tops the list as the most stressful known event, followed closely by divorce. Reading further, you can build a stress score by adding up all the significant events that have happened to you within a year. If you’re going through or recently went through a divorce, here’s what adds up:

Divorce, 73. Separation, 65. Change in financial state, 38. Change to a different line of work, which often comes bundled with divorce, 36. Trouble with in-laws, 29. Change in living conditions, 25. Change in social activities, 18. Change in sleeping habits, 16.

And that’s before counting all the other stressors that tend to show up alongside divorce. By this point your total score is already around 300. That puts you at real risk of illness. I’d never actually added mine up before writing this, but that number speaks for itself.

Everyone told me I’d get through it eventually, and life would get better, and they were right. It did get better. But it took real time, two to three years of living with above-average stress. And being a mom, I passed some of that stress along to my kids. I know their dad, dealing with his own stress, did the same. Nobody wins in that situation.

So how could it be better?

I’ve been trying to figure that out. My first idea was that marriage should just be a lot harder to enter into, maybe banned outright. That’s obviously not happening, and I decided I didn’t want to be everyone’s dream-killer. These days when someone tells me they’re getting engaged, I just smile and say congratulations.

Instead, I decided to put my energy into helping people divorce better. If enough people start divorcing better, maybe the stress that comes bundled with divorce starts to drop across the board too.

So what does divorcing better actually look like?

Learn how to do conflict properly. Doing conflict badly is probably what got you to divorce in the first place, and continuing to do it badly is exactly what makes the divorce itself so brutal.

This isn’t a quick fix. We’ve spent our whole lives learning our own particular way of handling conflict, and deciding to change doesn’t undo that overnight. It takes real work and real practice.

You’ll likely need a support system built specifically to help you do conflict the right way. Don’t hire pitbull lawyers who thrive on court and war. Hire people who will support both you and your ex as you each figure out a more positive path forward, now that you’ve decided to part ways. Hire people who will help you build the tools you’ll actually need to thrive afterward.

Spend your divorce dollars and energy wisely. Don’t put them toward support that pulls you further from a better life. Put them toward whatever actually moves you closer to living with hope.