Why i almost didn’t believe in the collaborative process

by | Sep 26, 2016 | Advocacy

photo-1473772564351-202a22a93101

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.

How do You Know When to Pull the Plug on Your Marriage?

by | Sep 13, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

photo-1473773386757-42bbe7288351

The Two Fears That Almost Kept Me Married

When do you decide to give up on a marriage, actually call it quits, and ask for a divorce?

I ask because I honestly don’t know the answer. I never made that decision myself; my ex made it for both of us. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed until death do us part. I have a high tolerance for pain, and I’ve always preferred trying to fix things over walking away from them. I still want an answer, even though I’m slowly learning there isn’t a clean one, which is basically why I’m writing this at all. When do you actually call it quits?

Put another way: what’s actually stopping you from initiating a divorce, if part of you wants to?

From what I’ve seen, mostly fear. Two fears in particular tend to do the heaviest lifting: money and the kids.

Let’s take them head-on.

Fear One: You’ll Be Much Worse Off Financially

Being poor was one of my fears too. Combined, my husband and I could live comfortably in an expensive city on one income. Divorced, that math falls apart. I’d need a job, we’d need childcare, we’d need to split assets and fund two households instead of one. Both our standards of living would drop. That was a genuinely depressing thought, enough on its own to keep divorce off the table. I’d rather be unhappy and financially stable than happy and broke, or so I believed at the time.

My divorce happened anyway, and yes, my net worth dropped. My cash flow took a real hit. That brought real anxiety with it. I used to build monthly budgets just to confirm, yet again, that there wasn’t enough coming in to cover what was going out, which only fed the anxiety further, until I finally made the connection that stressing myself into a spiral wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

Eventually I realized I’d always managed, one way or another. I cut my spending, found ways to bring in more money, made decisions, and kept moving forward in a direction that matched what I wanted for my life. For some people that means earning more. For others, it means spending less. Either way, there’s usually a path through.

Three years out, I can say plainly: being happier on my own is worth far more than what the divorce cost me financially.

Fear Two: The Kids Will Suffer

I’d been the primary caregiver for our two kids, four and six at the time we separated. I genuinely couldn’t picture their dad managing them alone for half their lives. Surely they’d go unfed, unbathed, put to bed late, and laundry would pile up forever. And beyond the logistics: my kids wouldn’t be with me for half their lives. They were four and six. They needed their mother. I needed them. They were, in a lot of ways, my whole purpose.

To be clear, my kids wanted us to stay together. My youngest once cooked up a plan where I’d rent an apartment in the same building as his dad, so we could live down the hall from each other. Adjusting to only having one parent around at a time was hard on them at first. But they adjusted. Honestly, it wasn’t even that different from before; my ex and I had barely occupied the same room together for the two years leading up to our separation anyway. They still have to manage two different sets of house rules, switching gears twice a week, but that’s just life. We all have to manage shifting expectations across different parts of our lives, jobs, family, everything. Kids of divorce just get more practice at it earlier than most.

It was harder on us, the parents, I think. I missed my kids desperately for a full three years after the divorce; I have the blog posts to prove it. It took my mom asking me this past summer, while the kids were away for their two-week stretch with their dad, “Do you miss your kids?” for me to actually notice something had shifted. I said, “No, I don’t miss them,” and then really sat with what I’d just said. The old version of me would have felt like a traitor for saying that out loud, wondering what kind of mother doesn’t miss her kids. Instead, I recognized it for what it actually was: a real milestone, for me, for their dad, and for them.

It took three years to build a life that could actually make me happy while my kids were away, and three years to genuinely trust they’d be fine with their dad. What I’ve come to believe, in that time, is that kids do better with two parents who are both actually capable of caring for them. Yes, it takes more coordination, and the back-and-forth between households is tiring, sometimes a little painful. But now they have two parents who can feed them, get them to school, sign them up for activities, and arrange their own plans. Two parents genuinely involved in their lives. I probably still do more, if I’m honest, but their dad is doing far more than he ever did while we were together. If we’d stayed married, I’d likely still be doing everything, and he’d likely still be on the sidelines. Now I have my own life, and a life as a mom, both. Time for my own things, my own work, my own growth, alongside real trust that my kids are being cared for by someone who loves them. That’s a genuinely good outcome.

It took three years to get here, though. Three years to understand that their dad does love them, and that doing things differently than I would isn’t the same as doing them worse. It’s just different. How do you even judge what good parenting looks like? The best I’ve landed on: a good parent is someone who loves their kids and is genuinely trying to do right by them.

Three years out, the fears that kept me in my marriage turned out to be mostly unfounded. I’m grateful my ex worked through his own version of those same fears and finally ended things. The marriage had run its course. We were done. We’re better for being divorced.

The Blame Game

by | Jun 15, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

Blame and Happiness

I went to a great workshop a few weeks ago put on by Dr. Sue Goldswain and John Boland. If you’re ever in the market for a marriage counsellor, they’re worth looking into.

One thing that stuck with me: it takes two people to build a relationship, and two people to take one down. If a marriage ends in divorce, both people played some part in that.

It was a relief to hear it wasn’t entirely on me.

It got me thinking, though. I hear a lot of different versions of how a marriage failed or is failing, and I’ve noticed something consistent: the person doing more of the blaming tends to be the one hurting more.

I know this because I lived it. I hated my ex when we first separated, and I was miserable. How could I have married someone so horrible? As the blame slowly faded, it actually turned into something closer to gratitude, and I got noticeably happier along the way.

How do you feel about your own relationship right now? If you’re doing a lot of blaming, is it actually fixing anything?

Same Money, Different Story

by | Feb 24, 2016 | Money

photo-1415226581130-91cb7f52f078

Same Money, Different Story

Retirement takes up a lot of space in our collective consciousness. It’s what we’re all supposedly saving for, and it’s especially loaded right now, when so many people struggle to get by while working full-time.

How are we supposed to save for retirement when we can barely manage the present? Maybe we should all give up. Who needs savings anyway?

That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one.

Interestingly, plenty of people keep saving anyway. What story are they telling themselves? Maybe they’ve noticed how many impoverished, vulnerable seniors are already out there, and that’s motivation enough. Maybe they still have hope for how things will go. Maybe they’re just hedging their bets.

Whatever story you’re telling yourself about saving right now is quietly shaping how you actually live and spend.

I first noticed how much these stories matter through my volunteer work with the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program. In one year alone, I helped file forty-four returns for low-income seniors, and the highest earner among them made $28,000. During tax season, the line at the Seniors’ Centre wraps around the block. The cutoff to qualify for free filing is earning under thirty thousand dollars a year, and even that’s generous relative to what most people in that line actually bring in. Between Old Age Security and a maxed-out CPP contribution history, someone with no other savings tops out around twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That’s a lot of seniors living on very little, each carrying a different story about how they got there.

One woman I helped had lost her husband years earlier, and with him, the financial security she’d expected to carry her through old age. She’d never worked outside the home. What little she had left, she’d since lent to family, and that money hadn’t come back to her. Every time I saw her, that loss came up again, clearly still the loop playing in her head. And yet she was sharp, put-together, moved quickly for her age, lived somewhere lovely, and had grandchildren who visited. None of that seemed to register next to the story she was telling herself. I could see the worry sitting right on her face.

Another man I helped, in the same building, offered me tea while I worked through his return. We talked about music, hobbies, his dog, who he still tried to walk daily even though walking had gotten harder. He seemed genuinely upbeat.

Financially, there was no real difference between them. Same fixed, minimal means, same basic constraints. But they were living in two completely different stories.

We all find our own way of coping with whatever we’re handed. How we manage it, and the story we tell ourselves about it, shapes how the present actually feels, and how the future unfolds from there.

Most of us will eventually retire, and eventually stop being able to earn. It’s worth planning for. If you want to know where I personally land on it, I’m solidly in the hedging-my-bets camp. It’s a lot easier to stay hopeful when you feel like you have some actual control over your own situation.

The Story I told myself about money

by | Feb 10, 2016 | Money

photo-1423598885756-9b4b0fdcb934

The Story I Told Myself About Money

The stories that play in our heads usually get planted there by whatever’s happening in the world around us as we grow up. We absorb them from parents, friends, and the wider culture, and depending on how loud and constant they are, we tend to adopt them as fact.

Growing up, the story in our house was: be careful with money, save for the rainy day that’s definitely coming. Good luck doesn’t last, and you’d better be ready when it runs out. That story wasn’t unique to my family. Most of our parents had grown up under parents shaped by war and depression, and they’d had the same story drilled into them. They passed it down.

Everyone interprets an inherited story differently. Some people hear “good luck can’t last” and decide to spend freely, so there’s nothing left to lose when the bad day comes. I went the other way. Every purchase became an internal debate: do I need this, or should I save it for the day I can’t earn anything and end up destitute? The rainy day always won. So I mostly just stopped spending.

The only exception was spending money with someone else who was operating from a different story than mine. As a lifelong people-pleaser, I weighted other people’s arguments more heavily than my own; if someone told me it was fine to buy the thing, I’d buy it, then spend the rest of the day quietly justifying it to myself, wrapped in guilt.

Sometime in my thirties, I noticed how extreme this had gotten and dialled it back a bit. But the core belief that ruin was coming eventually never left. Then I got married, had kids, and my ability to save took a real hit. I worried about money constantly. It was exhausting.

Then I got divorced.

And there it was: proof. My story had finally been confirmed.

Starting over after divorce is hard enough. Starting over while genuinely believing the world has ended and you’ll never see financial stability again is a different level of hard. The day I’d spent my whole life bracing for had finally arrived. I was going to be financially unstable forever. That’s a difficult belief to build a life on. I tried to limit the damage by taking no risks at all, hoarding whatever savings I had left and making them last until I died.

Then I started noticing other people telling themselves different stories. One that fascinated me: if you run out of money, you go find a way to make more. Really? That was allowed?

Another was the gratitude story: friends who felt genuinely lucky to live where they lived and have the work they had, who seemed to move through life with more actual joy because of it.

Slowly, I noticed something else too. Doomsday hadn’t come. I hadn’t become destitute. I had only believed I would. That belief was never true; it had just been busy manufacturing my reality anyway.

So what did the story actually do for me? It helped me save, and I’m genuinely grateful I came out of my divorce with some financial stability because of it. But did I need the guilt and buyer’s remorse that came bundled in with the saving? Honestly, no. I could have saved just as well without any of that extra weight. Pay yourself first; that’s really all it takes. I did that automatically every month. The guilt over everything I spent afterward wasn’t doing anything useful. It was just the cost of believing a story I’d never actually tested.

Do you have a story about money running in the background of your own head? What is it actually doing to how you live?