What Members of a Divorcing Couple Really Want From One Another

I have repeatedly witnessed a hidden and powerful currency in one party’s willingness to acknowledge the other’s emotional reality. A mediated divorce negotiation can feel like an impasse with one party not willing to yield on a financial point, and then, if an acknowledgement of an emotional nature occurs, the other party’s seeming rock solid unwillingness to concede a financial issue can suddenly and miraculously evaporate, to the astonishment of the couple, and including, sometimes, me.  In other words, if one party can become willing to offer an undefended expression to the other of how he or she may have gone unconscious to a behavior that had real consequence to the other, this can create a stunning breakthrough in the financial negotiations. Moreover, the gesture of conceding the emotional point costs nothing financially to the party doing so.

An example of same can be something like, “I really can appreciate how it could feel to you that I did not include you in financial decisions, that this could have made you feel unimportant, dismissed or unintelligent, and that you could have harbored understandable resentments toward me. I am sorry.”

The biggest challenge to bringing a couple to see the value of this hidden currency is an understanding of how guilt operates covertly.

Packed away in every withholding is a belief that our unconscious and unloving behavior makes us bad, and deserving of punishment, and that any such acknowledgement would expose one to more judgment by the other, and then amplify the consequent painful judgement of self. Therefore, a party’s non-conceding of a point of emotional consequence to the other is adhered to with a strength of conviction that only makes the other party more unyielding on the financial matters.

Helping a couple see the potentially transformative currency of this emotional humility is truly a fine, inexact art – a game changing offering when it is received. It requires a verbal and subliminal empathetic communication of the first order — that, at least on a conscious level, no one really wants to inflict pain on another, and yet we all do this all the time. It does not come from our better selves, and that behaving from our darker selves does not make us bad, it makes us human.

Most importantly, however, in order to maximize a couple’s receptivity and to lower their defenses, it must be communicated to the couple that: “I, the mediator, am here for you, without judgement, that both of you are safe, which also implies that both of you must be good, and deserving of kindness, and that neither of you deserves to be punished, that defenses are not needed, not here, in this judgment free sanctuary”.  As such I communicate: “I see through your understandable fears, even if you don’t, and that I know both of you are worthy, no matter what you did or failed to do!” It is in this climate that a party can much more likely consider any acknowledgement of his or her contribution to the series of painful happenings that led them to the place of divorce. Just as attack and defense results in more of the same in another, so does this polar opposite invite a softening, a reminding to each of what is true underneath the chaos. This paves the way for an organic falling into place of a more satisfactory financial outcome for each.

Attorney Michael L. Lavender has been practicing divorce mediation on Cape Cod, Massachusetts since 1991. He can be reached at 508 362-1189, ml@capemediation.com and Capecodmediation.com.

Categorised in: Affordable divorce, Divorce, Divorce Mediation

This post was written by Michael