I completed my Divorce Mediation Training last week. I’m now qualified to empower couples toward productive conversation about the terms of their divorce. Yay! The experience was interesting. It was quite unlike Basic Mediation Training, which left me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. My Basic Mediation class was full of social workers, therapists and managers who were looking for new ways to approach conflict. In Family Mediation Training, I was the only participant who was not an attorney. I started out feeling rather uncomfortable, to say the least. On Day One, a woman asked our instructor, “What business does a […]
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What About the Children?
“I’m really upset about it,” a woman told me after she learned that an acquaintance of hers was getting divorced. “I mean, I hardly even know them. But… they have children. It just breaks my heart.” I bit my tongue and looked away. Now is not the time to get on your soap box, I reminded myself. She’s entitled to her feelings. Just let it go. While I maintained an even facial expression, the woman’s words infuriated me. She openly admitted that she didn’t know anything about the situation and yet she assumed the divorce was a tragedy simply because the couple had […]
Continue readingWhat About “Unconscious Coupling?”
I have to say, I’m ecstatic about Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling”. While the public reactions are mixed, the general buzz is wonderful. As a culture, we NEED to talk more about this stuff. Let’s keep it rolling please. Let’s bring divorce out of the shadows and continue to discuss and dissect it. It is, after all, a fact of life for millions. …But with all the existing coverage of the topic, I didn’t sit down today to write about conscious uncoupling (which is really just a fancy way of saying GOOD Divorce™). Quite the opposite, in fact. […]
Continue readingSleeping With Spoons
One night last week, as I prepared to get in bed, I paused to notice the landscape atop my sheets. My pillow was placed in the corner of the mattress, as I’ve been sleeping diagonally for the past couple weeks. The inventory around the pillow was as follows: the small blanket I’ve been sleeping with since infancy, my iPad®, a white cord, a pair of ear buds, two books, a few crumpled paper towels (I’d been nursing a cold and paper towels hold more snot than tissues) and a spoon. I paused to consider the spread before throwing away the […]
Continue readingGuest Post: Take Control of Your Divorce and Mediate!
Today’s post comes from Joe Dillon, founder of Equitable Mediation Solutions. I’m a big fan of the model that Joe’s company provides to their clients and I hope to see more of these healthy divorce options in the future. Here’s Joe with some education about divorce mediation… *** When I was a kid I didn’t very much like amusement parks. While the brightly colored lights and the spinning machines looked nice, the thought of being buckled into some ride that I had no control over was not appealing to me in the least. I was quite content to sit there, […]
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