Divorce Therapy

Conflict. Many techniques for dealing with conflict have been developed for couples therapy, family therapy and for mediation (conflict resolution). These techniques can be used in divorce therapy to minimize or eliminate conflict.

Grief. Marriage is the most important supportive relationship in the lives of married adults. When the marriage is falling apart, spouses feel a profound loss. The ruptured family connection makes this loss much more devastating than a loss from being fired from a job. Grief is routinely dealt with in psychotherapy and, sometimes, the best mediators address grief as well.

If you have tried to explain your perspective to your ex and were unsuccessful, and you want to know why, then you need to understand the three stages in divorce therapy process.   

The first stage is crisis intervention and rapport building. 
‍The importance of this stage will be clear once we identify stage two. The second stage is meaning making and problem solving. Problem solving is a creative process of getting over obstacles, and meaning making is the process of seeing things differently either as a result of your own thinking or because someone else shared a perspective with you.

People in a crisis are not open to meaning making (won’t accept ideas from others, not able to slow down and think about a dilemma). People in crisis also are not good problem solving (are not good at brainstorming and won’t accept solutions from others). People in crisis tend to regress to fight or flight. 

The divorce legal system encourages and enables fighting so people in crisis can’t resist a fight and get stuck in the divorce court, spending there years of their lives and tens or, sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now we are ready to look at why divorce therapy is necessary. Unless you have rapport with your ex-spouse, and he/she is out of crisis, he/she will not accept your views and your solutions.  

The problem, however, is that you, as a divorcing spouse, are coming into the conversation with your ex in a very negative light. The therapist is coming in neutral. You have a very long way to go from negative to positive rapport. This may be an impossible journey. The therapist has a shorter distance to go from neutral to positive rapport and also has training and experience in doing that. 

Moreover, your ex is in a crisis and needs to be taken out of crisis before meaning making and problem solving can be done. This can only be done by someone with whom your ex has rapport. That is why the therapist is needed. With time, as the relationship is repaired, you will learn to build and rebuild rapport with your ex and to take him/her out of crisis so you can talk about problem solving and changing perspectives.

The third stage is visioning, a process of developing a vision of the future relationship. For example, divorcing parents can spend some time talking about what kind of co-parenting relationship they want to have. This process builds trust and orients the co-parents for collaboration. This enables parents to think about children’s needs and work together to do what needs to be done.

The above just scratches the surface of what is involved in divorce therapy and why it works. Additional strategies and techniques and underlying theory can fill several aisles in a university psychology library. But the above is enough to show that lots can be done to make the divorce better, faster, cheaper, and safer for kids.