Peaceful Divorce
by Wisconsin Sturm
March 4, 2010

Hello readers - I have guest columnists for you this week and next. As a therapist, I help people have better relationships. Often, however, couples come to therapy after so much damage to the bond of their relationship has occurred, the bond is irreparable. With 50% of first marriages divorcing, ending relationships has become a part of our social fabric, whether we like it or not. Many people act out the pain of the loss in ways that diminish their personal integrity. Lawyers often exacerbate this process by inciting their clients to take an adversarial stance with their spouses.

Thurman “Wes” Arnold is a Palm Springs attorney who specializes in peaceful divorces. Breaking up is extraordinarily painful, and yet, the traditional divorce process often causes further trauma to the individuals. If there are children involved and the couple has to co-parent after separating, it is even more imperative that the process of separation be as compassionate and fair to both parties as possible. Next week, Beverly Jewel, LMFT will write about her role as a therapist/mediator in the collaborative divorce process.

Peaceful Divorce
by Thurman W. Arnold III
If you are considering or facing a divorce, I invite you to think outside the box. You have the ability to define your separation from the one you once loved. Seek out lawyers who aspire to be peacemakers rather than warriors. Destruction is easy: Set a brave new course instead.

The traditional adversarial model for resolving legal disputes invites dishonesty and promotes a cycle of distrust and resentment. A system founded upon conflict ignores the consequences of making a contest over every issue to individuals and to their families. Otherwise sane, decent people are encouraged to argue every point and to become obsessed with winning “at any cost”: A win at any cost is always a terrible loss, and an awful legacy. The next generation tends to repeat these patterns until someone does the work to overcome them.

In the adversarial process lawyers and family law litigants forget their ethics, they misplace their essential goodness, and so may cause themselves and others needless economic and emotional catastrophe.

Can we not agree that this is so?

For if we are in agreement, clients and lawyers can begin to change how we respond to the crisis of divorce. We can look at what works and what doesn’t and chart a different course.
Family law and divorce clients today have choices that did not exist ten years ago. There are voices within the legal community reminding us that ‘lawyers can be healers rather than destroyers.’

The idea that lawyers can be peacemakers is an invocation to attorneys like myself to rethink our legal practices as litigators. It is an invitation to adopt a wholly new role as mindfulness guides to redirect and benefit persons in relationship breakup.

I have found that many clients yearn for a workable alternative to the adversarial system that I am describing, but what to do next and where to go can seem challenging.

Clients can make the difference in their own lives and a difference in the attitudes of the family law legal profession generally. As consumers, clients have the power to accelerate the spread of peacemaking services among lawyers by expecting lawyers to know about, offer, and perfect such services. There is a rich interactive opportunity between clients and attorneys for redefining the experience of divorce far differently from the toxic adversarial template.

As the recipient of legal services, you have the power of choice and the influential power of your wallet and pocketbook in helping to reshape the behavior and expertise of lawyers in a fashion that might, ironically perhaps for the lawyers, redeem all involved in the process. Lawyers’ commitments to peacemaking may be the lock, but clients hold the key.

A lawyer who is a peacemaker understands that people in relationship break up are suffering perhaps the worst crisis of their life. These clients are looking to be stabilized and validated, but early on they are testing their views on the lawyers themselves to determine in which direction to go. This moment is the greatest opportunity for peacemaking intervention.

Peacemaking lawyers listen deeply to their clients, and then listen some more. They resist imposing a legal right’s based triage, or making recommendations for warfare in the courts or anywhere else. They understand that what matters most to clients is what matters most to the peacemaker, but they do not rush in determining what that might be.

Peacemakers do not pander to reactivity. Peacemakers know that it is easy for adversarial lawyers to sign up clients by playing to their fears and anger, and to the fantasies about “righting wrongs,” and that such victories are hollow and short-lived.

As a client, you are looking for abiding compassion and a “genuine concern” for resolution. You are seeking wisdom as much as you are seeking legal acuity. Indeed, the peacemaker who has established artistry in the field has redefined “skillfulness” in their daily life as a union between extreme competency and the highest healing ethics. A good word for this is equanimity.

Peacemaking professionals tend to have considerable mental health training and a passion for ongoing peacemaker training.

Money may be an important factor in prompting you to consider the positive alternatives that peacemaking in divorce make available, as it costs far less than a adversarial divorce. In addition, the benefits of peacemaking will echo far into your future and in perhaps presently unseen ways.

A peacemaking strategy to resolving relationship breakup offers a tone that is the opposite of courtroom litigation. It promotes emotional closure and forward looking impacts upon families. It cracks the door to the room of forgiveness.

Securing your family’s future, and hence your own, in a way that you and your former partner may agree upon trumps the expense of conditioned adversarial problem solving models every day of the week. Any reason for avoiding conflict and reactivity is a good reason.

Seek out peacemakers in your locale who have shown a commitment in joining peacemaking organizations. The best peacemakers are passionately involved with the craft and recognize that it is an ever evolving and life-long practice of devotion.

For more information please contact attorney Thurman W. Arnold III at (760) 320-7915.

Arnold’s websites and a link to local collaborative divorce mediators: http://www.ThurmanArnold.com or http://www.MindfulDivorces.com

www.collaborativedivorceservices.com