We’ve all heard the expression about “marriage for better or for worse,” but I don’t think most people have heard the expression “divorce for better or for worse”. The reality is relationships never end. Relationships are forever. Relationships only change over time and they either get better, or they get worse, depending on the choices we make.
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Mary Anne Loughlin and Patrick Greenlaw interview Ron Supancic for CNN’s DayWatch in 1991. The topic? Divorce and property settlement in California. There’s even a reference to the old classic film, War of the Roses. Check it out!
The Law Collaborative – Ron on CNN from The Law Collaborative on Vimeo.
Dr. Goulston gives us 4 R’s to heal a marriage that’s been hurt by infidelity: Remorse, Restitution, Rehabilitation, Request for Forgiveness.
Remorse is not the same as regret. When you feel regret you look back at something you’ve done and think, “Wow, that was a stupid thing to do. Wish I could go back and do it over, but I can’t, so let’s move on.” Regret makes people who’ve been hurt feel as if they have no right to be hurt. When you feel remorse, you think of your past actions and feel sick, ashamed, you’d give your eye teeth to have a do-over. But mostly? Mostly you just can’t stand that you hurt your spouse. Showing remorse for infidelity will help your hurt spouse feel cared for, listened to, and understood. You can show feelings of remorse by looking into your partners eyes, listening to them talk about their feelings of pain, and by expressing the pain you feel when you witness how much your actions have hurt them. Remorse requires courage to admit that you’ve made a terrible mistake, that your actions hurt someone you love, and that you’ll do whatever you need to do to be forgiven.
Spouses who’ve been cheated on feel as if they’ve had something stolen from them, they feel violated and taken advantage of. They need Restitution, which literally means, the restoration of something lost or stolen. You can help your spouse find restitution by showing remorse, and then asking them what they need from you so that they can begin to heal. Ask your spouse what you can do to give them back what they lost. They may say there is nothing you can do. Be patient, give them time.
Many times when a spouse cheats, they’ve cheated because they are angry or upset or disappointed with some aspect of their marriage. Rehabilitation is an excellent way to help your partner find Restitution. Get Rehabilitated. Show your partner that you’ve learned how to deal with your unhappiness in a healthy way, rather than in a way that is a betrayal to them (through infidelity). Show your partner that you are happy to have learned a new coping mechanism, and that you have confidence that you will be a trustworthy spouse from now on.
The last of the 4 R’s is Requesting Forgiveness. Dr. Goulston says it can take between six and eighteen months for a couple to heal from infidelity. If you’ve shown remorse, if you’ve given your partner restitution and rehabilitated yourself, you have the right to Request Forgiveness. You deserve a second chance. If your partner refuses to forgive you even after all 4 R’s, the problem shifts from you’re being unforgivable, to their being unforgiving. It’s up to them to stop Holding Onto A Grudge.
Tiger and Elin are getting a divorce, Sandra Bullock’s filing for a divorce, and Larry King is thinking about divorce. Each of these celebrities has something in common that led to their divorces – infidelity. But do we have to suffer through a divorce if a spouse has been unfaithful?
Dr. Mark Goulston says that when you betray someone’s trust at such a deep level, you trigger four intense reactions in them: Hurt, Hate, Hesitation To Trust and Holding Onto A Grudge (the 4 H’s).
When your spouse finds out you’ve had an affair, feelings of intense and devastating pain are triggered. Many people feel as if they’ve been made a fool of, they feel ashamed, embarrassed, they feel anger at themselves for failing to see. They feel as if they’ve been living in a lie, as if they are not respected or loved by their spouse. They may become physically ill, depressed, angry or volatile. All of these reactions are reactions to hurt.
Realizing that you’ve been lied to by your spouse, that the very person who promised to love, honor and respect you has gone behind your back and broken the vows of your marriage and then lied about it, may trigger anger so strong it can only be called hate.
The spouse who ignores their gut feelings and convinces themselves they’re being crazy, or who confronts you and believes you when you swear there’s no one else, is going to experience an enormous Hesitation to Trust. How can they possibly lower their guard and trust again, when surely they will only be re-traumatized?
A spouse who has been cheated on will want to protect themselves against future pain. Even if your spouse wants to get back together, it is frightening and painful to learn to trust after such a huge betrayal. It’s much easier to Hold Onto A Grudge. Holding Onto A Grudge allows a spouse who’s been cheated on to keep their guard up and hold it up with fortified bursts of anger.
What can you do if you or your spouse has cheated? How can you get past the 4 H’s and heal your marriage? Check back tomorrow to find out.
Ron Lieber, writer of Your Money for The New York Times wrote, “Divorce tends to be emotionally gut-wrenching for the people who go through it (not to mention those around them). But most couples don’t realize that divorce can also be among the most ruinous financial moves anyone can make.“
So how do we avoid divorce? According to Lieber, you can lower your chances of divorce by talking about money before you get married. He shares four specific topics he believes should be at the top of your discussion list and I’m sharing them here because I think they should be at the top of your discussion list whether you’re engaged, happily married, thinking about divorce, in the middle of a divorce, or somewhere in between. Click here to read on.
An article this week in the New Zealand Herald got me thinking. The author writes, “Lawyers know about conflict and extreme positions and applying rules and measuring out assets and applying formulas and assessing risk. What lawyers don’t seem to know about is that there is really only one answer to everything. Forgiveness.”
In a way, she’s right. Yet what she says is basically what those of us practicing collaborative law have been trying to say all along. Divorce is a crisis of huge proportions. It’s messy, it’s complicated, it’s painful. While traditional lawyers are trained to defend their clients according to the laws, collaborative lawyers are trained to help families in crisis reorganize their lives with dignity, honor and peace. The goal of Collaborative Divorce is to begin as two, end as one, and still feel whole.
Recently I heard a woman say that it was too late to begin the collaborative process because she’d all ready hired a traditional lawyer. It’s never too late to turn things around and seek peace.
If you or someone you know has questions about the collaborative process, send us an email by clicking here: Info@TheLawCollaborative.com. You can also call our toll free number (888) 852-9961, and please feel free to visit our information center. We’re here to help.
According to Gudrun Zomerland MFT, within the first three minutes of watching a couple have a conversation, Dr. John Gottman can predict with 96% accuracy whether the relationship he is watching will survive or not. Zomerland says that Gottman bases his predictions on four potentially destructive communication styles and coping mechanisms, one of which Gottman calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
In the Bible, The Four Horsemen are a metaphor depicting the end the world. They represent conquest, war, famine and death. When introduced into a marriage, The Four Horsemen are disguised as criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling (avoiding conflict.)
Criticism is an expression of disapproval based on perceived faults or mistakes. When we criticize our partner, we chip away at his or her self-confidence. With criticism we tell our partner they are not good enough, smart enough, sexy enough, hard working enough. For example, if your husband comes home late and you say, “Where were you? I was worried. You said you’d call if you ran late,” you’re complaining about a behavior. Laying into him, accusing him of being forgetful or saying something like, “You never think about my feelings,” is criticism.
Contempt is the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving of scorn. When we communicate with contempt we are being mean; we are disrespecting those around us by ridiculing, using sarcasm, or name-calling. If you’re at a party and your spouse launches into a story you’ve heard a hundred times and you roll your eyes and interrupt him or her to say that no one wants to hear that stupid story again, that’s contempt. In marriage it’s a quick poison.
Defensiveness is easy to fall prey to. Your wife asks you to get milk on your way home from work, but you have a long day and forget. When she greets you at the door wanting to know where the milk is, you snap at her and say something like, “Do you have any idea what my day was like?” We feel accused of something and so we defend ourselves, but often the act of defending our self tells our partner that we’re not listening to them, and that we don’t take their feelings into consideration. By defending our self we ignore our partner. Instead, when we feel defensive a better response is, “Hey, I’m feeling under attack. I’m sorry I forgot the milk. I had a long day, and I didn’t mean to ignore your needs. Can the milk wait until tomorrow?”
To stonewall is to delay or block a request, process or person by refusing to answer questions or by giving evasive replies. People stonewall to avoid conflict, but avoiding issues only makes them accumulate. People stonewall by tuning out, turning away, being too busy, or engaging in obsessive behaviors. A spouse who stays up all night playing online poker despite his partner’s invitation to come to bed may be stonewalling issues of intimacy.
If all four horsemen are active and alive in a relationship, it is likely too late to turn things around. If stonewalling and defensiveness are present, couples counseling can help you and your partner get through whatever issues are blocking your path to a truly happy marriage. However, a partner who engages in criticism or contempt is attacking their partner’s self worth. It is toxic behavior often stemming from childhood wounds, and anyone participating in this kind of behavior should think seriously about seeking individual counseling.
Alec Baldwin wrote a book last year called A Promise To Ourselves, decrying “the corrupt California divorce industry” (his words). He describes a nightmare divorce that lasted eight years and cost over three million dollars, after a ten-year marriage to Kim Basinger. That is the seventh option: Litigation.
A few years ago there was a case all over the newspapers. A short marriage; a two-year-old child. Dad was voluntarily giving Mom $50,000 a month in child support, but the mother wasn’t satisfied. Mother wanted $350,000 a month in child support for the two-year-old. Why? Because Dad could afford it.
The couple spent over a million dollars – each – on the Order to Show Cause Hearing. At the end of the day, after hearing all of the evidence and testimony, after concord jets and race horses and all the other evidence put in for a two-year-old child, the judge raised the support from $50,000 a month to $60,000 a month. A hundred thousand for a million. That’s litigation, straight up, all the way.
The good news is that you have options. You don’t have to spend your life’s savings on legal fees or spend years fighting in court. It’s your money, it’s your family, it’s your choice.
Option 1: The Kitchen Table
Option 2: Mediation
Option 3: Collaborative Divorce
Option 4: Arbitration
Option 5: Negotiation in the Shadow of Litigation
Option 6: Rent-A-Judge
Option 7: Litigation
In this low-key interview, Ron Supancic gets personal and tells us how he got into Collaborative Law.
