For most people, divorce is usually (and thankfully) a one-time experience. Because of this, it is easy to understand why most people are ill-equipped to deal with the emotional, legal, and financial challenges this difficult life transition presents. Unfortunately, most people going through a divorce do so on their own and struggle to make important life-influencing decisions at a time when they are least prepared to do so.
Divorce is made even more challenging when children are involved. Issues of money, fear of losing one’s children, anger, and revenge often interfere with parents’ ability to appropriately consider their children’s needs and interests at a time when they are also most vulnerable, Specifically, too often parents fail to clearly consider how they plan to ensure that their children’s needs and interests are met immediately and as they grow and mature. Instead, their focus is on winning the “custody dispute”.
Given the rise in the number of contested custody cases and the stress that goes along with them, there is an increasing need for parents to avail themselves of assistance from a professional who has expertise in the areas of divorce, custody disputes, child development, family dynamics, the parental alienation syndrome, and domestic violence. In recent years, the assistance of a divorce and trial consultant is becoming an important component of a divorce support system – much in the same way that divorce attorneys and accountants have been,
The services provided by divorce and trial consultants complement but do not replace the services provided by divorce attorneys. Divorce and trial consultants SUPPORT, EDUCATE AND GUIDE people through the emotional, practical, and strategic aspects of the divorcing process such as preparing for custody evaluations and trials, developing parenting plans, formulating strategies based on case analysis for negotiating settlements, or developing legal arguments and, overseeing family reunification efforts. We also assist our clients’ attorneys with expert testimony and prepare clients and witnesses for court testimony.
Divorce Coaching – A Useful Tool to Help People Survive the Divorcing Process
Divorce coaching is an important tool in assisting individuals to cope with the stresses of divorce. Divorce coaching helps people become emotionally ready to make informed decisions about their lives and those of their children. It helps people deal with the turmoil that often comes with a divorce, particularly those involving custody battles and parental alienation syndrome (PAS). It also is useful in assisting people to cope with having to make major changes as the result of a divorce (i.e., lifestyle, financial, family, and social orientations). Divorce coaching helps people become grounded by normalizing the strain of divorce and providing useful feedback during difficult times. It also gives people a safe place to vent their frustrations, anger, and sadness with a professional divorce coach skilled to manage a wide variety of issues that arise during the divorce process.
Divorce coaches provide invaluable assistance to clients and their lawyers in their combined goal of reaching timely and reasonable settlements. In the long run, clients find using a divorce coach to be a very cost-effective service overall. This is because divorce coaches are better trained to address the emotional side of divorce than lawyers. By assisting clients to overcome some of the emotional hurdles encountered during divorce negotiations, clients are able to move through the process with fewer disputes that result in escalating legal fees.
A divorce coach DOES NOT provide legal advice. You must go to a lawyer for that. However, a divorce coach can address many other issues that these other professionals are not trained to do.
Some of these issues involve:
- supporting your child during a time of change and adaptation
- learning how to reconstruct emotional boundaries when interacting with your ex
- coping with difficult litigation
- coping with your own frustration, anger, and grief
- finding a balance between the divorce process and getting on with life
Consulting Services for Divorce Attorneys
Custody cases pose a growing challenge for divorce attorneys and the courts. More so than ever before, the custody of children is being disputed in court. With the trend toward joint custody, the increase in dual-income families, and as people accumulate more wealth and assets, the stakes associated with custody disputes increase as well. As a consequence, attorneys and their clients are in need of more creative approaches to reaching timely and reasonable settlements.
Divorce and custody consultants provide invaluable assistance to divorce attorneys in offering their expertise and knowledge in areas such as child development, family dynamics, domestic abuse, parenting, parental alienation syndrome, and more. These are areas that attorneys rarely have in-depth knowledge or experience. Combining a divorce consultant’s expertise in these areas with an attorney’s legal skills makes it possible to develop an effective strategy even in the most challenging cases. With this type of assistance, a divorce attorney will have a decided edge when it comes to making convincing and credible arguments to the opposing counsel or before the court.
Some of the services provided include:
- reviewing & critiquing custody evaluations for methodological flaws
- assisting lawyers to develop questions for cross examinations and discoveries
- making submissions to the court on various family-related topics (i.e., addictions, domestic abuse, parental alienation syndrome, teenage parenting, attention deficit disorder, etc.)
- conducting observations of children and parent interactions
Review & Critique of Custody Evaluation Reports
The purpose of a custody evaluation is to help resolve a custody dispute by providing direction to parents about how to best meet their children’s needs and interests once they divorce. Custody evaluations generally offer recommendations concerning with whom children should reside and how parents should manage responsibilities for their children’s care.
As previously suggested, the ultimate goal is for parents to use the recommendations of the evaluation report to direct further negotiations and hopefully reach an out-of-court settlement. Unfortunately, this is not always possible in an increasing number of highly conflicted cases. In fact, in many of these cases, custody evaluations become another weapon to be used adding to instead of reducing the acrimony and conflict that already exists. It is in these cases that the Court is left to make decisions for you and your children.
When court involvement cannot be avoided, it is important to be aware that this too presents a very difficult challenge. Too often feel that going to court is the best option without considering its downside. It is important to recognize that decisions made in court will be by a judge who knows very little about you, your children, or your family circumstances. When the court becomes involved in these matters, the decision-making is guided primarily by rules of evidence, precedents, and legal procedure. The human elements that should be taken into consideration are often missed.
If a custody evaluation is not done properly, then the court may be relying on information that is incomplete or faulty. If you and your attorney are in strong disagreement with the evaluator’s findings and recommendations. you must effectively challenge the evaluator not only on substantive issues in the report but more importantly, on methodological flaws in his or her procedures. This is where a critique of your report may be helpful.
A divorce and trial consultant with expertise in conducting custody evaluations can conduct a thorough critique of a custody evaluation report and suggest to clients if there is a basis for challenging it. A divorce consultant will be able to review your file including investigations, testing, and home studies that have been conducted by psychologists, social workers, or other mental health professionals. A complete review would also include critiques of the evaluator’s procedures, findings, and conclusions of the evaluations in question.
In many cases there are significant weaknesses in each area or the individual conducting the evaluation might not have sufficient training and/or expertise to offer the opinion he or she has made. There are instances when particular issues may have been overlooked (such as the parental alienation syndrome) and this may be the result of an evaluator’s lack of expertise and experience in that area. On the other hand, some evaluators will dismiss or discredit a parent’s concern such as parental alienation syndrome without having the expertise that will allow them to do so.
An effective critique of a custody evaluation will provide divorce attorneys an opportunity to challenge a custody evaluation and prevent its findings from being given any weight in court. Attorneys can also be further assisted in preparing for an effective legal attack (i.e., development of affidavits/depositions or cross examinations).
Parental Alienation Syndrome Consultations
The Parental Alienation Syndrome (P.A.S.) is becoming recognized as a serious negative outcome of divorce with potentially dangerous consequences to children and the targeted parent. In its most basic form, P.A.S. involves the deliberate severing of a healthy and positive relationship between a parent and his or her children where the children become actively involved in the relationship’s demise. Unfortunately, parents, attorneys, and judges are grossly under or misinformed about P.A.S. Because of that, P.A.S. is not identified in a timely fashion and appropriate interventions are lacking.
Parents who observe any sudden deterioration in their relationship with their children and where their children are overtly hostile without cause should consider exploring the possibility that the P.A.S. may be developing – particularly if their separation is acrimonious.
A divorce and trial consultant with expertise in the P.A.S. will be able to assist parents to identify if this is a valid concern and identify ways of sparing children the emotional pain and stress that result when they are caught in their parents’ crossfire. A P.A.S. expert can help parents understand the harm being done to their children through their actions, helping them find peace and reassurance in leading a life separate from each other and helping them develop effective ways of co-parenting. The challenge for lawyers is to discern whether the actions taken and allegations made by a client are based on genuine concerns for their children’s safety and well-being or motivated by revenge, leverage for child support, fear of losing his/her children, and the role of father or mother.
- providing coaching and support to parents who are wrongly denied access to their children
- working with families to re-establish contact between children and parents
conducting PAS assessments to determine or discredit PAS and to ascertain - whether allegations of abuse are bona fide or bogus
- reviewing and critiquing assessments conducted by custody evaluators who have failed to identify PAS
- consulting with lawyers on how to question suspected alienating parents and/or suspected alienated children and how to develop strategies for case development
- providing expert testimony on PAS, parenting & domestic abuse
Family Reunification & Reintegration Consultations, Services & Programs
The bond children have with their parents is essential to their development, their self-concept, and their self-esteem. It provides children with the framework for how their view themselves and the world around them. More importantly, it sets the blueprint for how they form relationships with others. The importance of this bond cannot be overstated or underestimated.
Sometimes events or situations occur which prevent this parent/child bond from being formed or disrupt one that previously existed. Some circumstances that may be responsible for this happening include:
- A child may not have established a relationship with their biological or birth parent because of adoption or separation from that parent at birth because of geographic distancing and/or because the relationship between the child’s parents broke down. Sometimes a parent chooses to not establish a relationship with the child because he/she feels at the time, it is not in the child’s best interest to do so. Oftentimes, a father is not even aware of his child’s existence and as a consequence, he never had an opportunity to form a relationship with the child.
- A parent’s physical and mental illness or events that alter a parent’s ability to function and relate to his/her child at times might have a significant impact on a relationship with his/her children. Some illnesses or medical/psychiatric conditions such as stroke, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, drug and alcohol addictions or brain injuries, may result in impairments in the affected parent so great that it might be difficult for a child to continue his/her relationship as it once was.
- Divorce and its fallout often lead to disruption in children’s lives. During this time, children might become hostile toward one or both parents. Most often this disruption is brief and resolves in itself within the first year post-separation. However, there are times when it is difficult to sustain a relationship that once, particularly when a custodial parent relocates.
- The most serious consequence of divorce is when one parent deliberately attempts to distance their child or children from the other parent. It is even more painful and devastating to the children and the affected parent when the children engage in the alienating process. Without intervention, preferably swiftly, the chances of re-establishing the important parent-child bond and repairing the relationship become increasingly difficult as time goes on.
Needless to say, re-establishing a relationship and/or repairing a damaged or disrupted relationship requires the participation of parent and child, strong social support, and tremendous patience. There are no guarantees that a parent’s efforts will be successful, but what is certain is that if no effort is made, the chance of realizing any improvement is remote.
Constructing a family reunification program with the greatest chance for success involves many steps including:
- reviewing the file documents
- separately interviewing the parents/guardians and children
- identifying children’s concerns and if and under what circumstances children might be willing to reconnect with their parents.
- In cases of P.A.S., challenging children’s reasoning and rationales for hating the targeted parent
An essential element in re-establishing and repairing a damaged bond between parent and child in P.A.S. cases is reconstructing old memories and establishing new ones utilizing a variety of approaches including games, crafts, and photo albums. Children often benefit from using email as it provides a non-threatening way to communicate with others.