—
Divorce mediation involves having a neutral, third-party professional provide assistance that helps you and your spouse come to an agreement on essential issues. Instead of having to battle it out in court, you can calmly discuss the issues that impact your marriage in a private setting.
As you plan your divorce, you and your spouse will naturally need to discuss challenging topics. Figuring out how to divide property, share custody of your children and make financial arrangements are all conversations that can get heated. Although you can just let the courts decide, working with a mediator can help you reach decisions that are mutually beneficial in a private setting.
Taking a deeper look at what to expect during divorce mediation and how it helps resolve disputes puts you a step closer to finding peaceful resolutions.
Gather Clear Information to Guide Decisions
By the time that you are planning a divorce, you and your spouse might have complicated financial situations. You may both have differing views on parenting needs, and it’s common for one or both people to be unaware of all that goes into paying debts and household expenses. Trying to make decisions when you only have half of the information available is difficult.
During mediation, an experienced divorce lawyer like the attorneys at Davis & Associates can help you and your spouse gather information that you can use to make essential decisions. For instance, knowing exactly how much each person has in their retirement accounts can help with financial planning. Or, you might need to take a close look at your child’s school and extracurricular activities schedule to determine custody and visitation rights.
Although many of these decisions are emotionally charged, looking at them through a factual lens can help prevent combative discussions. Instead, it may simply make sense for one parent to have visitation during specific times when they have the availability to take your child to soccer practice. Meanwhile, looking at clear numbers can keep financial agreements from becoming emotional moments.
Prevent Miscommunication With Facilitated Dialogue
Couples entering the divorce process often have years of poor communication in their past that influence their conversations. Name-calling, shouting and shutting down are all behaviors that can quickly destroy any hope of reaching a decision during a dispute. With a mediator present, people tend to curb some of their anger.
If things do get heated, a professional mediator can help calm tempers. Professional divorce mediators go through special training that helps them facilitate dialogue, especially when it begins to spiral out of control. In fact, most mediators work hard to prevent tensions from ever rising to the point that people begin to exhibit poor communication behaviors.
Knowing that you are walking into a meeting where you and your spouse are held to the standard of demonstrating mutual respect can help to eliminate stress. You’ll also find that having someone guide the discussion helps prevent miscommunication that could cause you to have to continuously revisit the same topics.
Instead of arguing about how to divide property for an hour, your mediator will calmly walk you through your marital assets. Then, you’ll begin discussions with intentional questions that they’ll ask to help determine who benefits from certain decisions and where someone might need to make a concession.
Having someone else assist with major decisions allows you and your spouse to stop feeling as though you have to battle it out. If a topic requires more thought, then your mediator may suggest moving on with other decisions while you think about a challenging topic. Whether you return to a decision during the same meeting or choose to finish the discussion at a later date, you’ll be able to feel good about how you communicate.
Explore Customized Solutions to Reach a Comfortable Agreement
Most court decisions follow strict recommendations for parenting time, child support and asset division. For many families today, having a strict every other weekend schedule for visitation simply isn’t in the child’s best interest. You and your spouse might also be uncomfortable with how a court might divide assets or debts. Yet, it might be a struggle to come to a collaborative decision together on your own.
Divorce mediators are trained to look at your unique situations and identify customized solutions. For example, you might find that splitting custody in half allows each of you to spend quality time with your child after the divorce, especially when you live near each other. Or, you might need to establish a more flexible schedule if you travel for work that allows you to maximize time when you are able to care for your child.
Mediators can also help with unique situations where even the court might not have a one-size-fits-all solution. If you and your spouse have a dispute about how to share custody of exotic pets or ranch animals, then a mediator can help. Alternatively, you might need help with long-distance parenting schedules or figuring out how to care for an adult child with special needs.
Having a neutral party share ideas that you might not have thought of before can ease these types of complicated decisions. Once you’ve settled all of your disputes, your mediator can then help you draft a divorce agreement that you and your spouse both feel comfortable signing.
Going through a divorce is never easy. After all, you might have years of tension that have built up between you and your spouse. Since divorce mediators take a natural stance, you don’t have to worry about getting caught up in arguments or trying to prove who is right or wrong. Instead, you can calmly look at factual information together to reach an agreement that you and your spouse can both live with.
Whether you are already in the midst of a difficult divorce or are just starting the process, you can work with a divorce lawyer to begin easing the conflicts. Although mediation might seem like an extra step, it can help move your divorce faster by preventing the need for lengthy waits for court dates. Plus, you’ll be building a foundation that can improve how you parent your children and manage other long-term needs that arise following your divorce.
—
