Surviving Divorce & Winning in Family Court

By Ron Neff, Ph.D

This volume will guide you through the myriad of family court procedures and programs. For example, what is mediation? And how does it work?

But it is fair to say that the greatest challenges facing you in a divorce are not legal or procedural. They are emotional. On both the legal and the emotional side, we will look at what works and what doesn’t – for you and your children.

On the emotional side, divorce is all about loss. Regardless of which party filed for the divorce, you both lost large parts of yourselves; so much of yourselves that it keeps surprising you. And your feelings about all of this keep changing. Why? Because these losses bring grief. And grief has stages. So, just about time you think you have come to grips with your feelings, they change on you.

Some people get stuck in one of these painful stages for years. Nothing good comes from that. It is much better for you – and any children involved -- if you learn exercises to move you through each of these stages as quickly as possible.

Also covered are: What to say to your child or children; how to arrive at a co-parenting plan that serves those children well; special cases (including a violent and/or alcoholic ex); how to do better in your next relationship; and how to know when you are ready for a new relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663232304

Ron Neff, Ph.D

Ron Neff (Ph.D University of Iowa) is a semi-retired professor and psychotherapist. In recent years he has published several self-help books: Goodbye, My Love: How To Mend A Broken Heart (2016), Loving Well: Keys to Lasting and Rewarding Relationships (2016), Your Inner Mammal: How To Meet Your Real Emotional Needs And Become Stronger - For Self And Others (2017), and Surviving Divorce & Winning in Family Court (2021). He has often been told he should write novels, probably love stories, since he has studied and worked with issues of the heart most of his life. Hence, The Color of the Moon (2017), Daisies in Hell (2019), One Heart Over the Line (2019), Heroes, Hellions and Hot Rods (2019), and now Sometimes They Came Back (2022). At other times, his novels have been more in the “action adventure” or “science fiction” genres, including Enough With Those Humans: Was It Time for a Higher Intelligence? (2020), The Trouble With Eve: Forbidden Fruit in a Big Sky Paradise (2020), Sidewinders & Sassy Skirts: Blame It on Texas (2020), Up to Alaska: The Rush Of 2032 (2021), and Post-Earth: Searching the Stars for New Life (2021).

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Copyright © 2021 Ron Neff Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-3229-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3230-4 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 12/08/2021

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Understanding What You Are Up Against

Chapter 2 The Early Stages: Taking a Closer Look

Chapter 3 Beyond the Anger

Chapter 4 That Someone New

Chapter 5 But How do You Find that New Person?

Chapter 6 You or the Other Parent Reject Mediation or Reach No Agreement

Chapter 7 Are You an Adult Child of an Ugly Divorce?

Chapter 8 Overcoming Both Childhood and Adult Scars

Chapter 9 Your Ex Really Is a Threat

Chapter 10 The Good Stuff: Liking, Romance and Companionate Love

Chapter 11 The Alcohol Factor: Problem Drinking and Relationships Do Not Mix Happily

Chapter 12 Show Me the Money: Child Support and Alimony Battles

Chapter 13 Your Ex Wants to Come Back--Or You Do

Chapter 14 What’s Up with the Old Boomers? Are They Going Wild?

Bibliography

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, the author would like to thank Jennifer Keith (affectionately known as Jen-Jen in this community) for the extensive insights she has provided regarding the lasting effects of persistent conflict between parents on their innocent children. That conflict serves no one in the long run. How to minimize that conflict for the sake of the children as well as yourselves, how each parent can move quickly through the loss process that accompanies any divorce, as well as how to fare better in your next relationship are the primary concerns of this volume.

Second, I wish to thank my early readers and especially my clients – from whom I’ve learned both the hard facts of family conflict’s costs and some of what works to avoid or overcome these emotional ordeals.

Finally, thanks are also due to my devil-may-care son and editor, who deletes half my commas and can probably write much better than I. For now, however, it humors him to just smooth out my often-choppy prose, as best he can.

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CHAPTER 1

Understanding What

You Are Up Against

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Divorce presents a multidimensional challenge. The legalities are but one dimension of this ordeal – and, while challenging enough, not the greatest hurdles facing you.

It is fair to say that the greatest challenges are emotional. And those challenges keep changing. It is like a moving target. Just about the time you think you have come to grips with your feelings they change on you. Why is that? Because one dimension of this ordeal is grief – grieving what you lost. And grief has stages, each stage bringing new emotions. So yes, your feelings keep changing along the way.

You might think that the person who files for the divorce will not experience these stages of loss. But that is not so. Regardless of who files for the divorce, you both lost large parts of yourselves.

One person may be further along in the grief process. But you both lost a lot.

How much you have lost just keeps surprising you in the early stages of the loss process.

People get inside of each other. That compact sentence sums up much about the field of social psychology – and much of what it means to be human. We humans are social animals. Some of us may say, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Or I don’t need anyone. Americans are especially prone to these ways of thinking. But they are wrong.

None of us would even have the ability to think such things – indeed, the ability to have ANY conscious thoughts at all – were we not raised in a language community.

Conscious thought is self-talk. All the things that separate humans from other animals are based on being a part of a uniquely human social process, a language-using community. We don’t just use that language to communicate with each other – but also with ourselves. The infant has no self-concept and no conscious thought, no reasoning. Those uniquely human matters arise only from the process of participating in a language community.

More important for our purposes here, when we lose someone we loved, we lose parts of ourselves – parts of who we were, both to ourselves and to our friends and family.

In the midst of your divorce, you will often feel disoriented. How could it be otherwise? You are no longer sure of who you are – or even who you want to be.

You have lost that much of yourself.

You have lost all the things you did for, with, and because of that other person. This includes things like working hard to bring home that paycheck; sharing what happened in the course of your day; picking out foods and beverages at the store that you hope they will enjoy; and bending down to give her a kiss in the morning when you leave, but only lightly on the forehead, so as not to awaken her . . . or you doing that for him.

All of those things have been ripped away from you. In time, you can put new things there, new identities into yourself. But for a time, you will be less. And you will feel that way. Yes, you will feel diminished. Research shows that peoples’ self-esteem normally drops sharply during (and for about 2 years following) a divorce. And that is true for both parties.

From Whence I Speak

I am a semi-retired professor and psychotherapist (Ph.D, University of Iowa). Even before I finished graduate school, my research focused on love, romance, and the foundations of successful relationships. My Ph.D thesis was entitled On Romance and Why It Doesn’t Last. I have over 25 years direct experience in marriage, divorce-recovery, dating and other relationship counseling. Along the way, I served 4 years as a full-time psychotherapist at Southwest Behavioral Health Services (Phoenix, AZ). For three years, I conducted a private practice specializing exclusively in divorce recovery: how to get over one’s loss and move on. During this time, I designed and implemented many programs for Parents Without Partners, International, the largest single parents’ organization in the world. Most of the members of this organization are products of divorce.

I’ve also taught marriage and family courses at the college and university level for over twenty years. Finally, I spent 5 years in family courts, where I did conciliation counseling, mediation, and designed award-winning programs for high-conflict parents (Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County).

Divorce is no picnic. As the poem by Emily Dickinson cited at the beginning of this chapter so aptly puts it, parting may be all we need of hell.

But it does help to understand what you are dealing with.

Researchers have also learned what strategies can help to ease your struggles – what works and what does not.

The Trouble with Friends

If someone close to you dies, your friends will recognize the reality of your grief, and say things like, I’m sorry for your loss. That is helpful in some degree, because they are helping you face the painful reality of your grief. The first stage of grief is called shock or denial. At first, you tend to block that reality – precisely because it is such a painful thing to face up to.

Further, the greater the loss – the more you loved (and still want to love) that person, the longer this stage of shock and denial tends to last.

In the case of a death, our culture has time-honored and elaborate rituals – funerals and visitations – to help bereaved souls face and come to grips with the depth of their losses.

There are no such supportive rituals for losing a loved one through a break-up or a divorce.

On the contrary, friends (and even family members) will often make minimizing comments like, You didn’t really lose anything. He was never any good for you, anyway. Or He didn’t deserve you. He was a loser.

Such minimizing comments DO NOT HELP. It would be like going to a funeral and having someone get up and say, You know, we really shouldn’t feel bad about old Bob dying. Hey, he was just a jerk, anyway.

We all know that would be a terrible thing to say at a funeral. First, it would be kicking old Bob when he is down; down and utterly defenseless. Second, most of us realize that funerals exist as much – or more – for the loved ones now in grief, as for the person who died. And such a minimizing statement would do nothing to help those bereaved souls face – and mourn – their loss.

Mourning serves a purpose. It is how we begin to work through our loss.

Recently, a business associate texted me when he was at a funeral. I didn’t know the person who had passed away, but he was a life-long friend of the person who texted me. He wrote, I can’t stop crying. What is wrong with me?

As you might expect, I texted back saying, There is nothing wrong with you. Sometimes we are supposed to cry.

Psychologists who study grief point out that the people who sit at the front of the church at a funeral, in the front pews, are often the last ones to cry. Sometimes those for whom the loss is the greatest don’t cry at all until they reach the gravesite, often after traveling several miles from the church.

Yes, the first stage of grief – shock and denial – tends to last the longest for those who loved the departed soul the most.

The same is true for the later stages. After denial comes the anger stage of grief. Sometimes this is followed by a stage called negotiation. Then comes the sadness stage, sometimes called despair. And that is fitting enough, as until this stage one had not quite despaired of somehow avoiding the reality of the loss. The final stage is called acceptance. This is the goal of the grieving process. If – and when – you reach acceptance, the pain stops. You are at peace with the loss. This doesn’t mean you tell yourself that you didn’t lose anything. That would be all the way back to the first stage, denial. You’re just not fighting the loss any longer. It’s fighting – struggling -- against that loss that underlies all the pain.

No one is saying that you will only have anger at the second stage, or no sadness until reaching the stage of despair. Your feelings will be mixed along the way, and there is much overlap in these stages, to be sure. Each stage simply describes the person’s strongest feelings at that point in the grief process.

Again, those who loved the one they have lost the most will normally take the longest to move through each of these stages.

But all of this can be sped up – getting you to acceptance and peace much more quickly – if you know what you’re dealing with; and if you learn specific exercises you can do at each stage, exercises that can move you quickly through that stage, onto the next, and soon to peace.

This volume will provide you many such exercises, tools to speed you through the loss process. Without those tools people often stay stuck in one of the stages of grief for years and years. Doubt that? Come and work at family courts, where some parents in settlement battles stay stuck in the anger stage for 10 years or more. In fact, these high-conflict cases take up 90% of the family court’s time. Why? Because they just keep coming back!

That is good for no one.

But there is more than emotion at stake here.

What If There Are Children Involved?

If you are like most people in our society today and live in a large metropolitan area, you will find that those larger courts normally offer a range of special services for divorcing parents – and they are offered entirely free. These services include conciliation (emergency marriage counseling), mediation, and evaluation and assessment (experts who investigate your family situation thoroughly – and make recommendations to family court judges.) Why are