Thousands upon thousands of words of case law have been written regulating the specifics of divorce, but they may not affect the emotions attached to negotiating the end of your marriage. The process’s psychological and emotional components make a divorce a nightmare. Grief, fear, and anger all mix to make even the easiest of decisions a battle. Before you can have a successful and amiable separation, you need to understand your mind and heart.
Stages Of Grief
You may have heard this before, but it is worth repeating. You will grieve it no matter how bad your marriage may have been. Even if you had the worst of marriages, you will grieve the possibility that it could have been better. In her groundbreaking treatise, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlines a grief process based on her observations of a universal grief progression. According to her, all grief, whether the death of a loved one or the death of a marriage, will have denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The odds are that you are vacillating between anger, bargaining, and depression at this stage of the divorce.
When bouncing back and forth between anger and bargaining, the negotiating strategies tend to contradict themselves. Under the influence of anger, the client often wants to take the spouse for everything, and legal precedence is damned. When bargaining, a divorcée is willing to give away everything just to be finished. To best negotiate your divorce, you need to understand where you are emotionally. Before meeting with your lawyer, appearing in court, and reviewing documents, assess your emotional level as it relates to the stages of grief.
Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
Psychologist Abraham Maslow laid out a hierarchy of human needs with physiological and safety needs being the bottom two rungs. Fear erodes our belief that we can have these two life essentials. Take a moment to rationally assess your needs and how you will protect them. Start looking at your credit and getting your mind around finances that are no longer mixed with your spouse’s. Begin creating your credit profile. Look at this LifeLock review and begin protecting yourself without giving way to rampant fear. Maslow hierarchy has a specific order. If you do not feel safe, you will not be able to move to the next level, belonging and love.
Role Of Attorney
First and foremost, your lawyer must represent your interests in the best legal way possible. A good attorney will also help you manage your emotional state so that you get the most out of the divorce. According to the Collaborative Divorce Network, one of the roles of the divorce lawyer is to lead clients through a process of cooperative conflict by seeing disagreement as a way to accomplish creative solutions to problems. Let your lawyer use your emotional stage as an impetus to negotiate imaginative resolutions that will be best for you.
