As you are headed for trial, take a final breath and ask yourself whether you have done all you can to avoid the continuation of conflict. By now, if you are still disputing a settlement, you have probably decided that it is really your spouse who does not want to settle, and he/she is doing everything possible to prevent your getting your fair share. True or not, you still have the power to end the dispute. One can always turn the other cheek in a fight. Even in war, it takes two to tango. The 60′s slogan is apropos here: What if they had a war and nobody came?

Taking stock of your situation one final time, and determining whether settlement is possible, evaluate…

• Am I still consumed with hurt and rage that I wish to visit on my ex-spouse?
• Do I still want him or her to come to his senses and call the whole thing off?
• Have I acknowledged my share of what went wrong in the marriage, even if my spouse had the affair or became the alcoholic? What did I do, or what did I overlook?
• Am I ready to become more self-sufficient economically? If I have small children, do I have a reasonable plan for how I can be with them as much as I need to and participate in the family money making as soon as I am able?
• Do I have a lawyer who advises me to make compromises, to keep my family interests at the center of the divorce, and to settle issues whenever possible? Or do I have a lawyer who encourages me openly or indirectly to fight?
• Do I need to keep fighting or do I and my children have the basis for a healthy post-divorce life? Maybe my ex-spouse will see the children more than I want him to, but will that really harm my child, or will it be an irritation he or she will have to stand up to when at an appropriate age to do so?
• Am I acting out of fear of the unknown; are my fears rational or irrational?
• Have I worked out ways of separating from my spouse physically and psychologically? Do we have plans that limit contact to the extent I feel comfortable; could limiting contact further help us reach settlement?
• If we’re stuck on economic issues, is there another way to look at the issue? Could we make an interim agreement that has a definite endpoint that will give us both time to adjust? Maybe it is less fair for one of us for 5 years, and then tips the other way. Maybe our negotiations leave things too open-ended for too long.
• Are we communicating in a way that serves the divorce rather than conflict? Am I badgering him? Is she provoking me? Could we get help communicating rather than negotiating?
• Am I still focused on the past? What could I do to look more happily toward the future? How will the settlement proposals support my goals for the future?
• Do I have proposals on the table that I can live with? Are they really impossible or are they unfair? If unfair, how much fairer would they need to be before I can live with them?

After answering these questions, you will have a sense of whether you are ready to settle or in what areas you need to do more work. Your inability to find an acceptable settlement could be personal, or it could be between partners, or it might require more assurances where your children are concerned. In this imperfect world, weigh the value of stretching out the divorce versus living with this amount of imperfection. If you are satisfied that you have not settled your divorce for solid reasons — that you or your child’s safety, mental health, or economic stability are at issue — then you need to switch into the mind set of preparing for trial.

For a terrific video describing the Seven Keys to Resolving Family Conflict, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYBx–zUtlo. For additional tips on how to diffuse an argument before it gets out of hand see http://singleparents.about.com/od/successfulcoparenting/ tp/stop_arguing_with_your_ex.htm.

Excerpted from Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (Simon & Schuster/Fireside 2001). For more information: http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com/.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

(C) 2008  Peace Talks Mediation Services, Inc.

We’ll even settle it.  From the sound of this article, it’s a hot mess. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4601465. It’s hard to believe these folks once loved each other.

But remember, the opposite of love is not hate. It’s “I don’t care.”  Nothing says “I still have feelings about you” like all of this fighting in court.

But where will it leave them?  Hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees, a couple of years in court, and then lovely stories like the one above about the case in the press?  Why would anyone sign up for this?

Good news. There’s a better way. Mediation. Of course, you have to be ready to have an agreement and you have to want to have an agreement for mediation to work (mediators can handle the fighting part). The McCourts don’t sound like they want an agreement. Not at this point. Maybe in a few months.

We’ll be here.

Let’s start with my bias: If you don’t want the world to know about something, don’t do it. In fact, never do anything you wouldn’t want written up in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346788310360439.html

For example, the details of your divorce.

Yes, of course, there are legitimate privacy concerns. Don’t tell anyone, but on our Child Support Information Forms which are required by the Los Angeles Superior Court, we fill in the social security numbers with xxx-xx-1234 because I, as a former court employee, used to see those “confidential” forms laying loose in the files.

So I get the identity theft issues.

But for the rest of it….how are we living our lives such that we really need to worry about privacy? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346788310360439.html

Thanks to a friend who works in reality TV, I’ve been watching the Fox Reality Channel. In LA, that’s channel 888 on cable. Yes, it’s up there. Remember when there were only 4 channels? I do. Okay, so I’m 45. There used to be only 4 TV channels. Hence my encyclopedic knowledge of Leave it to Beaver episodes. But, in retrospect, is that so wrong?

As a 20+ year family law practitioner—12 years in litigation and 9 in mediation exclusively, I’ve learned a few things. http://www.peace-talks.com is my mediation firm, and while I made 3 times my current salary doing litigation, the rewards of mediating cases are far more rewarding than money.

So let’s start with the value, benefits and results of mediation:

Mediation is confidential—so let’s say you’ve done something, or acquired something, or accumulated some assets that you’d prefer to keep out of the Wall Street Journal,  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346788310360439.html, you can keep that confidential. Lest you think I’m joking, if ethical boundaries permitted, I could tell you about cross-dressing TV executives (not my friend, BTW) and S&M fans.  Mediation lets them keep those issues out of the public eye, because only the finalized details (and sometimes not even that—-interested to know more? call us at (310) 301-2100) are submitted to court.

Not interested in testifying in court in front of whoever might be there? A lawyer friend of mine represented Jennifer Anniston in her divorce. My lawyer friend was waiting to see if the papers had been served on Brad Pitt…when the news poppped up on her MSN alert.  I was in court representing a client once when the President of the board of directors of a charity board sat in the gallery waiting for his case to be called by the judge. A Ph.D., president of a major charity…..you think he wasn’t embarassed?

So if you really want your divorce to be confidential, choose mediation or collaborative divorce. I happen to favor mediation…but as a full time mediator, I happen to know that it is typically about 75% less expensive than hiring a lawyer and going to court, it happens on your own time frame, at your convenience, and it’s confidential….so if you’re up to something you don’t want to see in the Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346788310360439.html, then maybe it’s time to take a second look.

In the immortal words of Pauly Walnuts on The Sopranos, “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’”.

For more information, http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com and http://www.peace-talks.com