Once the decision to divorce is made, you reach a fork in the road, where you need to make a series of choices about how you will proceed with your divorce. At each fork in the road, you choose your path: settlement or conflict. You can maintain a generous outlook toward your spouse, which fosters settlement, or you can respond to your more negative emotions, which fosters more conflict. In choosing conflict, you soon find yourself further down the road toward adversarial divorce than you intended. Once several choices have been made that foster conflict over settlement, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract yourself.

Choices that exacerbate conflict include: acting with distrust and dishonesty, being aggressive or stubborn when reasonable compromises are available, or making the process difficult in order to satisfy your anger, desire for punishment of your spouse, or your fears. When each conflict is held onto with tenacity, feelings of affection from the marriage are eroded and are replaced by resentment that smolders into fury. These feelings often stem from grief that goes unacknowledged, your own or your spouse’s. When grief is not worked through, it becomes a cantankerous emotional tumor, spreading its way through your heart and central nervous system. It hardens into bitterness. For a good article on compromise in divorce, see http://ezinearticles.com/?Divorce—Finding-Compromise&id=516461.

Divorce is rarely easy, and bitter feelings make it more arduous. Although few couples actually go to trial, many go a long way towards trial before finally settling. These cases are characterized by added length and cost to the divorce process.

If your priorities are clear, you are willing to compromise on most sticking points, you hired an attorney who is interested in settlement, and you are not hindered by emotional issues carried over from the marriage or the hurt of facing divorce, then you have an excellent chance of settling your disputes with minimum chaos to you and your family. Of course, you can not effect success alone. Both partners have to participate. Some great information on conflict and compromise is provided at http://www.divorceinfo.com/conflict.htm.

Many spouses feel that they are the ones doing the compromising to achieve resolution, while their spouse is blocking it. Yet their spouse tells the same story, only he/she is the one doing all the work! When perceptions are so disparate, neither person can be acting in the “perfect” way they believe. If your conflict is increasing rather than decreasing, take a hard look at what you might do differently. Most important, try understanding what’s happening inside of you that is contributing to communication breakdowns. Assess whether you are acting out your feelings instead of experiencing and managing them.

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/.

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