Working With Family Consultants

Support, Preparation and Training In Relationship Breakdown

You want to reach an Agreement about the future using either: Personal Negotiation, Mediation, Solicitor Negotiation or the Collaborative Process. You try not to bring the emotional trauma of the breakdown of the relationship, manifested in your pain, grief, guilt, fear, resentment and anger to the Process. You want to engage your better self in the discussions to maximise the best outcome.

But how do you manage this? With considerable difficulty. The Lawyers will prepare and advise you. Mediators will manage the Mediation Process and Lawyers will manage Solicitor Negotiation or the Collaborative Process. You need more help to get through the crisis and provide you with future skills to continue communicating for the benefit of your family.

Acknowledgement of the Past

Each individual has a ‘story’ to tell. It is important to be heard. The Legal Process is designed to look to the future, building new relationships, improving and re-establishing communication whilst you map out an agreement containing the plan for the future of your family. If you are both to be heard and acknowledged, allow yourselves to express your feelings, understand them, accept them and continue with communication in a constructive way, you need the assistance of Family Consultants. ‘Your Story’ can be told to your Lawyers as the background to their understanding and management of the Legal Process however this is not the fuller acknowledgement, examination and understanding that a Family Consultant can help you reach. The Family Consultant will help both Partners understand and overcome their key issues.

Fear of change and Working Through It

Achieving a fair negotiated future, taking into account all family members’ needs will involve change, which is frightening. With the support of Family Consultants you can contemplate such change, consider the implications, and affect without being overwhelmed by the fear and anxiety surrounding that change or being enmeshed in the history of the relationship. It will help you to see clearly from all perspectives, not take sides, to look for an open workable solution, to be creative, and ultimately achieve a compromise, avoiding an impasse with the resultant conflict and increased distress.

Building the Future

Whichever Process you have chosen you see the benefit of an agreement over which you and your Partner have control, addressing the personal, emotional, and financial aspects of separation and divorce. At the conclusion of the relationship you want to enter the next phase of your life with renewed understanding and strength, rather than divided and depleted by Court proceedings.

The Team

The team to do this may include you and your Partner, the Mediators, Lawyers and the Family Consultants with our complimentary skills dependent on the process that is right for you. You are seeking to resolve the family’s needs on every level, more than in an adversarial manner which allows you only to pursue your rights, limited by statute and the Court Process. You, your Partner, the Mediators, the Lawyers the Family Consultants and other professionals involved, have a common aim of achieving a fair and workable solution to all aspects of the future, objectively reaching a creative and tailor made outcome for you.

With the Family Consultants you are able to address the following:

  • Tell your ‘story’ and be heard with therapeutic professionals.
  • Identifying your own wishes and those of your Partner.
  • Dealing with your Partner outside of the negotiations and in the Legal Process.
  • Adjusting to the practical realities of Divorce and Separation including the major changes in finance, accommodation and care of your children.
  • Coping with the emotional impact now and over time.
  • Coming to terms with the loss and end of the relationship.
  • Developing new skills for the future including communication with your Partner.
  • Helping you in the decision making process.
  • Coaching you and supporting you to make the Legal Process work at it’s best for your family.
  • You will save time and money addressing your situation with Family Consultants who are therapeutic experts and will charge at a more modest hourly rate than Legal professionals. The involvement of Family Consultants also makes it likely that the legal process will be shorter and more productive

Use Family Consultants in tandem with the Legal Process, whether you have chosen Personal Negotiation, Mediation, Solicitor Negotiation or the Collaborative Process to help secure, as far as possible, a complete resolution, peace of mind, “a Good Divorce”.

You are striving to achieve the best Separation or Divorce for yourself, your Partner, and your family in all spheres.

It is not the separation, but the way you separate that affects your children. Understanding, support, new skills and methods of communication are fundamental now and can be used for the foundations of “a good life” in the future.

Lisa Broddle,
Family and Collaborative Lawyer, Mediator
April 2011