Divorce Mediation
What is "divorce mediation"?
Divorce mediation is a form of alternate dispute resolution. If you're on the internet you may see the letters ADR, and that's what they stand for: alternate dispute resolution. Divorce mediation is for people who want to go through the process of resolving their dispute privately. When you go into court, everything's public and all the bad things you say about your spouse happens in a public environment. Divorce mediation is private. You would come into an office, like my office or a retired judge's office, and you would hire a mediator to help you come to a resolution of your problem. The mediator's job is to help you and your spouse find a common ground.
How do I begin the divorce mediation process?
If you're interested in beginning the divorce mediation process, the first place to start would be finding a qualified mediator that you want to work with. I think what you really want to consider doing is making that a process that you include your spouse instead of excluding your spouse. Reason being, if you come home and say, "Hey, I talked to this person and this person is wonderful and I want this person to be my mediator or our mediator", your spouse may look at you and say, "Gee I don't trust that, I don't know this person, and you're up to something, I know you're up to something". So, get a list, get some recommendations, talk to some of your local, maybe you know somebody that's used a divorce mediator, maybe you've done some internet research, maybe you've talked to your clergy, maybe you've talked to your financial people, maybe you've talked to your therapist. If you know a therapist or a life coach, that's a really good place to start because they work with the mediators, they work with collaborative remediation trained individuals. Get a list, go shopping with your spouse and see what happens.
What happens during the divorce mediation process?
During the mediation for the collaborative divorce process, typically, we have a series of meetings. And we create an agenda. We perhaps want to create a list of issues that we need to tackle during the collaborative divorce process; and some of them may be resolved in the first meeting and some of them may not. Sometimes we need more information, more feedback. Sometimes people just need to think about things. So it's a series of steps. The idea is to come up with a happy agreement, or an acceptable agreement, at the end.
How does the divorce mediation process affect the participants afterwards?
People that go through divorce mediation generally end up with, if there's such a thing as a better divorce, they'll get it in an ADR, whether its collaboritive or mediation, so typically people are affected positively by divorce mediation and typically they walk away from the process at the end feeling more complete, more whole, less violated. Certainly there's a lot less confrontation. Essentially though, the difference in the end of the mediation and the end of the collaborative process is at the end of the collaborative process they've had coaches and they walk away from that process with better communication skills, better tools, more tools to work with as they continue in life as parents and as former spouses. Other than that, they typically, the experience in both processes is the same.
Can divorce mediation decisions be contested later on?
Typically in a mediation process the successful mediations end in an agreement. Typically the agreement is reduced to a writing and at that point the parties either go to a document preparer or sometimes the mediator offers a service to take the document, the mediated agreement, and turn it into a judgment because it's not a court order until a judge signs it. And once a judge signs it then you back in, if the question is how can I undo this and it's a judgment its the same as any other judgement there are certain protocols just like any other judgment and certain time constraints and certainly varies from state to state and so you'll want to consult with your professional on that.
How does divorce mediation affect my family?
Divorce mediation can have a really positive affect on your family, because you're resolving your dispute privately, fairly, and you're taking responsibility for the resolution by coming to an agreement. So typically when people walk out of court and they've been forced to do something, it can have a devastating affect on the family. It can effect how you look at your whole family: how you look at your children, how you look at the other parent, your emotional makeup; the whole landscape of feelings that you go through. When you walk away from mediation, you're usually feeling pretty good about your family because you've come to an agreement and nobody forced you to do it. So you're feeling good about that.
