Relieving That Uneasy Feeling When Resolving Divorce
By Amanda Mason, CEO & Founder, SOLAGREE®
Anxiety is an unavoidable fact of divorce. In addition to grieving the end of a married relationship, you are stuck wondering about legal bills, getting financial answers, whether your parenting values will be honored, and how soon you’ll just have all of this behind you. Worse yet, you know the kids can sense the tension and feel stress, also.
A healthy legal process will get these questions answered as early as possible. The ordinary legal approaches to divorce and even most alternatives don’t do that. Thankfully, a carefully managed (by humans!) process can reduce these normal fears and empower you with knowledge from the beginning.
The problem with almost every divorce process is that there are two vulnerabilities:
- First, that one person has the power to walk away at any point, blow the whole settlement process up, and drag the other spouse into court. Expensive, seemingly endless, without quicker solutions.
- Second, that one person has the power to drag things out or keep their head in the sand. Again, expensive and time-consuming.
So how can professionals get out of old systems and help you progress right away?
A great way to help this happen is for the couple to agree on a phased process that uses excellent tools and culminates in a private arbitration instead of court. This greatly reduces the two weak spots because it keeps them moving. Plus, if they don’t get to 100% agreement, they still have a decider to help. But, unlike waiting endless time on a judge stuck in a government process, they can have a faster, discreet, more conversational way to be heard.
An arbitrator is an attorney with years of experience and who is vetted to give the couple a dignified, quiet way to discuss their goals and get to an outcome. They are also able to put all the couple’s agreements into their final, binding document. This efficiently eliminates the need to rely on back and forth from attorneys to write the settlement.
Knowing up front that neither person will ever take the other spouse to court means that you can relax and shed the fight-or-flight mindset. This guaranteed, binding ‘safety net’ helps ensure that no single person can extend negotiations into a multi-year, highly expensive endeavor.
A Three-Phased Process to Human-Centric Divorce
Structured mediation and arbitration can be approached from multiple angles, but the most effective model involves a three-step framework.
Phase 1: Intake & Education
Couples can work with Certified Divorce Financial Analysts® to become educated about what their separated finances can look like. This gives early education and even more confidence.
On the parenting side, a couple can work with a parenting planning specialist. This professional helps provide reassurance that each of your voices will be a part of the child’s life. In turn, that confidence helps you create the roadmap for your futures as co-parents.
Phase 2: Structured Mediation
In this phase, you will try to work through any open disagreements with a neutral attorney trained to overcome these challenges. Again, the setting is relaxed and even virtual. The benefit there is that you can be where you each are comfortable, instead of in a stranger’s office. This helps get to more trust in settlement talks.
Phase 3: Arbitration
And if you still don’t agree on everything, not to worry. Your kind, friendly, and knowledgeable arbitrator can close the gap and resolve lingering issues, all while keeping the entire process out of the public court docket.
Divorce coaches, knowledgeable Certified Divorce Real Estate professionals, and other experts can enhance the entire experience described above. Attorney representation can also happen the whole way through, in addition to your work, with the neutral attorney mediators and arbitrators.
All of these steps should be guided by the right people familiar with navigating in their lane and based on your state’s laws.
The fact is that children of every age experiencing divorce need parents who are more relaxed and able to give confident, genuine reassurance that “everything is going to be okay, even if things are a little different.” And to the couples themselves – even if you don’t have children – it’s awfully helpful for you to feel that way, too!
Amanda Mason is CEO and founder of SOLAGREE®, a new divorce framework that blends mediation, arbitration, and financial planning professionals into one streamlined process. In addition to her role with SOLAGREE®, Amanda is a partner at Mason, Mason, & Smith in Wilmington, NC, and a certified mediator who provides assertive, effective representation in divorce, custody, and complex civil matters.
