What the Divorce Battle Is Really About
All you want is a fair and fast divorce. You want the children to have a stable home, and you believe you are the best parent to provide their day-to-day care. This makes complete sense to you as you were also the primary parent during the marriage, when your spouse spent most of their time building their career. You meet with an attorney and you feel confident about your chances of being the primary parent in a painless divorce.
But when you tell your spouse you’d like to be the primary parent, they balk, and say that they want the primary parenting duties, or at the very least share equal custody of the children with you.
When you hear this, you have a strong emotional reaction. Wasn’t it you who spent so much time making their food, cleaning up after them, taking them to school activities, being there for them and devoting yourself to them? Where does your spouse come off thinking that a court will grant them custody?
At that moment, you double down on your legal position and take the matter to court. What happens next makes you think you’ve entered into a bizzaro world, as the court seems to stress that the children would do best with equal custody—even when one parent has been an absentee for the kids’ whole life.
When you learn how much money and time and energy it will take to achieve your goals in a highly contested divorce action, you decide to settle your case, and now the children are acting out, upset, and the parenting plan is just not workable.
What went wrong?
The battle isn’t about the truth. It’s about the perception of the truth.
If you’re like most people, when there is disagreement on an issue you feel strongly about, the usual tendency is to dig in your heels and insist on what you want, with the hope that the other side will relent.
But unless you have the budget (time, resources, energy, and emotion) for a divorce battle, you need to learn better techniques than trying to power your way through to your position with logic, arguments and threats. What you believe may be true and right, but high-conflict divorces are not about a search for the truth. They’re actually a battle over perceptions of the truth, and perceptions are built in the mind of the person we want to persuade, influenced through biases.
The real “fight” in a divorce is based on a mental game, and how you play the mental game determines how likely you are to get what you want, and how high your divorce budget will be.
Gain control of perceptions with “framing”.
Most divorces are settled by parties not the court. So you have the best chance of getting what you want in your divorce and post-divorce life by learning to be more persuasive with your spouse. Even if you have the budget to battle through your divorce, you will soon find that working out details with your spouse is like trying to get out of the city for a weekend away in the summer. No matter how much you rush, you will be slowed down and delayed by forces outside your control.
It will be a long road no matter what you do, and makes more sense from an energy management point of view to accept that rather than struggle against it! I can’t say the divorce process ever gets easy, but when you get good at the mental game it becomes a lot less frustrating.
So here is a quick three step process to change your spouse’s perception in your divorce for success:
Manage emotional reactions.
Agree in part.
Lead your spouse to think differently.
Step 1: Manage Your Emotional Reactions
To win the mental game in your divorce you’ll have to stay cool—at least on the surface. Fortunately, your surface-level reactions are the one thing you can control in your divorce. You will still have below-the-surface emotional reactions, which may cause you to be triggered into your fight or flight mode, but you don’t have to act on how you feel in the moment. Unless you are trained in dealing with conflict under pressure, automatic response you make when you’re upset or triggered most likely will escalate matters and increase your divorce budget. The better course of action is to focus on tools and techniques to help you stay calmer in the moment such as breathing, being relaxed in your body, taking a break, if necessary, and being aware of your triggers and how you can best self-soothe. The appearance of cool is powerful. Go ahead and fake it while you’re working hard to feel it.
Step 2: Agree in part
Nothing stops a person faster than feeling heard and understood. So short-circuit arguments by agreeing in part at least with your spouse on broad points, instead of taking a hard line.
Say you are asking for the children to go to summer camp and your spouse is uncomfortable sending them in the middle of the pandemic. If they say, “I know the kids are begging, but they’re not going to summer camp. I am not going to put them in danger,” you’ll escalate matters and cause most people to be triggered into a power-play dynamic if you say, “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s more dangerous here in town than at a kids’ camp.”
But you can make your spouse feel understood by saying, “It’s a scary time and we all feel vulnerable all the time. It’s been really stressful for all of us to be locked in together.”
Step 3: Lead your spouse to think differently
Once your spouse feels heard on their issue, what you can do is first is again acknowledge their issues, but then focus on positive principles as you make your case. When you do this, assume the best intentions from your spouse and also assume that it will be hard for your spouse to hear you, so go gentle and go quickly.
You could say, “Yeah sending our children to summer camp may be a risk, but if the risk is manageable, then I really see the benefits of letting the children be free for a few weeks, have fun with their friends, be themselves and support our regular camp, which I am sure will appreciate the business, not to mention giving us time away from them too. If they’re being careful about the risk, it seems to me a risk worth taking.”
If your spouse’s response is something like, “I am not willing to take any risk with the health of our children,” the bad response would be to point out that they take those risks already every time they fly, walk out of the house, or go to the grocery store. If you take that approach, you are focusing on the truth, but what you need to focus on is their perception of the truth—that camp is a 100% threat.
I would see that this person is in step one, fight-or-flight mode, so give them a moment or two. If this conversation is done on email, at least 24 hours would be best, and then you could start off by saying something like this:
“The safety of our children is the utmost priority for us. So is having them create deep friendships, try new hobbies, have independence and learn to be self-reliant, while also giving them a happy time this summer after being cooped up all day because their schools have been closed.”
Now that you’ve framed the issue the way you want, let them help you resolve the issue. Say something like:
“Let’s find out from our camp what they are doing about COVID management to put our minds at ease.”
Maybe what you will find in your research is that the camps are going to be testing everyone, that the counselors all have been quarantined and that the camp is having a delayed or staggered season so they can have small groups with social distancing. Basically, the camp is problem-saving, using their big brains to focus on the issues at hand. In the end, being at camp may feel like a safer option for the kids than being stuck at home.
But you can’t even get your spouse to listen to any of these ideas if they are stuck in a fight or flight thinking because you’ve pushed them into a corner by saying they’re stupid or wrong.
If you can learn the art of reframing—helping them see the situation as you do by acknowledging their concerns—not only will you decrease your divorce budget, you will get more of what is important to you in your divorce, through personal agreements, rather than through court. That will also set you up for a workable post-divorce life free of attorneys, courts, and needless conflict.