Clinical Interventions for Clients during Divorce

1. Be a shock absorber for safe expression of extreme and fluctuating emotions.
2. Provide emotional support, hope, and stability – lend your ego.
3. Educate client about what promotes best outcomes for themselves and children.
4. Encourage learning in order to made informed decisions (family’s finances, custody and property laws, pensions, etc.)
5. Educate client about mediation and other alternatives to litigation.
6. Encourage client to have a safety plan if there has been domestic violence, particularly if there is a custody battle going on.
7. Provide ideas about age-appropriate parenting schedules.
8. Help client prepare for negotiation – how to negotiate, clarify what’s important and what isn’t, in-session role play, needs-based negotiation.
9. Help the client identify alternate sources of emotional, familial, and social support.
10. Encourage client to get advice from legal counsel, try mediation, engage other professionals as needed (financial planners, Human Resources personnel, accountants, groups for children).
11. Present a paradigm for post-divorce parenting.
12. Normalize stages of adjustment in first and second year.
13. Help client find alternate sources of self-esteem (may be work, parenting, hobbies).
14. Work with client regarding what to tell children, when, and how.

Clinicians can help the “Leaver”

• Be honest- pull bandage off quickly

• Accept responsibility 

• Be able to listen to other’s pain without becoming defensive or counter-attacking

• Apologize

•  If children, introduce concept of continued but different connection.  Have patience.

Clinicians can help the “Left”

• Cope with rejection and rebuild self-esteem

•  Grieve

• Accept lack of answers; emerge from denial

• Begin to address practical matters re children, $, legal needs, house.

• Avoid demonizing the Leaver.

• Accept some responsibility for what led up to the break-up

• Find other support systems needed