My Blog

My blog is meant to inform but its primary purpose is not to be informative. It is about the law but it is not solely about the law but also about those places the law does not go. The law is the platform from which I dive. My blog is about my opinions but is not primarily about my opinions since I often temper these to the subject matter on hand, not to mention the imagined audience. Quite often when I open a subject which is related to the law for discussion, I find myself in a place I never meant to be, or to go, as if the subject takes on a life of its own. I write articles based on what I do for a living, and I am a family lawyer, but of course that is not all I am. I find that when I engage with a subject, and use writing to express my thoughts, that quite often the journey is more interesting than the end and that what I thought I was writing about is not what I wrote about at all. This seems to me to be a metaphor for life. I write, therefore, to throw some light into the dark, to increase my understanding and by extension hopefully, other people’s understanding of what often seems incomprehensible, to enliven the dull so my spirit does not sag and to throw some humour at what is often deeply sad so that I can, or maybe, dare I say hopefully, “we”, can gain perspective. I doubt I succeed but the effort is honest.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Helping Hand

It is very tempting in the throes of hurt and grief to give into the temptation to behave badly. However, as good parents, which we all aspire to be, we know in our calm rational higher functioning selves that angry scenes, vengeful actions and so forth will cause our children suffering and damage both immediately and in the long term. Our children love us both. The challenge for us is to transform our grief, sadness and anger into something constructive i.e to take the ending of our marriage and make it into an effective and good co-parenting relationship.

To behave constructively and rationally, you need to a) be completely convinced that a) civility is a worthy object and also that good communication post separation is highly desirable for the sake of your children and b) to have loads of support around you. All too often well meaning friends and family can feed our hurt because they are hurt to and they feel for us.

I have written about the five broad stages of grief and knowing about these will help you to understand how you might be affected. I have also written about the need for children to have good parenting during the separation and how this corresponds to a time when we are likely to be at our weakest as parents. Educating ourselves on these things is helpful and empowering. It normalises our emotions and behaviour for us, our family and friends in a confusing and deeply upsetting time, it empowers us and puts us more in control. But while it is a crucial first step, is not enough. Dealing with the challenge of grief and loss takes enormous resources. As well as dealing with our own emotions, we will also have to parent at this time and deal with the grief and loss our partner is experiencing. We will probably need help and happily help is at hand.

The Collaborative Coach will assist you to process your grief and thus enable you to make the necessary decisions, family and personal, that you will have to make at this time. Your coach will help you to stay in tune with your emotions so that you know what you can and cannot achieve in any particular day. Of course, you cannot control how your spouse or partner behaves but you can control how you respond. The Collaborative Coach will work with you to examine the communication pattern between you and your spouse or partner so that you can better control your responses to situations but also communicate with one another so as to be able to make the decisions that need to be made consequent on the separation and also so that you can co-parent effectively.

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