During a typical divorce, both individuals hire their own personal divorce lawyer. The lawyer’s job is to zealously advocate for their client and to get them the best deal possible. The nature of litigation sets couples up to fight and go back and forth between lawyers. The process makes it nearly impossible for a couple to maintain a peaceful positive relationship. In addition, couples will each have to pay a large lawyer bill as well as have the process drag out longer.
Contra to litigation, mediation focuses on peace and cooperation between the couple to help them come to an agreement that is in the best interest of both individuals and child(ren) if involved.
Family Centered but Child Focused
Child(ren) are put in difficult situations when their parents are going through a litigated divorce. Often times, an individual’s lawyer will advocate why one parent should have more parenting time instead of the other parent. Mediation allows both couples to work together to create a custody schedule looking at the possibilities for each parent to be able to spend as much positive parenting time with the child(ren) as possible. Focusing on what is in the best interest of the child(ren) is critical when coming to an agreement. The goal of mediation is peace. Peace offers parents the opportunity to keep the family together. Even though the parents may not be married anymore, they will always be parents. As a result, maintaining a relationship with the ex-spouse is critical. Mediation helps couples come to an agreement that they helped create.
Fostering Communication
Having a neutral mediator, allows couples to have a planned time to meet and consider all the concerns about the divorce process. Mediators help parties talk about their wants and concerns, but maybe most importantly, the mediators help educate the couple about the process and can help them create solutions that the couple may have not even thought about. The timeframe can be much shorter compared to litigation process because couples are working together to come to an agreement instead of going through their lawyers.
Preserving Confidentiality
After a long divorce through litigation some issues still can remain unsettled and the couple has to have a judge make the final decisions. As a result, the couples forfeits the ability to make the final decisions for themselves and their issues may be on the public record if the judge has to decide the case. In mediation, couples can talk about all of their issues they have while the mediator helps both of them come up with a peaceful and creative resolution that the couple helps create. Conflict in the divorce setting is common, years of issues may come to the surface in mediation. A benefit of mediation, is that those issues are confined to the room. Couples do not have to fear their issues will be in the public spotlight because they are protected under confidentiality.
Couple Created Agreements
In mediation, the mediator will educate the couple about the process but the mediator will also listen to the couple’s wants, needs, and concerns. The mediator’s goal is to help couples reach an equitable resolution to areas like child custody and visitation, child support, and the division of assets and debts. The mediator is a neutral party and therefore is objective in giving possible solutions for resolution of issues. However, the couples are the ones who retain the control and have the final say to what goes into the agreements. When couples help to create the agreement the probability the agreement gets followed post-divorce goes up drastically.
IS IT TIME TO TAKE CONTROL AND CHART YOUR COURSE TO HAPPINESS AND PEACE?
If you want additional information about mediation and other services that we provide or if you wish to schedule a free initial consultation with a Heartland Family Mediators professional, contact us today at 317-251-2589 or email us at [email protected].