When clients come to me they are usually at their worst. They are worried about child custody, visitation, support, and property division. They don’t know if they can keep their house, who should move out and they feel desperate about their relationship with their children. Will they be able to parent in a meaningful way? Are the children going to be damaged by the divorce? Will they have enough money to adequately provide for the children? These issues represent the most important aspects in a person’s life.

Raising children well and having adequate resources with which to live are essential components to living a purposeful life and being happy. With life’s most important issues at stake, it’s no wonder that divorce can be a destructive, contentious process, with people spending many thousands of dollars to have their issues determined by a judge. But divorce can also be a constructive process.

I come to work each day knowing I am going to change the way a family lives for the better. I am a healer and I bring tools to the world of divorce that restore family health rather than destroy what is left of a broken family. I can’t do this work by myself, however. Both spouses must be committed to restoring health to their family and both must be willing to work with me to learn new skills.

I use the Collaborative Process to help people transition out of broken marriages and into a new relationship that has improved communication and places that focus on raising happy, healthy children who have enough time with both parents and feel loved and supported in both parents homes. We have to agree to discard labels like sole custody, joint custody and shared custody and focus on the nuts and bolts of parenting and what each parent is going to do to ensure the goal of raising healthy children is accomplished.

This is not an easy task, but with the proper level of client commitment and use of talented professionals, divorce can be a healing process with the help of lawyers who know how to employ the healing arts in their work with families.