Recent Posts in Coping With Betrayal Category

Palm Springs Divorce Recovery Group Begins June, 2012

Marriage Counselor/Divorce Coach, Bev Jewell, is offering another 6 week "Growing Through Divorce™" support group beginning the first week of June. This opportunity is ideal for people who are recently separated, stuck within the divorce process, or who are coping with the aftermath of relationship end months or even years following your breakup. 

As you well know, divorce is a crisis that dramatically alters the foundations of a person's life. "Growing Through Divorce™" helps to create a sense of security, community, support and personal growth so people can get through this stage of confusion and grief and start to productively build their new life. Sharing this experience with others who are similarly situated has immense power and benefits.

The group's focus includes moving through the emotional stages of the divorce process in order to reintegrate and rebalance ourselves;. These stages often involve denial that the divorce is really happening, questioning (bargaining) if one could have done more to prevent the divorce, becoming unstuck in patterns of blame/anger at "the other" for "doing this to them".  These emotions, as well as the deep sense of loss, have to be addressed and dealt with before forgiveness and acceptance can be approximated or achieved. It is also important to understand the roles that partners played in the marriage, the lessons that can be learned, and to feel gratitude for what was good and wonderful, when it was. Without this healing process people often rebound into another relationship, carrying their previous baggage with them, or transfer their distress to their children or others.   

Each group is limited to a maximum of 8 people, in order to create a more personal and intimate dialogue and experience. The workshop is six weeks long. Each session is 90 minutes, The cost is $25 a week per person, and is intended to be affordable.

If this process sounds like it might have value for you, please call Bev Jewell at 760-699-7027 for more information and to reserve your spot in the group! 

Related Websites: www.growingthroughdivorce.com, www.desertdivorcesolutions.com and www.essentialfocus.com  

One reason why people become "stuck" is that they develop patterns of dealing with conflict, over time, with their spouses, domestic partners, employers, children, inlaws, and just about everybody else. We respond in repetitive types of ways. These can be likened to unconscious "strategies" in the sense that we rarely make a decision to employ one pattern or another. The patterns can become conditioned over time, and may become a part of how we have structured our personalities. They may or may not be the same pattern in dealing with every person, or the same pattern that will arise every time, but patterns do develop. Very often the conflict patterns of other people trigger our own in specific and even predictable ways.

If you are considering mediating your family law matter, it may be helpful for you to reflect on your conflict interaction patterns. One important reason why is that conflict patterns provide a strong argument in favor of using mediation instead of some other dispute resolution method like the Courts, violence as an extreme example, or just plain arguing or disruptive conduct (yes, each of those can be a strategy for overcoming conflict). 

At DFMS we suggest that some form of peacemaking is the only approach that resolves disputes - the others just impose outcomes and call it a "result" or perhaps a "consequence."

In general terms there are three primary patterns that persons in conflict employ or express as a coping mechanism: Accommodation, Avoidance, and Control. They manifest in behaviors and speech, or the seeming absence thereof. They tend to look like this. Do any seem to fit your style of dealing with conflict more than others?

Accommodation

• Giving in
• Playing the victim
• Attempting to pacify the other
• Deference to the law
• Deference to the mediator
• Emphasis on sense of personal inadequacy
• Wanting peace at any price
• Failing to assert one's own needs

Avoidance

• Refusing to participate in mediation, litigation, or even conflict itself
• Avoidance of differences
• Indecision
• Withdrawing behaviors (refusing to engage and isolation)
• Going off on tangents
• Being overwhelmed by complexity
• Difficulties processing information
• Wanting it over at any cost

Control

• Dominating the other party or the process
• Seeing only one's own interest
• Rigid positions and outlooks
• Blaming behaviors
• Shaming behaviors
• Threatening behaviors
• Inability/unwillingness to view situations in different ways
• Acting in ingratiating ways towards the other party or the mediator

• The avoider avoids, and his or her interests are not protected
• The accommodator accommodates, and so sacrifices his or her interests
• The controller controls, tramples the interests of others, and their own as well

Mediation holds the promise that these patterns, including the triggers that the cause them, can be understood and real choices can be restored that are much healthier for all concerned.

The conflict that is inherent in divorce and custody contests is frequently related to distrust over how to cooperatively co-parent children.Challenges such as finance and asset division are also often topics of angry contention. Suspicions that parties aren't being transparent or forthcoming often underlie them. When this occurs, negotiations can become problematic and heated because they become imbued with meaning and feelings beyond the scope of the topic, particularly where a person’s feelings become too big and intense for them to be able to manage and express productively. In the mental health field we refer to this as “affect regulation,” which means that the difficulty in moderating emotions and their expressions in what is said and done can be a primary factor in impeding the resolution of high conflict disputes.  

Historically, emotionally conflicted cases were managed through the court’s inherent authoritative power.Yet, solving the dispute of tangible assets without resolving the underlying negative emotions and animosity among the participants is often a half-measure that invites the perpetuation of this conflict. Increasingly, the courts and child advocates have come to realize the costs and dangers in letting these emotional conflicts persist. Prolonged and antagonistic legal battles may provide a form of settlement or judgment that defines people's economic relationships (often coercively), but with the consequence of emotionally damaged parents and children. That does not offer finality, but the reverse and it tends to be short-lived.

This is one of the many destructive attributes of our adversarial legal system:It treats people by reordering the external parts of their experience, and ignores what is happening inside of them.

When emotions become charged, the parts of our brain that we rely upon for clear judgment and thinking shut down and go offline. We call this the “reptile” brain.   Naturally, then, we react aggressively and intensely and with little ability to filter our thoughts, speech and behaviors. 

The role of a licensed psychotherapist as a therapeutic co-mediator is to educate and support parties to learn or reclaim the ability to interact constructively – and certainly without a continuing cycle of distrust and abuse. As long as one partner behaves provocatively the other finds it hard not to respond in kind. By focusing on emotional reactivity and a spouse’s perception of threat, loss, and hurt, we re-establish empathy to the “aggrieved” partner(s), helping each to regulate their emotions back to more manageable levels. What a relief this can be for people who are suffering huge relational anxiety! The meanings beneath the tangible issues being negotiated are heard and incorporated into the dialogue as we model a productive way to communicate differently about difficult earlier situations. We map out strategies for how to handle similar situations when they unavoidably arise again in the future. The benefits of such a model are felt and seen in a reduction in traumatic experience for children as well as the parents. Anxiety diminishes. Trust and sanity returns. New opportunities arise.

Likewise, undue court time and unfortunate legal expense can be reduced.  Indeed, court can be avoided almost altogether. This means you are directing your life, not some stranger to your family.

Elizabeth, the fact that you are asking these questions tells me you are on the right track. Who knows where it might lead? Perhaps in a direction of wellness, however things sort out?