Illinois Divorce Lawyer BlogIs Divorce Mediation for You?
Are you wondering:
• What is the most informed way, at the least expense, to get divorced?
Published on:
Kane County Divorce: Divorce Mediation
Published on:
Talking to Children About Divorce: Kane County Divorce Lawyer
Family therapist Diane Shearer says we should look beyond the questions about divorce and get at what kids are really asking for. “When kids ask tough questions, they aren’t looking for complicated answers. They are looking for affirmation, not information.” This means they want to be assured that you love them no matter what. They want to know that you recognize their turbulent feelings. Here are some tips on three of the most common questions.
1. Why? From “why did you stop loving each other” to “why are you doing this,” kids want to know the big-picture reason behind your split. Shearer says the fear behind this question is that if mom and dad can stop loving each other, they might stop loving their kids, too. So you’ll need to assure your child that love between parents is very different from a parent’s love for their child. Your love for them is permanent and will never change. In most cases, it’s not appropriate to get into the details of why you’re divorcing. Instead, reassure your child that you are still a family, just a different kind of family.
2. Is this my fault? Young children, especially, are self-centered, so they can’t help wondering if they are somehow at fault for your split. Again, the most important thing here is to assure your child that your love for them is unconditional. They need to know their parents’ complicated relationship has nothing to do with them — they are NOT the cause of the divorce. They will always be loved. That will never change.
Published on:
20 Reasons to be Thankful for Divorce
1. “I am thankful for becoming the person that I am. I’ve learned so much along the way. Even the pain served a purpose.” -Amber L.
2. “I’m thankful for my self-respect.” -Tom H.
3. “I’m thankful the two of us were able to rebuild our lives. We got out earlier instead of waking up 50 years later and asking, ‘what happened to us?'” -Pilar G.
Published on:
Kane County Divorce: Divorcing A High-Conflict Personality
What Therapists Don’t Tell You About Divorcing A High-Conflict Personality
Therapists are trained to help clients become self-aware and authentic. For people who grew up in invalidating environments, where they learned to suppress their feelings and needs in order to be accepted, therapy can be life-altering.
Competent therapists who provide a corrective emotional experience can make it possible for people who never had a voice to find one. Once self-actualized, people generally find the quality of their lives improve: they find the right career, attract the right mate and extricate themselves from toxic relationships.
Published on:
Three Financial Fears About Divorce
Divorce can feel like a full-time job. It can be all-consuming, affecting every aspect of your life. Between the (sometimes) contentious texts with your ex-partner, phone calls to your attorney and figuring out child custody, where you are going to live and how your new life will look, there is almost always a sense of uncertainty or fear just below the surface. And regardless of how affluent the couple is, there is often a great deal of worry about the financial future.
Once separated or divorced, the informed spouse already has the experience and relationships to transition financially, but the other spouse has to start from scratch. In my experiences as a divorce financial planner who has specialized in working with the “out” spouse, three fears have emerged as most common. While some degree of worry and apprehension is to be expected, with a little work and planning, these three common divorce fears can be eliminated and can help the out spouse feel more confident and secure.
1. Fear of not getting a fair share. If your finances are simple, it can be easy to evenly divide the assets, but if your finances are more complex (e.g., multiple homes, employer stock options, closely held business, illiquid investments, separate property), this can become much more difficult. The solution is to answer these two questions: What do we own and what is it worth? If you are concerned that assets are not being disclosed, discuss this with your attorney and consider hiring a forensic accountant — basically a financial detective — to help uncover any undisclosed assets. The next issue is to arrive at a fair value for each asset. This is an area that is ripe for abuse. The valuation of family-owned or other privately held companies is inherently prone to subjectivity and, particularly in the divorce context, manipulation.
Published on:
Surviving a BPD Relationship
Falling in love with a person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is an emotional roller coaster ride. The relationship involves never-ending emotional blackmails, hurtful criticisms, threats, manipulations, verbal attacks and silent treatments. Borderlines are known to call you at work more than 20 times in a day. Borderlines need constant reassurance. Borderlines feel the need to check up on you all the time. Borderlines also wake you up in the middle of the night because of their concerns.
How can you continue to love a person who will give you the responsibility for anything and everything bad that happens to them? You are accused as the source of all their pains, heartbreaks, anger, frustrations and hardships? The Borderline will emotionally wear you out by their insults and accusations.
Borderlines have a problem with regulating their emotions. They feel real pain and fear of abandonment.
Published on:
What Dads Should Know in a Custody/Parenting Case
1. Fight as hard as you can to get the most time possible from the very start. Whether you want the kids to live with you (as primary residential custodial parent) or you simply want to have an “aggressive” visitation access schedule, be clear about your goals and push for what you want. If you want equal time (or any decent amount of time), you need to push for more from the very beginning of the case.
2. Find an attorney who gets it. (Blog Author’s Note: Illinois Attorney Michael F. Roe “gets it!”) Many divorce lawyers just don’t understand why dads want more access time. You are dealing with a system that has historically favored mothers’ custody wishes, and is only now very slowly changing.
3. Do not bring child support issues up in custody conversations. Period. Many people — even some lawyers — will assume you want more time with your kids because you want to pay less child support, even when faced with facts that you are the more nurturing parent. While some states tie access time to pro rata support (like New Jersey), some, like Illinois, do not.
Published on:
Patrick Stewart, Refuge, PTSD and Domestic Violence
Published on:
How to Recover from an Affair Involving Borderline Personality Disorder
How to Recover from an Affair Involving Borderline Personality Disorder
By Tommy (http://youmebpd.com/)
The feeling of pain and betrayal that an affair causes is something I would wish on almost no one, but when you add in the addition of borderline personality disorder it throws in a whole new set of variables. Our particular story is one that has a lot of mitigating circumstances, but that makes it no less painful to go through. In June of 2011 I lost my wife (at least that is what it felt like). June, 2011; I checked my wife into Prairie St. John’s facility in Fargo, ND for depression and manic behavior. She went into the facility a loving wife, devoted mother and successful business owner. She spent the first night there crying asking to be sent home to her family. She was met with doctors telling her that if she did not stop crying, asking to go home and start taking all the medicine they had for her that they would hold her indefinitely.
