the next step to the forest the steps before divorce there is a better path to divorce that's our topic for today but you know what we do on a dr joyce show we take it down with three deep breaths are you ready inhale into the dr joy show thank you for having me so is there really a better path to divorce there is except when you're going through it you don't see it quite there is so how did you get started why why a divorce just very quickly i got married young had a child at twenty three was married to a man with two children who told me at the time that he couldn't find his ex wife or the children way way way let me back up for did   no when you got married they he had an ex wife and the two kids that i did know but he said he could not find them he did not know where they were so when i had my daughter it was almost like a gift i was giving him as well as myself to be able to give him a child because he couldn't find his first two ok two months afterwards i got a call from the ex wife out of nowhere because i didn't know or he didn't know where they were and i got later i got divorced and we became good friends and i had asked her that question and it turns out he knew where they were all along and had told me so he started lying from the from the beginning correct and twenty three and this happened and i had my little baby and she basically said coming get your kids or the guy i'm living with is going to adopt them and he was all about money and i think that's really what it came down to so i was these are your kids you're going to get on a plane they were out west in california really so at the ripe old age of twenty three from memorial day to labor day i had three little kids six four and a newborn  bless us ok couple years later i had it we had another daughter but what had transpired every year of having three little children is that i watched how these two expel says communicated with each other and what they did to these children and it just kills me because i don't come from that kind of home and most people don't and back then i was probably one of my first friends who ever married somebody divorced so i was an anomaly to begin with and i had no one to look at to say what how do i change this what do i do i was young and had no clues i just right there had to be something better you don't do this to kids if these little kid i was would call from california during the school year and say daddy can i have a pair of roller skates his answer was no you mom gets child support no and that's how he would talk to his children wow yeah so i would immediately get him off the phone and go what are you talking about of course they could have roller skates if they were here they would have roller skates you call back but the damage was done look what he said to the kids and his ex wife in anger would send them to us with no clothes they would come off a plane with nothing so we would have to buy them clothes every year and this is what was this was the dance these two were doing and the kids were upon oh my god terrible just terrible so this is been something in my heart because i always wanted to be a teacher i worked in day camps and nursery schools kids of my thing and i just don't do this to kids so because of the way our marriage went i was the support of the family financially and i could not pursue this dream and we had a small business together and in the mid ninety's something came across my desk to become through the courts to be trained as a certified mediator so this was also as as you can see my marriage was never a great marriage realizing these things as they come along along with other things and this was my opportunity to try to come out myself as an individual again and move out of the business and eventually move out of that marriage so that was the path i took so how long were you married to the first total twenty three years that's a long time yes it was but i had no support my parents had moved out west when i was thirty there was nobody here to help me and i just had my blinders on you know i had a support of a family nine months a year i had two kids three months a year i had four kids you had to support the family my ex husband was not good at that either and you just do what you have to do and if he wasn't a good husband i knew oh my god what kind of divorce would i be going through right without any support and back then there was no support and you know everything was litigious back then was no mediators that's what thrilled me about this whole thing so i became a family court mediator ok that island and as time was going on i knew my marriage was ending because i gained my self respect back seeing i could do things for myself right and i went to wall street to get a job continue to mediate as a volunteer with the courts because it was really an important thing and i got my divorce so you initiated the divorce so i just have this thing in the news and i have determined and it really works very well for the wealthy basically right now usually the man and it's being sexist but right the larger wage earner when there's a discrepancy in earnings right paid alimony sometimes the woman too right and it was a tax deduction right now what's going to happen is as of december thirty first two thousand and eighteen that deduction goes away so when they have to pay alimony going forward think about they don't have a deduction and when you break down how moneys get allocated during a divorce the woman will now get less alimony payment because his net dollars are not theirs they would be if they had the deduction now though whoever receives the money do they have to claim it as income they're ok and it is claimed as income but they will not even have as much income so it does affect the other party as well because they will get less money due to this new tax law wow so discuss the role of a divorce coach ok basically it is a new field as well and i started doing that four years ago divorce coach can be any part of the divorce process i deal with clients that are deciding if they should or shouldn't stay in this i work with clients throughout the process i'm now considered part of the divorce team the way they could be a lawyer a financial advisor an accountant if this property you have a real estate person and mortgage person a divorce coach brings it all together a divorce coach saves time and money as an example you come in to me or to my office or any really certified divorce coach is what i would say you don't know if you want to lawyer you don't know if you want to mediate or you don't know if you want a collaborative law process you first have to determine these things and that's where you come in i can say yes they don't have to go to a lawyer and make a mistake and just think everything is litigious and i just need a lawyer and so that i fret and that clock is ticking when you go to an attorney's office oh my goodness from the time that you walk in it's almost like they just hit the clock and it starts going in those early minute every minute and those fees just ramp up from what i heard in new jersey typical lawyers fees at three fifty to five hundred dollars an hour so if you go in and start to tell your story from the very beginning and you're very emotional you could take hours when you're determining what it is you want in a settlement you tell your story to an attorney it could take hours they don't know what it is you want that you must have what it is you're willing to negotiate on you just keep talking right keep bringing up money and the attorneys don't want to do it they want to do the legal process and they don't want that so when folks come to me this is what i sit down to do with them and i help them figure out what it is they need what they want what process i give them information on questions to interview when the attorney you're the therapist as well well it's not really therapy therapy is there is have patience ok there is also go back to try to help you figure out ok is very forward focused ok gotcha so that is the difference in coaching but divorce coaching is a highly specialized field versus a life coach or other coaches because when you go to them you're looking to just improve something in your life divorce coaching you have to be like i'm a mediator you have to know certain things but we don't advise along those lines we never do that's the lawyers job but we ask the questions to move them forward to keep them healthy so they can get out of their emotional brain because you cannot make these decisions when you're highly emotional and charged get them into their thinking brain by asking the questions they need to figure out where their life needs to head ok so here's a discussion point i have written down the american bar association has recognized that divorce coaching is an alternative dispute resolution process we are part of that team now it is written up in the a b a i'm very proud to say that so who also defies you i went to a school called the certified divorce coaching the c d c there in tampa florida but what they do it globally and it's run by randy and peggy cooper and their standards were through the i c f which is the international coaching federation ok we get set certified we have to keep up credits we have a standards of ethics and it's highly regulated so is divorce or divorce coaching a woman's thing or do do you have male clients too and i know your answer i'm now you i have male clients i do think it's interesting because i actually thought when i was doing this i would be doing it to empower women and all of a sudden i started getting men and it's really interesting because by helping the men i'm really helping the family so it became a blessing in disguise i never thought i would want to do it and here i am helping men so how can you as a divorced coach eased the negotiation process and turn them against you know going into war like the war of roses on my dime so you saw that movie right over and over yes they were very litigious and they got litigious attorneys they did what they did so how how do i do it i role play really i do role place with my client you want to give an example ok we yeah ok like to i have a client who calls they're highly charged about something their spouse says i act that could be even not getting divorced i know that actually ok so what do we do i say let's role play it like you got charge back and now all of a sudden whatever button a pregnant pause reach out to me especially during divorce proceedings in terms of going on we can do with this role play i call a ten minute laser coaching and they reach out to me in between class in between sessions and we do a quick how would how do you want to be remembered through this sometimes the kids are in the next room what do you want your children to hear step back how do you want to be remembered through this when you're arguing if you inflame him or what does that accomplish nothing so this is what you're looking for how can we say this another way let's do a quick practice and so i could do something sweet and simple like that and it stops the panic but then they have to remember that when they go home go they do or we practice again in m they didn't go well why didn't it go well what prevented it from going well well let's try something else so do you usually do you get one person that comes to you out of the union or two always one i am not i don't do my arch counseling even if they come to me in the place of deciding should i use shouldn't i go a lot of times let me just explain marriage counseling yeah bills go there that really want help then you have couples that go there that are just appeasing or shutting up the other person so you're not always there with a full heart you see my face i saw your face i've seen it they go they go for a month they're done look where wonderful i did everything and they just kind of step back in their old ways that's why people get divorced they keep saying how many times did i go to marriage counseling i've been there six times we've seen attorneys i work on the person first of all you can't keep doing the same thing the same way right expect different results that's cool insanity isn't it is ok that's the word i don't want to i don't say that to my client so i kind of just tell her it a little and i say so how can we do this you know to help you if you change a behavior in the home and you're consistent with it then either they're going to change with you and things will start to get better and then we change the next behavior it's like retraining a child sometimes i hate to say it but work on who you are so either it's going to change the dynamic of the marriage and your marriage will turn around or you've now started to change yourself a little bit and you could walk out of here being a different person important so you mentioned children before yeah what's the impact of divorce on the children it's never great it's never optimal children never want to see their parents breaking up and there are a lot of marriages if they can work out an agreement with a stay together and it's peaceful and many marriages do that too they set up their own little side way of living contract call it what you want as long as it's peaceful around the children the children are good with it but if this yelling and screaming and constant animosity and fighting in sniping what a marriage and a relationship looks like so what happens when they go out when they get older they emulate what they see right so you're not helping your child either they rather see two happy parents in happy homes too and  learned that so jackie would you please share a success story ok i will share the one with the man since we're discussing men here because the will of the i'm glad you're going to share one with the guys because typically the guys aren't going to be the ones i'm sorry typically the guys are going to be the ones to reach out for help because they're you know that's just who they are a lot of times right yes i'll share i'm going to get a lot of things  in for saying that but i'm putting it out there the truth is men don't reach out this was very new even for me and i embraced it because again i think i'm helping the family so right there was a gentleman who reached out to me in the middle of his divorce while it was going on was a year ago october that they were getting separated because money he was a major wage earner she was not they had the big house three children all the trappings all the trappings clearly there was addiction and alcohol issues in the home  and they were both part of the process was they had to go for help but there was also seems from his version of the story again there's always more but it's very it's my client there was a lot of parental alienation to the point where they had a restraining order for him and he had to have a and that any unsupervised visits with his children which already makes it very strange and very difficult oh absolutely he had a teenage daughter that on a good day a teenage daughter can be very hormonal and then along with the mother feeding a lot of negative information why we don't do that right she would be absolutely impossible when they would go out and at that point all they were doing was going out for dinner because dad didn't know what else to do he would go to the car and she'd be riding on the cart nasty words to him and about him he couldn't take his son to the bathroom he had a four year old because the supervisor was a woman and so she couldn't go to the bathroom with him oh my goodness so you can imagine the tension just sitting at a table they probably all couldn't wait to get away from each other so he had asked me what what can i do what year and again i don't advise so the question i would ask this gentleman or someone else is when you were a happy family or a family what did you do as a family that brought smiles to everyone's faces that made good memories see i can answer that i have to ask him you know he certainly did he took a pregnant pause to the choice he did and what happened well he said we would play tennis together we would go to amusement parks and go on he remembers the great bumper cars that will slamming up against each other who giggles more than on a bumper car all right oh absolutely but while he was going through this course of the emotional state he forgot about that and the alienation and going to therapy all the time in going for classes and having to meditate and whatever was going on you get very caught up and you only think about this and that nobody's opening up your mind and get you away from the emotion and into the thinking so i said what what's preventing you from doing that again and with that he said he said i never thought of that oh yeah the light bulb will know nothing so quick and what seems so easy yet i can't think yourself when you're highly charged emotionally going through a divorce and he said is there anything else i go well i have no i can't give advice so i'm very careful how i frame things i said did you take any pictures from the house before you got separated he said yes i said i have a lot of clients who send notes every week or so with pictures of when they were all together with happy faces and just drop a note is that something you can think you think you can do along with now doing more fun things with the kids as opposed to just sitting in a restaurant right and he he did he embraced it he started sending especially to his daughter who was the one who really needed to be broken down a bit more and as time went on things he would say to me well as a woman so in relation to the question about a man i think they're very comfortable speaking to a woman well so it goes as a woman and i know you have children i have pictures all over and grandchildren i just i'm at a loss is there anything else you can tell me that you might do with kids or your other clients because he sees how i word things now right and i gave him some other ideas and he took them he went to the wild wild west he went to the dinosaur park but he took his sessions with you seriously so serious and then he looked inside himself to see what he could do and then made some changes and then took it back home wrecked and so what happened while he also had me looking at his agreement ok what we thought or not fair again it's not a matter what i think is lawyer but i would question lines with him and go through it with him and asked him if it was reversed how is his wife with this how would you be a few with the wife how do you think she would be  husband so i dig deep that's kind of questions i ask because everybody's entitled to something right try to remember to put your shoe on somebody else's foot see it from somebody else you know so we go through that and in june they finalize their agreement his wife ended up taking the children to florida which was part of the agreement to live down there now her parents and he sees his children more he's been writing me ok has been seeing his children more since they're in florida they have quality time the agreement his ex wife saw the changes and allowed him more visitation than she did when we first started the process right so everything turned out pretty good well so that's really really good yeah so what is your process because i know my and i and so how does it start i don't want to say it is the but right high level it's very individual if they come to me just deciding if they should or they shouldn't that there's one process so we start with working on them as an individual it's like i said they have to start to change their behaviors even with the spouse in the home if they want that marriage to work right and see where it goes ok so that's we start with that process and we work on that in steps again whether there are side wins role plays however and i feel that my client what they're capable of too and at the end of every session we have to walk away with least one thing to do and i always ask them on a scale of one to ten are you going to do this and if it's anything less than a ten answer my response is what's preventing you from getting to attend good and if they come back next week and they don't do it it's the same question you're making them think yes jackie yes i yeah and ok so now they come back and they say yes it's a ten i'm going to do what we discussed and then how does it i don't know the sessions the you do well i never do one session at a time i start out with always in groups of three because one session in coaching will not help anybody doesn't work that way  going back to then that's just if i should or i shouldn't then if they're in the midst of coming in at the beginning of a process i start to i have lists of how to get prepared things they need to do check a credit report change your it's impossible the forms are mind boggling so instead of doing that again with your attorney coming in with a box at three fifty to five hundred dollars an hour you do we do it together now i don't do anything for the client especially if it's a woman who has been in a position and doesn't know the finances right we do it together ok she has to learn these things that's part of how i have to empower a woman in those situations and then when i worked with this man to teach him how to be a better father right and to think a little bit more like a woman so i don't have to teach a woman how to think a little bit more like a man in the typical right so they've done it before of course so we we do things like that how are you getting healthy what about what are you ever pulled in at the point where they've already seen an attorney oh yeah it's her she's referred me oh good because they don't want to do this work no they just think they don't want to get to the contract or a way to go in here right so we come up with the information to take a couple of sessions that's why i say i do them in groups of three what is it you really must have you think you still want the house well let's do a budget can bring forth the house do you know how to go about getting repairs degree know what the home is worth so these are questions that and i make them go find the answers how to find the answers because if you want the house you can have to figure out how to do this that's right so you work on that that's the thing that's key now you talked about being healthy is work life balance in there some oh you want to type so on that your sleep and eating a critical as we all know now we've learned that yeah divorce that doesn't exist so on top of high emotion if you're not sleeping well and you're not eating well how are you going to make decisions for the rest of your life once you sign on that dotted line it's over it's a contract it is legal and binding here so we have to make sure that you are comfortable with what you're doing and th tells you what the law is and what you're entitled to with the end of the day it is your life you make that decision nobody tells you what to do but that's where i help them really figure out what it is they can live with what they can't live with where they could be in the middle and just start to move on and have a life for themselves it's a second chance so how can my viewers reach you thank you joy ok well my website is w w w dot better path to divorce dot com and i have a phone number i work on myself all the time because of the emergency nature of the calls i get so client it always have to reach me or text me nine one seven three five three one six five five no thank you nine months seven three five three one six five five now do you work with people in person skype on the phone how all of the above i have clients actually all over your global that i'm very global so if they're local i least and i know schedules are crazy would like to at least meet them once just like you would me a face to face is really important oh yeah but other than that we do face time we do phone work we do anything and everything can be sent through emails if there's a project or an assignment that i'd like the client to do when they agree to do clearly do you have any final thoughts or advice you can give advice yeah well again i don't promote to force especially if this kid's involved what is the best advice i can give you maintain your dignity going through it to the best of your ability because people will remember you reach out to your friends but don't just pick two friends because you're going to wear them now pick a few other people you can talk to that you can trust that you can trust yeah ok they were ns i'm making an assumption yeah i know i cheerleaders right you do need someone neutral to help you get through this process it's really really important that someone helps you move forward because you do life is short i don't know if you're getting divorced in your thirty's forty's fifty's doing a lot of work now with older people as well as a whole new segment of the population they call it gray divorce and life's short be happy thank you so much for yes thank you dr joy should i want to help people it's a rough time of life i know that's right until