Your approach to your family law litigation matters. Whether that’s your initial divorce, modification action, or contempt, how you see your former partner and how you treat them during the litigation has a lasting impact on your life and your family.
This person, who you formerly shared a life with, is now no longer in that role. There are hurt feelings, emotional turmoil and raw pain that persist from the breakdown of that former romantic relationship. It’s easy to want to take out your pain on the other party, to use the justice system as a weapon of retribution and punishment for the person who you thought would be there with you until the very end.
Some people approach their litigation with this mindset. “I want my ex to feel the pain that I feel. I want to make them pay.”
We have over 30 years of experience with this. We’ve learned that using litigation to punish your former partner will end up punishing you too. You will spend more money on attorney’s fees than you thought possible. Your family will be in the turmoil of litigation for months on end and possibly years. Your reason will be clouded by pain and emotion which may lead to you acting against the advice of counsel and unintentionally taking out your pain on the legal team you have hired to protect you.
Then, after you have invested all of your self – emotionally, financially, physically, and mentally – into the litigation that you hoped would make the other side pay for what they did to you and you finally go to Court, the Judge will make their ruling. Even if you win and the Court completely sides with you, you are left with the wreckage of acting out your pain on the person with whom you still have to coparent, work with to sell the house, split the retirement and untangle a life you built together.
You came to your family law attorney because you have an intimate, personal problem with has broad legal consequences. Once the legal consequences are resolved through your litigation, you will still have the family. How do you want your family to function once the lawyers are no longer involved and you navigate the next chapter of your life? How you reform that new family is in no small part up to you.
It is your world. How do you want to create it?
Cara Schlosser