When you’ve decided that it is time to end your marriage or to restructure your family, collaborative divorce may be a gentler, easier, faster, and less expensive option than the traditional court battle.

In collaborative divorce, the divorcing couple is guided, advised, and supported by a team of collaboratively-trained attorneys, financial professionals, and mental health professionals through the steps necessary to become divorced. This process includes mediations and negotiations where each spouse has the opportunity to be seen and heard on all of the issues important to them, and also important to the divorce, including parenting time and parenting plans, financial restructuring or division of assets, who keeps the family home- if anyone, and more.

In addition to having an attorney on your side to advise you of your rights and the law in a collaborative way, you will have a financial professional who can help you understand potential tax consequences or long-term possibilities for jointly held property and other investments. You will also have one or two mental health professionals who can help you understand divorce-specific things such as how and when to tell the kids, how to create a parenting plan, how to use healthy communication with your soon-to-be-ex-spouse (even if you’re mad as heck!), how to speak to your children about their other parent, and how to maintain healthy boundaries around the issue of divorce and parent issues, to name a few.

The collaborative process is typically less expensive than a traditional divorce as well, as you and your spouse will be negotiating and mediating through your issues instead of fighting out the details in lengthy—and very costly—court battles.

Just some of the reasons to consider a collaborative divorce:

• You will have an entire team of knowledgeable and experienced professionals at your disposal to help you make important decisions (legal, financial, emotional, psychological) that will affect the rest of your life and your children’s lives.
• Divorce and separation are considered one of traumatic Adverse Childhood Experiences that have been shown to have lasting negative effects on physical and psychological health, well-being, and opportunity. By divorcing and restructuring your family in a healthier, gentler way, you can help limit the trauma not only to yourself and your soon-to-be-ex-spouse but also to your children.
• In addition to helping you through your divorce, the collaborative divorce process also provides an enormous amount of education on all aspects of family restructuring. Ideally, your whole family will benefit for years to come from the financial, legal, emotional, and psychological tools that you emerge with from this process.