Preparing For Divorce: If You Asked For It, If You Didn’t

Micki McWade’s article, “10 Tips For A Sane Divorce: Five For You, Five For Me”, outlines the steps both the person asking for the divorce as well as the one it is happening to can take to feel more prepared. She makes the point that there are big differences between the emotional mindset of the initiator vs. the non-initiator of divorce. Read more

Parenting After Divorce

What can you do if your adolescent daughter brings a troubling issue to you and you have absolutely no idea how to handle it? How can you learn the best way to teach your toddler not to do something?  What if your kids just won’t stop fighting? Will you choose to have the final say to stop the squabbling or would helping your child to make their own choice be the best way to go? While you and your ex (or soon to be ex) are officially “co-parents “, you will nonetheless find yourself making many parenting decisions by yourself after the divorce. When it’s just you and the kids tonight, this weekend, or this week, issues will inevitably crop up and then it’s parenting showtime…what will you do? Read more

Learn to Fight Less With Your Spouse

Want to fight less with your spouse? Then don’t be yourself! It’s only natural for there to be disagreement from time to time between any two people in a relationship. How you work things out (or don’t) has a great impact on your day to day life and on your marriage overall. So, how do you and your spouse go about fighting or disagreeing?

Do you do what you have always done or are you thinking of trying something different? How you choose to fight or try to settle disagreements has an enormous impact on the quality of your day to day life together. Couples often fall into a repetitive pattern of behavior when conflict rears its ugly head. This pattern may be undetectable to the spouses who are enacting it, but a studied, objective eye can be helpful in spotting the types of thinking, feelings, and behaviors are getting repeated. Here are a few examples of the unhelpful patterns that couples can fall into when each person is just acting as they always act and being “themselves”: Read more