Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Saturday, January 22, 2005
Breaking Our Own Antennae

One of the things I love about being a divorce mediator is facilitating meaningful communications between individuals.

Now, if you've been through a divorce or you're going through a divorce, we might reasonably start with the "reframing skills" divorce mediators use to shape solutions-oriented dialogues out of baggage-laden utterances.

Consider this raw material:

"You know, Dell, I'm just plain exhausted. The boys are here seven days a week most hours of the day, and more when school is out.

"Okay — even though he cheated on me throughout our entire marriage with a sleaze he's still with, and I know he'd rather be in the Pokonos with her than with our own kids — yeah, I'd give him an extra week this summer if he wanted it. I don't think he really does.

"Le'me tell ya, it's about time someone forced him to step up to the plate and be a real 'dad.' Better late than never, I say. I just hope he's got a library card to check out all the parenting books he's gonna need to handle the two offspring he only stuck around six minutes for to create. Better make that audio books, because I don't think he can read. Or videos. Maybe something with cartoon characters."

Possible translation by me to the dad (very separate room, very separate time):

"Sounds like Mom is amenable to your interest in spending an extra week with the kids this summer."

Believe it or not, they are in dialogue and interested in negotiation. No one is in danger here. They don't need lectures. What they do need is time to cool off (long term), and an anger filter (short term) to get through the now.

A bigger challenge is what I call "The V'Ger Syndrome." This describes people who choose not to hear complete agreements to solutions they've insisted upon.

Yeah, that V'Ger: Antagonist to Captain Kirk in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A Google.com Search gives 9,500+ references to this on the Internet, if your divorce recovery path cries out for such diversion.

For everyone else, here's the plot. NASA launches a Voyager-series probe in the Twentieth Century to learn all there is to know and report back. This spacecraft is captured by aliens in a far away galaxy, given great powers, reprogrammed to think it's a person. Fulfills mission, returns to Earth, as planned.

Then, after all that trouble, V'Ger burns up his own antenna — right here in Earth orbit, at the very moment that Kirk, Spock, and the entire Earth agree to dialogue.

Take another look at the "raw material" above. Switch the roles and subject matter, if you wish.

Now, let's say you're the target of that initial diatribe. You hear meaning apart from style, accede to all charges, and acquiesce to a revised visitation schedule predicated on enhanced parental education, a'la Saline District Library.

You politely transmit all of this, but your former spouse burns up his or her own receiving antenna just as your agreement is delivered.

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kirk's next move is, matter-of-factly, to reach for the antenna leads. Simply close the connection, abracadabra, communication restored. Marriage counselors, mediators, and divorce court practitioners will no doubt empathize with the great starship captain here.

I certainly do.

But marital attachment is a complicated thing, one that can be amazingly resistant to outside intervention. And the mysterious algorithms of marriage too frequently morph into even more mysterious, embedded subroutines instructing their divorces. Some walls are erected as barriers; others are erected as invitations to climb.

Just when you thought science fiction was pigeonholed, V'Ger comes back for "intimacy"!

Wha'd'ya do?

As family mediators go, I tend to be more "directive." Beyond the basics of balancing the playing field and maintaining safety, I'm pretty engaged in expanding options and thinking. I'm not afraid to get my fingers fried once in reconnecting an open receiver connection.

Twice? Well — then I'd have to wonder if the underlying reason they've broken their own antennae isn't really to draw you closer.

—posted by Dell Deaton @6:00 PM EST 1/22/2005 [675]

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