Collaborative Law Family Professional
(many call us “Neutrals”):
The role of a Family Professional is to help you, with your active participation, get ready for Collaborative Family Law, to help the process itself and to help manage the non-expected in one of the most challenging time of a family life. This is actually the time, of all time, to treat people the way we want to be treated. Because think about it: it is mostly bound to happen like that.
To be ready to collaborate with maturity, we need to become committed to:
- create safety in a very vulnerable time of our life;
- work with compassion in mindful strategies;
- be able to understand that we need to build a rapport that will make it as safe and secure as possible;
- find where the conflict is;
- address feelings of shame, guilt, fear, unfairness, and anger, in self;
- learn to deal with feelings of shame, guilt, fear, unfairness, and anger in others in the situation;
- prevent threats;
- uncover and prioritize interests, build on needs, rather than wants;
- know what the real needs are, the adults and the children ones;
- know what the children healthy needs are in being wisely parented;
- help prevent or manage “shallow thinking” and “do crazy”;
- be able to have the responsible difficult conversations and negotiations we don’t want to have;
- settle personal value before settling the separation and/or divorce;
- address one’s ability to advance one’s interests and to manage power maturely;
- know the source of power of each member in willingness to settle;
- assess “comfort with money”;
- find and address what’s the real issue underneath all of that;
- look at how you’re going to deal with your children after separation/divorce for the rest of their life;
- put an emphase on having to normalize pacing the process;
- look at what we need to prepare for collaborative mature negotiations;
- assess the area where you could feel out of control and manage the process so you feel heard and safe;
- look at the psychological impact of the process and decision making;
- ensure procedural fairness and bring each person’s voice to the table;
- provide a reality check in a non-judgemental way;