Beware: The Unforeseen Divorce Deal Killers - DuPage Divorce Lawyer Blog

Divorce Myths and Misconceptions

October 20, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

There are many myths and misconceptions about divorce.
Misinformation can lead you to making avoidable mistakes and incorrect choices.

Is a no-fault divorce quicker and cheaper?

No, this is not true.

Does it help to be the first party to file for divorce?

For all practical reasons, No.

Can my spouse prevent me from getting a divorce?

No. You don’t need spousal consent to get a divorce, however you must be able to prove he or she is guilty of one of the eleven grounds for divorce in Illinois.

Am I allowed to date before the divorce is final?

From a strictly legal standpoint, yes.

However, dating can harm the case from a negotiation standpoint. It is likely to reduce the chances of a smooth or early settlement.

At what age can my kids decide who they want to live with?

The court won’t consider the children’s wishes until they are at least 14 years old.

However, the judge isn’t required to follow the children’s preferences. What the child wants is only one of several criteria the court must consider.

My spouse is trying to make me move out. Do I have to?

No. You do not have to move out of your shared home.

Unless (or until) your spouse is granted a court order giving him or her exclusive possession of the home.

If I do decide to move out, is it considered abandonment?

No. This is one of the biggest myths. You do not lose any of your rightful percentage of equity in the home if you choose to reside somewhere else.

For more Divorce Myths and Misconceptions including:

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Getting Past Anxiety Part Two

August 12, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

No one ever told us how important it is to do what we can to reduce our soon-to-be ex spouse’s anxiety during the divorce. It gives us our best chance of getting our point across when we are discussing settlement terms with them.

In Part I of this post, we touched upon the importance of communicating without arguing and showing our partner that we do not dismiss their feelings and concerns. I cannot imagine how many of us have unwittingly derailed our own divorce settlement negotiations by not showing respect for our partner’s position.

Instead, we did what society programmed us to do. We told them that their viewpoint was wrong and we tried to convince them that ours was righteous and just.This approach does not make many friends and it does not keep divorces out of court. It represents exactly what not to do because it is confrontational and it breeds anxiety.

Anxiety prevents our spouse from understanding what they need to understand if we hope to get them to understand where we are coming from. Reduce their anxiety and reduce the frustration and cost of your divorce.

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Dealing with Anxiety Part One

August 10, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

Reduce Your Spouse’s Anxiety and Reduce the Pain and Cost of Your Divorce.

Divorce is about loss. It threatens our family, our cash flow, our standard of living, our future, our stability, and how we feel about ourselves. This major crossroad in our lives inevitably causes anxiety, the painful uneasiness and apprehension about future uncertainties.

Anxiety in divorce is natural and it prevents us from communicating effectively. It can freeze our mind in a closed position and make it hard for us to get our point across. What can we do to mitigate our anxieties?

The best way is to avoid arguing with our spouse. Non-confrontational communication can ease our spouse’s anxiety before it can gain momentum. If we reduce theirs, we reduce ours. If we refuse to respond to their arguing with more arguing, it may inspire them to follow suit. Arguing is always futile; it just makes the other side dig in deeper.

A good way to avoid arguing is to be as understanding as you can when addressing your partner’s worries and concerns. It is also wise not to defend the past by offering excuses or by proclaiming your innocence. In your spouse’s eyes, this is the same as arguing. If your spouse is hurting, the pain won’t go away just because you didn’t intend to cause it or because the precipitating incident was not your fault.

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Beware of Divorce’s Double Whammy Part One

August 1, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

Divorce in Cook and DuPage - Beware of Divorce's Double Whammy Part I

Divorcing couples go through a highly emotional time. Negative feelings of fear, jealousy, anger, frustration, and resentment commonly arise when we believe we are being wronged or when we believe something we value is being threatened.

However, we must realize that emotions have the same effect on our spouse as they do on us. It only makes sense, therefore, to try to reduce the intensity of our spouse’s negative emotions by controlling how we show ours.

Anger is the most powerful emotion, and anger in a divorce is pure poison. It makes us look crazy and it infuriates our spouse. It closes our spouse’s ears and prevents us from making our points. It distorts our perceptions, twists our thinking, and impairs our ability to solve problems. It gives our spouse justification to see herself or himself as a victim.

In any divorce, a major source of anger is blame. If we are angry, we blame; placing blame intensifies our anger. The person we blame resents it and gets angry right back. Anger and blame feed off themselves and kill divorce settlements.

More about this in PART II (on August 3, 2011).

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The Ninth Barrier to an Early Settlement

April 1, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

We Underestimate the Fury We Will Face

Many divorces start out friendly and then turn into train wrecks. One reason for this is because we are not properly prepared to handle the potentially explosive nature of divorce settlement discussions with our soon-to-be ex.

A barrage of fury awaits us at the bargaining table where we are prone to retaliate by adding our own fury to the mix. When our spouse says something confrontational, we become angry and retaliatory. When we are insulted, we insult back. In doing so, we aggravate our partner and aggravated partners do not want to settle, they want to fight.

No one has ever won an argument by alienating their opponent.

We fire back because we seem to think that firing back is free. It isn’t. It complicates the divorce process and causes unnecessary litigation. We are not giving our spouse a pass when we do not return their attack; we are giving our wallets a pass.

Boxers do not get upset when they get punched and football players do not get upset when they get tackled. They expect to be punched and tackled and we should expect to be confronted and insulted. For us to think otherwise is naive.

The best way to prepare for being insulted or verbally attacked is to anticipate its happening. When you know it is coming, there is no shock and there is no justifiable reason to react instinctively (and at your own expense). Simply expect an attack and you will automatically be in a position to brush it off.

Accept in advance that your spouse will be volatile or difficult; and, if you hope to prevent your divorce from becoming unnecessarily painful, lengthy, or costly, never, ever fight back no matter how tempted you may be to do so.

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The Eighth Barrier to an Early Settlement

March 30, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

We Think We Have More Legal Rights than We Do

Most of us enter the divorce arena with preconceived notions of the law has in store for us. Unfortunately, much of what society has conditioned us to believe in this regard is often inaccurate.

Misinformation about divorce law and the legal system is perpetually circulating among the public. This is primarily due to decades of legend and hand-me-down stories and myth.

Our friends and family mean well, but their knowledge is generally incomplete or erroneous because it can only be as accurate as the bits and pieces of information that they have gathered from other lay people. We all know how stories become distorted as they spread throughout a community.

Consequently, many spouses enter the divorce system believing that they have more legal rights than they really do. When they learn that the law will not give them the settlement that they were expecting, they become frustrated, angry, and difficult to deal with.

This leads to unnecessary conflict and delay because most divorces will ultimately settle in a way that is consistent with the way the law is, as opposed to what one or both of the parties wishes the law to be.

It is asking a lot to expect an early settlement when one of the parties entertains unrealistic, though perhaps understandable, expectations about his or her entitlement.

It takes time, patience, and willingness for the misinformed party to become able to adjust their thinking so that they can consider other settlement alternatives.

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The Sixth Barrier to an Early Settlement

March 25, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

Divorce Papers Make People Mad

Divorce papers are upsetting and they can start wars all by themselves. The “papers” that are necessary to start a case qualify as an barrier to settlement because of the destruction they so often do to the parties’ hopes for working things out smoothly.

When one of the spouses chooses to institute a divorce case, his or her attorney is required to file “divorce papers” with the court. These papers must conform to the statutory requirements for such a document and these requirements are never pleasant sounding to the person against whom the papers are filed.

Even if the lawyers make the papers as non-offensive as possible, most people get very upset when they read them. No one wants to be on the filing end of divorce papers and no one wants to read about their lives in the formal and accusatory manner in which they are set forth in these documents.

Even if the parties are intent upon having a friendly and cooperative divorce, the initial papers that are filed with the court cannot ever be as friendly or as cooperative as the parties might like them to be.

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The Fifth Barrier to an Early Settlement

March 23, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

Finger-Pointing

This obstacle causes us to focus on the cause of the divorce when our focus should be on how to resolve the divorce.

The longer we spend dwelling on the reason for the divorce is the more time and money we will spend getting divorced.

Angry people see themselves as victims. This makes us want to blame and blame does not settle divorce cases; instead, it starts wars. Blame causes anger and anger causes blame. They feed off one another at our expense.

Our spouse does not want to think of us as the victim, they see themselves as the victim. They want sympathy from us, not the other way around. The way they see it, we should be apologizing to them and acknowledging our guilt for victimizing them. To blame them is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Finger-pointing and blame do not settle divorce cases.

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The Fourth Barrier to an Early Settlement

March 21, 2011 By Kulerski & Cornelison

Feelings Count More than Money

If a divorce case goes to trial because the parties cannot resolve their financial differences, it usually has more to do with feelings that it does with finances.

As part of what I discussed in the “We Don’t Know How to Get Through to Our Spouse” post, this is another of our classic misunderstandings. Most divorce wars are not about money, they only sound like they are about money. They are about unresolved feelings, which do not appear on a ledger. We have to soothe the feelings before we can settle the divorce.

However, we cannot soothe the feelings until we can talk about them constructively and this takes more time than an early settlement allows. We are rarely content with a settlement offer if we still have something to say and society has not taught us how to state our objections without stirring up trouble.

We must allow our spouse to vent without our becoming aggravated, and we must learn how to express our feelings sensibly and safely.

Feelings are a major part of divorce negotiations. Attempting to negotiate a divorce settlement without addressing feelings is like trying to land an aircraft without fuel. While this is doable, it does make the landing much harder.

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Divorce Myths and Misconceptions

Getting Past Anxiety Part Two

Dealing with Anxiety Part One

Reduce Your Spouse’s Anxiety and Reduce the Pain and Cost of Your Divorce.

Beware of Divorce’s Double Whammy Part One