How to Communicate with a Spouse During a Divorce

Communicating with your spouse during the divorce process is often difficult. Communication while you were married was likely a big problem, and now you have to make decisions and communicate with each other especially if you have children. We have some suggestions that may make it easier.

Treat Communication Like a Business Transaction

If you can remove the emotion from your communication and treat it as you would a business transaction, you will find your communication improved. If you want to talk to your spouse about an ultimate issue, do more listening and asking questions and less talking.

At this stage, communication should be both orally and in writing. If you need your spouse to know something, call him or her, leave a voicemail if they do not answer, and then follow up with an email. Some people check their emails but never their voicemail and others just the reverse. Using both methods decreases stress and the writing can be used as evidence that you provided your soon to be ex the necessary information.  It is very common for parents to accuse the other of not communicating about issues related to the children.  Courts look favorably on a parent who shows the ability to communicate important issues to the other parent about the children.

Collaborative Divorce Aids in Communication

In a Collaborative Divorce, these types of communications occur within the safety of the Collaborative meetings. We don’t like to tell spouses not to talk to each other, but if your spouse raises an issue, it should be easy to deflect and say, “I’d like to talk to you about that, but let’s talk about it at the next meeting.”

The Collaborative Divorce process provides a safe setting where you can express your emotions without losing control of the conversation. The role of the mental health professional is to facilitate communication, so it makes it easier to hear what the other person is saying.

All professionals who are collaboratively trained have mediation like reframing the questions or answers that may come off as aggressive to the other spouse.  This helps the other spouse actually hear what you are trying to communicate to them.

If you need help with any issue concerning your divorce, whether it is a traditional divorce process, collaborative divorce, or mediation, contact us at The Law Offices of Patrick Markey, P.C. Our practice is dedicated solely to the practice of family law.