The Cost of Divorce Part 4

A Series exploring how to control and measure the cost of divorce in Bucks County, PA.

Part IV “What is the emotional ‘cost’ of divorce?”

It’s both hard and easy to discuss the emotional “cost” of divorce.

It’s hard because no one can truly tally the emotional “cost” of divorce. There are financial costs associated with the stress of processing feelings of anger, betrayal, loss, frustration and all the other maelstrom of emotions that may accompany the dissolution of a marriage. There might be lost work time, illness, therapy bills, and any number of services affiliated with the same.

A further difficulty is: how do you determine the beginning and the end of the emotional distress – and its accompanying extra “costs” – from divorce? Do you count from the date of your first irreconcilable argument with your mate or from the day he or she moved out? Do you consider the cost ended with the divorce decree, or months or years later when you emotionally close the door on the process with something finite like a last therapy session?

You see the difficulty here. Mental health professionals still hew closely to the groundbreaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying” to describe the emotional stages a person goes through while processing loss and grief. Even so, the process is so individual in length and depth of feeling that, again, calculating the price tag on your own emotions is at best difficult, at worst, impossible.

It’s easy, though, to talk about the cost of extra legal needs that might be considered your emotional “cost.” As I discussed before, Talk = Money. When you stop talking to your spouse, you start paying more money for someone else to talk for you. If one spouse tries to take advantage of another, lawyers and courts exist to protect each client’s rights, and those of their children.

But Justice is slow, by its nature exposes private details in a public forum (which adds to emotional “cost”), and requires billable time for attorneys to prepare each step. Both the emotional and dollar cost of divorce begins to increase exponentially the closer you get to the courtroom. Managing the emotional “cost” of divorce, at least as it translates to dollars due on your lawyer’s bill, is not always under your control. But to the degree that you can make a choice, you will always come out financially ahead each time you and your spouse can work out details between you.

There are literally hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of print and online resources available to people going through divorce. There are support groups, therapists and coaches. This is clearly the domain of psychology, counseling and psychiatric professionals. Even the courts of Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties – the three courts I most often work in – require that information on counseling be made available as part of the legal process of divorce.

This inclusion is the result of long experience in which court personnel, attorneys and judges have come to acknowledge the importance of sorting through emotional issues, or “costs,” before spouses appear in court.

Try to think of the legal process as a project separate from the emotional process of divorce. The more you detach your feelings from each legal step, the more you become a project manager rather than a passive recipient of papers and documents.

If nothing else, I hope I’ve impressed on you that you do have control over some of the costs of your divorce. You may have to make some difficult choices. But you can be in the driver’s seat. Our role is to help you get there.

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