Mediation and Divorce Blog - Equitable Mediation Services

If you and your husband or wife just made the decision to split up and end your marriage, you may be wondering how to get a divorce in California without a lawyer.

There could be many reasons you’d want to avoid attorneys in your divorce:

• You and your spouse want to keep things civil for the sake of your children: You don't want California family law attorneys putting your kids in the middle of your proceedings and using them as poker chips. Because even though your marriage is ending, you don’t want to destroy your kids and want to remain good co-parents moving forward.
• You don’t want to lose years of your life trapped in a never-ending court battle: You have friends or family whose California divorce process took 2-3 years to complete and they never got that time back or recovered emotionally. Your time is precious and you want to heal and move forward as quickly as possible.
• You don’t want to waste your financial resources on expensive legal fees: You’ve done some research and learned that the cost of retainers for California divorce lawyers average $5,000 to $10,000 per person. And you've heard that a divorce in California using attorneys can cost $25,000 or more! You’d rather spend your hard earned money on your kids and your future.

No matter what the reason, the answer is YES - you CAN get a divorce without a lawyer!

And not only that, but you don’t have to risk making expensive mistakes like you would with a do-it-yourself divorce method.

It's Saturday morning. You're standing at the kitchen sink.

And you hear it mocking you.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

That pipe under the sink has been leaking for weeks. And the bucket just about needs emptying again.

Between the kids' activities, homework, your travel schedule and everything else going on in your life, you just haven't had time to fix the darn thing.

But today is going to be the day...

Your wife keeps telling you to just hire someone. But you insist you're going to fix it yourself. It's a leaky pipe. How hard could it be?

Four hours and one flooded kitchen later, you finally give up.

The water from the now exploded pipe got under the fridge, shorting out the cooling coil. And while you were under there, you somehow managed to break the garbage disposal by hitting it with your wrench.

That leaky pipe which looked oh-so-simple to fix is now going to cost you a lot more than you had originally planned...

The first part of this post was written by guest contributor and parenting coach, Dana Hirt, who consciously set out to protect her three young children from the negative effects of divorce and in doing so, had a "good" divorce which paved the way to her own future happiness and the well-being of her entire family.

Dana shares her own personal divorce story and offers some tips for how you, too, can plan a good divorce.

The second part of this post was written by guest contributor and divorce coach, Tara Eisenhard, who believes that families should evolve, not dissolve, through the process of divorce.

Tara shares what a good divorce is and offers advice for how you can have a positive divorce of your own.