Podcast: Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Divorce Trauma

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Getting Real with Grief: How Mediation Can Break the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma That Divorce Can Bring

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Randi Cutler Hall: Hello, hello fellow humans. Welcome to Getting Real with Grief. This podcast is here to benefit you and to benefit humanity by bringing one of the most uncomfortable and misunderstood subjects into your everyday conversations. I’m your host, Randi Cutler Hall. Grief chose me at three years old when I experienced my first major loss. Ever since that, I’ve been obsessed with how we grieve and heal. While I’ve spent my life tending to grief, I’ve been professionally providing grief support since 2014.

Throughout this journey, I’ll be sharing my expert tips for navigating grief and loss and highlighting grief stories that have catalyzed positive change in the world. When I’m not here on this podcast with you, you can find me working with clients, hosting groups and retreats, and facilitating intentional endings through divorce ceremonies and memorials. Sometimes you can even find me right there with you, down on my knees, shedding tears, numbing or screaming. Get ready. This is the podcast you pretended not to need. Yeah, you. I see you. But actually, this is going to meet you in the realest and truest places of your heart. So let’s get into it.

On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about something challenging but really meaningful. We’re going to be talking about grieving the loss of a marriage and what to do when you have already made that decision, and then how to move into and through the divorce process in an intentional way. I’m so grateful and honored to have my guest today, Joe Dillon. He is the Co-Founder of Equitable Mediation Services and he and his wife Cheryl own and operate a divorce mediation and coaching firm that serves clients online throughout the whole United States to help make this process more intentional and less contentious and to help people get through what can be otherwise a really painful and excruciating process. Joe, thank you so much for being here. I’d love to send it over to you. Tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you’re doing in the world.

Joe Dillon: Thanks for having me, Randi. It’s an important conversation and perfectly put. My wife Cheryl and I believe in getting through the divorce process as peacefully, amicably, and cost effectively as possible, and minimizing whatever potential collateral damage there might be to relationships with your children, your friends, and your family. Something you said is so true — it’s to move through the process in an intentional way. Societally, we are taught that divorce has to be a conflict. It has to be a disaster. We need to get a lawyer and fight it out and fight for what we’re entitled to.

We’ve been practicing now coming up on 18 years, and I’ve been mediating for 20. We are proof day in and day out that it does not have to be that way. The feedback from our clients certainly reinforces that. Folks who have come to us over the years have said the same thing over and over — “I spoke to my friend and they got through this process so wonderfully and they’re so grateful to you, and we want to make sure we do the same thing.” That’s the reward — to really hear that people are making that conscious choice to move through the process in this intentional way. And then it allows them to begin that healing process that’s necessary, the grieving process, the loss of that marriage. That’s what I hope we can spend some time exploring today.

Randi: I’m just hearing you name the possibility, the outcome — the banking of the evidence that it doesn’t have to be so tragic and ugly and traumatic and harmful. When a lot of people think about the divorce process, they think about the worst of people coming out. You really see the ugly in somebody. It’s really beautiful and meaningful to think about you and your wife and your firm really prioritizing people having a different kind of experience, so that they can get to the grieving — because this is the severing of the marriage and the death, if you will, of the marriage. I hear you saying let’s do that civilly and with some dignity and let’s try to have the most positive experience you can, so that then you can grieve the relationship and move forward with your life. Absolutely important, especially with such a high divorce rate these days.

Joe: Something you said is spot on — if you get through the process the way we want you to, then you can grieve the loss of the marriage. If you don’t, you have to grieve the divorce process, and that can take years. And then once you’re done with that, you have to grieve the loss of the marriage, and that can take years too. Suddenly 5 to 10 years go by and you’re still wrapped up in this and not moving through it. Everyone moves through grief at their own pace, and I’m not saying they should feel compelled to hurry. But we want to focus on the things that matter — the relationship, the loss of that, the introspection that comes or should come with that — so that you can move forward. Everyone deserves happiness and you can move forward and find that happiness again. But if you’re mad about the ruling or the statute or the thing from the judge, that’s not important. The loss of the relationship is what we really need to be focused on, not some procedural element that happened in a courtroom. Unfortunately, in contentious divorces, that becomes the primary focus of grieving rather than the marriage itself.

Randi: What a different lens this is coming from. I’m imagining the amount of time you get back. In some ways it feels like you’re giving people their life back — giving people an opportunity for a fresh start where they’re not needing to lick their wounds for such a long time. They can just recognize this wasn’t working for whatever reason, find a way to end as amicably as possible, and then move forward. I’m so grateful to you for wanting to do this work and making this your life’s work. How did you get into this? What’s your personal connection with grief and with some of this work?

Joe: My parents litigated their divorce. I am the poster child of what not to do. I watched the certified letters arrive from each attorney. I sat in the lobby of my mom’s attorney’s office. I sat in the back of a courtroom and watched my parents screaming and yelling at each other. There was a moment in the process where my parents were talking about who was going to pay for me to go to college. I was a good student and I wanted to go to a private university, which was far more expensive than the public universities. At the time, my dad was probably making 10 times more than my mom. She had just gone back to work — she had been working inside the home to raise me. He wanted to share the college costs equally. My mom said, “You make 10 times more than I do. How is that going to work?” So they went to court to fight over it. He wanted a 50/50 split.

I’m sitting in the back of the courtroom as a teenager. My mom made me put on a jacket and a tie and get a haircut. I’m watching them screaming and yelling and going back and forth. My mom’s lawyer argued that my father had to pay a little more. The judge said 60/40. Then my dad started yelling at the judge — literally yelling at the judge. The judge banged the gavel and said, “OK, now it’s 70/30.” Then my dad got up and was about to approach the bench and his lawyer had to grab him. The bailiff came over and the judge said, “Would you like to try for 80/20?” They locked my father back down in his chair. This is me at 15 or 16 years old witnessing this.

Then everybody went out into the hallway, and there I was standing with my mom. My father came over — I hadn’t seen him since he had moved out two years prior. I had had no contact with him. My mom said, “This is your son. Don’t you want him? He’s an A student.” He grumbled something and walked away. That was the last time I ever saw or heard from him. I got a letter about 35 years later from his lawyer that he had died. That was it.

I never had the chance as a kid to go through that process and grieve my parents’ divorce. It took me a good 20 to 25 years to really process it because it was this stunted emotional thing that happened that I had no context for. My mom didn’t send me to therapy. I was an only child. I had nobody to talk to. As I realized what was happening and what it meant to be a child of divorce, and as I moved into what I do now professionally, it was such a natural transition to say: in a nutshell, I want to help families avoid what happened to me.

I get to work with client couples every day and it’s very rewarding. We talk about intention, but we also need to talk about authenticity. If you’re going to give people messages like I need to give them, you need to come from an authentic place. I can look people straight in the eye and say, “Listen, I have literally sat in the back of a courtroom and watched my parents argue. Trust me when I tell you, you do not want that for your kids. It will mess them up for a very long time.”

People can grumble at each other, but I can usually get them to a place where they recognize that this is not the way to do this. And then by doing that, we can get through the process far more amicably. We can focus on being good co-parents. And then, as we talked about, you can really focus your efforts on grieving the loss of that relationship — not grieving the process. My mom never got through the trauma of the process, let alone being able to grieve the marriage. She never had many friends. She never dated again. She was 45 when she got divorced. I’m older than that now and I still think I’m young. I feel like it was a life robbed from her — she never got to go through the healing process that she undoubtedly needed. That’s my story as to how I got here. It’s a strange one, but true.

Randi: Thank you for trusting me and trusting our audience and really sharing. I can see how it fuels you. I can see what’s at stake from a very personal place, and that when you’re looking at your clients in the eyes it comes from a really authentic place. That’s the thing that can really get through to people — when people feel like you understand, like you’re showcasing why it’s so important. It feels bittersweet to hear that you are sort of the evidence to bank of “don’t do this, because this is all the ways it can cause harm to yourself, to your life, to your children, to your legacy, to your finances, to your security.” But I’m also recognizing the beauty that you’ve made of your life given these circumstances — while also honoring that you’ve had to do a lot of this from an empty cup and without the modeling of what it could look like if it went well. A teenager sitting in the back of the courtroom, enduring this, witnessing the ugly come out in people — witnessing people fighting in survival mode and having parts of their life really robbed from them when it could have been so different. What a missed opportunity.

Joe: That’s an important lesson for everyone — you can let your pain define you or you can let it fuel you. When I first started as a mediator, I would finish a session and Cheryl would ask how it went — we keep strict confidentiality between us; what clients talk to her about is emotional support, what they talk to me about is financial and tactical. I would go, “Good job, Joe, you just helped end another marriage.” She looked at me and told me something very powerful that stuck with me. She said, “Don’t look at it that way. You’re not destroying their marriage. They came to you voluntarily. Their marriage was over before they came to you. You’re helping them avoid what happened to you. You’re helping them move on with their lives in a more intentional and constructive way.”

As soon as I shifted that perspective — from destroying a marriage to helping prevent intergenerational trauma — so that these couples could model good behavior, everything changed. My dad disappeared. My mom was a train wreck. She did the best she could and I’m grateful to her for everything she did. But it wasn’t like I had a mom who was fully present, because she was dealing with her own stuff. I didn’t have siblings to work through it. I didn’t have a counselor or therapist. You’re sitting there with your grief and your pain and you’re not really sure what to do with it. As a teenager, you’re already filled with all kinds of emotions.

As I think about it now, I’m not a particularly religious person but I am a spiritual person. I think about the Buddhist mantra where you throw a stone into a pond and it creates ripples. I think of myself as the stone being thrown into the pond. My hope is that these ripples will mean that this family can spend holidays together, that those parents can be at the baby showers together, at the weddings and the graduations, that they can go see the grandkids. All of a sudden you’ve got this ripple effect where those kids have seen a model of good co-parenting, so they’re less likely to divorce, and if they do, they’ll behave differently. That’s what drives me. When people really sit down and think about it that way — that what you’re doing right now is going to impact people who aren’t even born yet — that’s a pretty big message, but it’s an important one to share.

Randi: Absolutely. Something I’m really appreciating about what you’re talking about is that people are coming in at a moment that has the potential to be a chapter in the story, and you’re helping them write that chapter in a way that ideally doesn’t let the rest of the story be consumed by it. I see the lens you’re coming at this with — OK, here you are in this moment, and this moment is hard. Yes, you have to divide the stuff and figure out the childcare arrangements and the financial piece and all of the logistics. But I hear you also offering the big picture. What we’re talking about is not just this moment when our kids are six and eight. It’s the moment where our kids are going to graduate, going to have a wedding, going to want us to walk them down the aisle, going to want us to be at their baby shower and be there for all the life milestones. It’s really hitting me — the way you are giving people a way to have there be so much more to the story than just that one chapter they’re writing during a divorce.

Joe: Absolutely. When I graduated high school, this is another story that really reinforces the point. I went to a small high school with a small auditorium. On the day of our graduation, there was rain in the forecast. The school said if it rained, everyone would get only 2 tickets — just mom and dad — because that’s all we could fit in the auditorium. If it didn’t rain, bring whoever you want because it would be on the football field. The threat of rain was coming. We got 2 tickets. My mom had one of them and wanted to give the other to my father. He was not going to come unless he could bring his girlfriend. My mom tried to explain it wasn’t her being difficult — the school had literally given her two tickets and she was taking one of them as mom and he could have the other. He refused to come. The bitter irony was that we actually had the graduation outside. The weather did hold, but he still didn’t come.

I remember just being there, looking around. My aunt and uncle came, all my cousins were there — it was great. But as a kid, you still look up in the stands looking for your parents. He chose not to come. And that’s part of that whole short-sightedness — you don’t realize that as the adult, your behavior is going to imprint a moment on your kid that 40 years later they still remember, and not in a pleasant way. That’s what we try to share with folks. It’s here, it’s now, it’s raw, it’s real, it stinks. But this too shall pass if you work on it and help usher it forward.

Randi: If you want it — at the end of the day, it’s a choice. Sometimes people will say, who are your favorite clients to work with? And it’s the clients that want to work, that want to make the change, that are invested. At the end of the day, you can give people all the tools, but if people want to choose it, you have this path and these resources for people who want to make that choice and move it forward well.

Joe: You’ve got to be engaged. I can’t do the work. We’re like a personal trainer. I can show you how to use the machines. I can help you lace up your sneakers. I can stand next to you. But I can’t lift the weights. You have to lift the weights.

Randi: Totally. I’m also really touched professionally, hearing this and understanding the grief process in the ways that I do. I also lived through a really contentious custody battle. That was a lot of my early life. I’m just really touched — what I would have given to have had this process, to have had these options for the different parties involved in my life. Many of my listeners know my story — my parents died when I was three years old and the question became, where are these kids going to go? It was my maternal grandparents and it was my dad’s brother and sister-in-law, my aunt and uncle. There was a very contentious custody battle trying to identify what’s in the best interests of the kids, what’s in the best interests of the adults, who is going to uphold the values of these parents the most. It was a really hard and horrific period of time. I was very young, so I wasn’t in courtrooms in the same way, but the ways it affected and fractured my family — it cost my grandparents their life savings. It ended up being a very unnecessarily contentious process that then took an entire family away from grieving my parents and grieving this whole situation. We could have come together in a different way. In a deeply personal way, I’m really moved by what you’re describing because I can see how from the earliest parts of my life, this could have redefined what my family looked like and how we showed up for each other.

Joe: People don’t realize that kids are sponges. If you don’t believe that, say a swear word in front of a 2-year-old and I promise you within an hour that kid will be running through your living room yelling it. We don’t even realize that kids are listening. They’re on all the time.

Randi: And learning what it looks like to relate, what conflict resolution looks like, what it looks like when you’re upset and need something and how to get your needs met. There’s a lot being modeled in those moments.

Joe: Something you said is very important to mention — “what’s in the best interests of the children.” As a professional negotiator, that’s where my training comes in. My training at Harvard, for example, is in professional negotiation. When you talk about negotiation, we have two schools of thought — interest-based and positional. Positional is what most people engage in. Yes or no, right. If I win, you lose. If we go to this restaurant, you’re going to hate it. Interest-based is about finding the shared ground, finding the common interest, finding what’s best for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, as a species — limited resources, survival of the fittest, social Darwinism — whoever’s biggest and strongest takes what they need. That’s part of what we’re all DNA-programmed to do. And unfortunately, that positional stuff shows up in our relationships, in our divorces, in all the places where if it didn’t, we’d be far better off. When you think about asking for something or talking through something, whatever it is in your life, try to think win-win. Try to think, what outcome is going to benefit everybody here? That’s also going to help with reducing conflict. Interest-based rather than positional-based — that’s an important message to remember.

Randi: That’s really, really an important piece. And something else you said earlier was that you can either be defined by the pain or help it move you forward, turn it into something meaningful. In some ways, to get a little meta, that’s sort of the purpose of this whole podcast. I see you in the motif of the wounded healer — not in a cheesy sense, but in the sense of really taking something, going through something, and not wanting other people to suffer the way you suffered. Coming to be able to help and contribute in the world from the pain that you know, letting that be the fuel that serves you. I’m really seeing the ways your story has you — you decided to alchemize the pain, you decided not to let it define you, and you decided to make it into something that is serving the people in the moment you’re with, but also many, many generations forward and the fabric of how we relate as a society.

Joe: It’s really rewarding. We’ll hear from former clients who are getting remarried, or we’ll get Christmas cards from them. We’ve even met up with some of them — who wants to meet with their divorce mediator and coach? But we’ve actually built nice working relationships with people. Long after their divorce is over, they reach out and say, “I know you guys live about an hour from us. Would you ever want to meet for coffee?” Of course, why not? That just goes to show you the power of going through the process in an intentional manner and being able to grieve it and move forward.

And now as the mediator, you’re sometimes looking at a former client with their new partner and you need a cover story — did we work together? Did we used to shop at the same Costco? And then they’ll say, “He knows you were my divorce mediator.” And I go, thank God. You’ve got to be quick on your feet.

Randi: I know that as a therapist. I don’t want to out you. I usually negotiate with clients ahead of time about what to do if they see me out in the world.

Joe: Standing next to each other at the produce section trying to pick out apples — yeah, that’s awkward.

Randi: Can we get into some of the nitty gritty? You have so much knowledge about this process and how to help it go well. What is it that you want listeners to know, especially if they are at the point where they’ve made the decision to end their marriage and are now moving into the beginning or middle of the process?

Joe: The first thing I’d always say is get educated. There are a lot of resources out there. I remember as a kid sitting in the lobby of my mom’s lawyer’s office. Part of it would always be that she had to save up enough money to be able to go pay for an hour of his time. She would come in with a litany of questions because she wasn’t really working full time and she didn’t have information. She was getting information from unreliable sources — friends and family filling her head with all kinds of stuff about what you’re entitled to and how things should work. They’re not lawyers. They’re family. They defend you and protect you.

When we first started, I decided I was going to blog and provide information freely. My goal was to say, information should be free and freely available. If I’ve got knowledge as a professional, I’ll write an article about it. Go read it. I hope you find it helpful. If we can help you, let us know. That has worked for us over the past 18 years. Over a million people have visited our website. You think to yourself, who am I? Just a kid whose parents had a terrible divorce who chose to do something about it. But the feedback has been that the resources have been invaluable. So start at our website, equitablemediation.com. We write content that applies nationwide, and we also have content specific to the states we focus on. Go read and get educated on the process. If you can dispel some of the myths, that will help you as you enter the process. For example, the common myth that mothers get 100% of child custody — that’s still out there and fathers assume they’ll never see their kids. That’s not how this works. I’d guess 80% of our clients have 50/50 parenting plans. When we first started, it was 10%. We’ve tracked this over the years. Yet that myth still persists.

The next thing is to learn what your options are. I want everybody to mediate, but not everyone can. It takes a certain level of emotional maturity and the ability to negotiate on your own behalf. For example, if someone is suffering from substance abuse or has a mental condition that would preclude them from negotiating in their own best interest, that’s where we want them to have an advocate — that’s where they would need a lawyer. Or if someone’s not fully disclosing assets, if there’s concern about financial impropriety, that’s also not mediation-friendly. On our blog, in the Learning Center, we have a resource on the five options for divorce. It asks you a bunch of questions, gives you a quiz, and helps you identify which process is right for you.

Then once you’ve done that, you really need to go in with an understanding of what it is you want and what you’re willing to give. When people enter these negotiations, they always come in focused on what they deserve, what they’re entitled to, letting their anger fuel them. At the end of the day, I can promise you — I’ve seen thousands of these things — one person doesn’t get everything and one person doesn’t walk away with nothing. You have to give to get. That’s what we were talking about with interest-based negotiation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be dollar-for-dollar 50/50. If I have an interest in keeping the house and you’re closer to retirement and want to keep the 401K even though it’s worth more — I’ll make that trade. So if you’re educated, you’ve chosen your divorce process, and you’re willing to give to get, that’s going to get you really far. It’s going to help you move through the process in a much more expeditious and cost-effective fashion.

I jokingly say to my clients: you’ll know I did my job if at the end of our mediation, both of you look at me and go, “You were OK.” When both of you are slightly annoyed with me, I’ve done an excellent job — because that means I forced you to think about things. I challenged you. I questioned you. I made you give things to get things. They kind of laugh and say, “You know what, that’s about right.” I’m like, look, I’m a nice guy, but I have a very specific role here. We could be friends later, five years down the road. And then when they smile and laugh about it, I say, now the healing begins. Now the hard work begins. I’ve helped you do all the paperwork and the technical stuff. But now this is really where you need to dig in and say, let me work on myself so I can see what role I played in this relationship and its outcome so I don’t repeat it moving forward — and so I can show up as the best version of me for my friends, my family, my kids, my co-workers.

That’s really where we try to get folks to. It’s kind of a ritual to acknowledge that this marriage was sacred and this was a meaningful period of life. Not all of it perhaps, but there’s always going to be something — even in marriages that weren’t 25 years long, even if they were five years long — happy moments you can reflect on. That’s what’s got to fuel you to say, it wasn’t all bad. These are the things I enjoyed. It’s now over, and it’s time for us to move forward.

Randi: I heard the importance of getting educated and learning what your options are. Then being able to choose what you want and what you’re willing to give up — what are my hard lines, what are the places where there’s wiggle room? Then having clarity about that opens you up for the final piece — which feels so foreign, honestly — being able to move forward and look for your own role in how things unfolded so you don’t repeat it in future relationships. That piece feels so absent from today’s divorce dialogue. But the whole process is about leaving not so contentiously that you can actually do the grieving work of the relationship and the personal work to help set future relationships up for success.

Joe: Absolutely. As we say, you move into, through, and past the divorce process. Those are the three steps, and we don’t want to discount any of them. We don’t want to make it sound like, “Oh, I’m past it, I’m over it.” Being past it just means you’re past the paperwork, the negotiation, the child support discussions. Now you’re standing on the other side, coming outside, looking around going — now what? That’s where the work begins. That’s where the smart folks understand it’s a good idea to take a pause and not jump into a relationship right away. It’s a good idea to examine what happened and what role you played in it. As much as we like to point the finger, it takes two to tango. This thing didn’t go sideways just because of one person — well, maybe it did, but it’s hard to really say there’s just one person that caused a marriage to end unless something is completely egregious. In mediation, we don’t see a lot of that, because people tend to be self-selecting and want to work together.

We’ve had cases where we’ve been unable to get people to agreement, and it hasn’t been because of our process or our work. It’s just been something so extreme that even if I had known it in advance, I would have said, mediation is not going to work for you. This is clearly litigation territory — forensic accounting, dissipation of assets — things that are outside the normal purview of a functional divorce. And that sounds like a contradiction — what does a functional divorce mean? But the truth is you can have a functional divorce. The relationship may not have been great, but we can move through this as adults. That’s the takeaway.

Randi: And I hear that comes from a commitment to wanting it to be amicable. My husband and I, when we first started dating and then got married, made a commitment to each other — we’re 14 years in and we need to remind ourselves of it often — to keep it awesome. What do we have to do to keep it awesome? And the commitment was, how do we keep making it feel good for each other? That being the priority and the value. If we want to have an awesome relationship, what changes do I need to make and what changes do you need to make to keep it awesome? I hear a shift to your frame being — how do we keep this not contentious? How do we come out the other side being able to bear each other? How do we come out the other side willing to prioritize being a part of our children’s lives going forward? The people who benefit from this most are the ones willing to commit to having a good process and having it lead somewhere amicable.

Joe: You don’t want it to destroy you. You have to live your life. Especially when kids are involved — these children need you. They need you focused and there. Kids can appear to be resilient, but they do need their parents. Anyone listening with children knows that kids are amazing at finding the fissure in a relationship. If they ask mom and don’t get the answer they like, and dad gives them the answer they want, they’re going to dad every time — or they’re going to pit mom and dad against each other. Those kids, they aren’t not clever.

As parents, you need to be united. Now think about a divorce situation. You’ve established two separate households and you’re co-parenting. Kids are going back and forth. What about screen time? Diet? Exercise? Maybe one parent smokes and the other doesn’t. These are all things you never gave second thought to before, but they become magnified and important when you’re trying to have a unified front.

Randi: Those are hard enough when you’re married.

Joe: Exactly. And now if you go through a contentious divorce, you’re going to feed the kids microwave pizzas just to spite your ex-spouse. You’re harming your kids. We want to get you through that process so you can put that away and go, OK, what do we need to do to raise these awesome kids?

Randi: And when there’s kids involved, whether you like each other or not, you’re in each other’s lives for as long as your kid’s life — and hopefully that’s longer than your own life. So you’re still signing up for a forever deal. It’s just — do you want to like the person you have to collaborate with, or not?

Joe: One of my favorite stories that I hope resonates with folks — my cousin went through a rough divorce. It wasn’t exactly the greatest divorce she and her ex-husband had. But they had one son, and the father never blinked twice about getting him whatever he needed. I think he realized as his son moved into his teenage years that he needed his support. Whether he was fully conscious of it or not, he made a choice. My cousin got remarried, and he and her new husband became the sports coaches for the son together. I remember going to one of my cousin’s games and sitting up in the bleachers. The new husband had his arm around the ex-husband and they were both cheering for the kid. I’m looking at this going, this is awesome. This is exactly what we’re talking about.

Put that in a Hallmark card — jumping up and down and high-fiving each other because they recognize that regardless of how I feel about you, it’s all about this kid who’s on the field. We want him to succeed and we want to support him. It was a pretty awesome moment. You couldn’t write a better storybook ending. That’s what we want to share with folks. When you mediate, you can have those moments. If you’re litigating, the new husband is going to hate the ex-husband because of everything that transpired. That kid just wanted to run across the field and do his thing and have people cheering for him. That’s all he cared about at 12 years old. He wasn’t caring about courtrooms and battles and child support.

Randi: Yeah, really reinforcing — let’s focus on what really matters, the bigger picture. My hope is that listeners who are in this process hear that that’s possible. Even just as an example — I want to have the two dads on the sideline cheering. You can have that too.

Joe: You can. It’s a choice. It’s a conscious, intentional choice.

Randi: That’s really beautiful. I want to move into a different realm — the realm of grief. One of the things I do with clients who are navigating divorce and really wanting to honor the ending of a relationship — they’ve made the decision, sold their house, gone through the process, the divorce is final — is something I call a divorce ceremony. I also do this for relationship endings without marriage. We do some of what you shared — a looking back, what I learned in this relationship, who did I become, what am I grateful for to this person, who am I on the other side, what wishes do I have for this person as they move forward. We do a whole intentional honoring of the relationship in service of creating closure. It’s almost like the funeral of the relationship — the death and then the funeral after all the logistics. Are there other ways you see couples honoring endings, or ways you and your business help people bring closure?

Joe: I think people underestimate that we all go through the grieving process, and the funeral is a great example. Why do we have funerals? It’s because we need that sense of community. We need to talk about that person. We need that closure, that finality. As we walk out of the cemetery, it helps us close the lid on it.

One thing I like to do with clients is have a moment of reflection where I remind them of what they’ve successfully accomplished. 98% of our clients are able to come to an agreement through mediation with us — so essentially all of our clients. I say to them, let’s take a moment and reflect on what you did. You managed to get a divorce using mediation. You managed to sit together — we do it virtually via Zoom — and go through what I would argue is the single most difficult negotiation of your life. You did it willingly. And you came to agreement. Look at the impossibly difficult thing you did.

And it’s great when kids are involved, because you can use the example: so now when Olivia comes home from high school and she’s decided to shave half her head, dye the other half purple, and has a nose ring — and you flip your lid and call the other parent — just remember, you were able to get through your divorce. You can get through that too. They laugh and it’s a moment of levity, but it’s real. I say, look at the hard work you did. You should be proud of yourself. I know it wasn’t easy. I appreciate you letting us guide you through this. Remember this moment — because I promise you there are going to be bumps in the road. Arguments about new spouses, child support, the kid coming home with the shaved head. Think about the work you did here and how you got through this extremely difficult thing, and that will serve you well.

It’s a choice. You can choose to react or you can choose to turn toward each other. Your kids are going to need you to turn toward each other as parents, despite your marital status.

Randi: I love that. There’s a therapy term called externalizing the problem — taking the problem and placing it outside of the two people rather than between them, so they can be on the same team both looking at the problem together. I see you doing that, bringing it back home to say, look at this intense negotiation you just lived through together. It feels like a last moment of pointing out how they were a team.

Joe: That’s part of the idea — to remind them that despite getting a divorce, you can still do great things together and work together as a team. That’s especially important in co-parenting.

Randi: And taxes are still going to come up that year. Things come up. And that person, in some ways, will always be a part of your story and identity.

Joe: Absolutely. You want to be able to talk about them fondly. Say you’re dating now and you go on a first date with someone and all you’re doing is talking about how terrible your ex is — the other person is going to think you obviously haven’t let this go, you obviously haven’t processed what happened. Whereas if you get on that first date and say, “Yeah, I ended this relationship with a really nice person, it just didn’t work out, but I’m grateful for the time I had with them and what they taught me” — the other person is far more likely to see that as real maturity.

As we move through these processes, if we want to get remarried or enter a new relationship, we have to make ourselves open to that. And grieving what we’ve lost is one very powerful way to do that. I was engaged before I got married. I explained to Cheryl — I said I got a box, I put those things in it, I looked through it, I picked them up and looked at them, and then I put a lid on the box. I processed it. I keep it handy to remind myself of what could or couldn’t be, or what I might have done differently. But I have put a lid on it. I sorted through the items, I picked them up, I looked at them, I processed them, and now I’m ready to move forward. I’m a visual guy.

Randi: What I appreciate about that metaphor is you’re not tucking it away and you’re not burning it. What you’re doing is containing it. It’s something you’re not afraid to look at, something that doesn’t unravel you if you do. But it’s there. It’s contained. It had its moment. It had its chapter. And now we’re on to a new chapter.

Joe: Exactly. 100%.

Randi: Really beautiful. I’m just really heartwarmed by the whole scope of this conversation. As we’re closing out, is there anything more you want our listeners to know, and anything you want them to know about your practice?

Joe: If you’re entering the divorce process, there’s often a lot of reflection on failure. “What did I do? I can’t believe this is happening. Am I a failure?” One very powerful thing to remember — Cheryl reminds me of this, and we all have friends who do this — is the phrase, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” It’s not happening to you. It’s happening because divorce happens. It’s also happening to your spouse, to your kids, to your friends, to your family. I’d encourage folks who are going through or thinking about divorce to make that subtle mind shift from “why is this happening to me?” — which is victim mode — to “this is happening. How can I move through this process the best way I can so I can grieve this loss and move forward?” That is the more constructive dialogue.

I know it’s hard and I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I want people to listen to that shift — from victim mindset to “I can do this” mindset. I say to clients, I know you’re not happy to be here, and I’m totally OK with that. We’re not planning a vacation. I’m not a travel agent. But I appreciate you being here, because you’re choosing to be here and choosing to move forward. If you’re facing a divorce — this isn’t happening to you. It’s perfectly normal. Lots of people do this. People grow, people change, people evolve. Sometimes people evolve and they’re not tethered together and they just sort of fade apart. Nobody did anything wrong. It’s part of the process. It’s now your job to acknowledge it, honor it, recognize it, heal, and move forward.

Randi: I love that so much. I’ve heard a different version of that phrase — “it’s not happening to you, it’s happening for you.” That can turn it toward seeing the opportunity in it. But even just the refocusing — it’s happening, and taking the personalized “taking it personally” out of it, just acknowledging this is happening, it’s happening to all of us involved. I can see how that subtle language shift moves you out of victim mode and out of seeing only your own experience without seeing the ripple effects on the whole system. Thank you for that reminder.

Joe: It helps people get through. As far as us — if anybody is in need of information or thinking about the divorce process, our website is definitely the best place: equitablemediation.com. There is a Learning Center where you’ll find all kinds of articles, ebooks, videos, and podcasts.

We practice specifically in six states — Washington, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Those are places we’re very comfortable with how divorce works. We have practiced in other states as well, so if you’re not in one of those six, you can still reach out. We might be able to help if it’s somewhere we’re familiar with. You can also schedule a call with Cheryl — Cheryl coaches nationwide. No matter where you’re listening from, if you’re going through the divorce process, I think the combination of therapy and coaching is such a powerful combination. It’s two sides of the same coin — it’s unpacking and moving forward. Coaching can be very tactical, which is what’s nice about it. Cheryl’s background is as a certified divorce coach, with a background in psychology as well. In her previous career she was an executive recruiter. A lot of times people going through divorce need to reinvent their careers, and she can help them in that very tactical way. It’s a sense of self — I need to establish my own identity.

Randi: How do I rebuild my whole life?

Joe: Exactly. She works with clients throughout the US and has even worked with clients in other countries. We always say — if we can help, we would love to. And if we can’t help, we can certainly direct you to someone who can. As long as you’re willing to be engaged in the process, you can certainly mediate your divorce.

Randi: Joe, I’m so touched. I hear your commitment and your passion for providing resources and getting people educated — not just for the people who are your clients, but for the world, for expanding people’s ideas of what this process can look like. I really feel the sincerity and the heart in what you’re doing, your own personal experience feeding into it and seeing all of the clients you’ve been able to support through this process. Thank you so, so much for the work that you’re doing.

Joe: Thank you for having me, Randi. I appreciate the opportunity to share. I hope someone out there finds this in their moment of darkness and it’s that little candlelight that says — OK, there’s a way through.

Randi: This is your sign. If you were looking for a sign, this is it.

Joe: This is it. We’re here for you when you’re ready.

Randi: Thank you so much. What a gift to have you. What a beautiful conversation.