Four Peaks Parents: Joe Dillon on Divorce, Mediation, and Family Wellness

Host: Thomas Miller, Licensed Therapist and Family Coach
Guest: Joe Dillon, Equitable Mediation Services

---

Thomas: Welcome to the Four Peaks Parents Podcast with your host Thomas Miller. Super excited to have with me today Joe Dillon, who is a pioneer in divorce mediation and has been helping couples navigate the end of their marriage with dignity and financial wisdom for over 17 years.

Today’s topic is going to be about divorce and mediation and how to help usher a family through that with dignity in the most effective way with a mind toward children and family wellness.

Joe is the co-founder of Equitable Mediation Services. He combines his MBA in finance with specialized training from Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern University to guide couples toward agreements that protect both their emotional well-being and financial futures. He pioneered virtual divorce mediation in 2011, nearly a decade before others adopted online practices during the pandemic. His results speak for themselves.

Even though divorce has been around for a while, it’s still amazing to me as someone who works every day with families and coaches parents that parents sometimes forget the impact. As we were talking offline, divorce has been so normalized – what is it, 55-60% now?

Joe: Right, especially in baby boomers and older couples, it’s probably approaching 75%.

Thomas: Even though it is normalized, and in no way am I saying that if you’re getting divorced, your kids are going to be living under a bridge, it is amazing that people forget that everything has ripples and everything affects children, particularly depending upon the age and timing. You have an amazing personal story about what got you into this space. I think it informs how you practice and gives you a north star.

Joe: Thanks. The story for me is that my parents litigated their divorce. As a child of divorce in a household where there were loud explosions of arguments and then silence for months – not days, months – it was such a dysfunctional pattern of peaks and valleys.

My folks had no ability to communicate with each other. They hired lawyers and did everything you shouldn’t do – spend all your money. I was finding myself sitting in the back of a courtroom watching my parents argue.

The last vision I have of my father, I was probably 15 or 16. They were arguing over who was going to pay for me to go to college. He wanted it to be 50/50, and at that point my dad made probably at least 10 times more than my mom did. She was working inside the home with me and had gotten a part-time job because she had an inkling something was going on. If she was making $5,000 or $6,000 a year, that’d be a lot.

He was really upset. The judge said, “Well, Mr. Dillon, you make a lot more. You should pay more.” Every time my father would start yelling at the judge, the judge would say “60-40.” Then my father would yell more – “70-30.” There was one point – an imprinted memory – where they actually had to restrain my father because I think he was going to go after the judge. The bailiff stepped over, the lawyer grabbed his arm.

I’m out in the hallway after this whole debacle, and my mom and dad are still bickering about something. That was the last time I saw my father again. I saw him when I was 15 in 1985, and then in 2019, I got a letter in the mail that said he died. That was it.

My entire experience with my father was either screaming matches or, when he was around, he was great. He probably had some kind of bipolar or something. When I think about what I went through, that’s really what drives me. When people talk about divorce, there’s a lot they don’t know despite how common it is. People are always like, “Oh yeah, that’s not going to happen to us.” Well, you’re sitting across from someone it happened to because his parents didn’t think that would happen either. It can happen really quickly.

That’s what I try to bring to the table – “Guys, let’s work it out in mediation. You’re not going to be husband and wife anymore. You’re still going to be mom and dad. Your kids are counting on you. They don’t care about what’s going on between you. They want you at the soccer games and high school graduation because I didn’t have that.” We try to use that message to get them to come to the table and go through divorce in the best way for their kids.

Thomas: I need to hold space first because that was a trauma. What people forget sometimes when they’re in the cortisol bath of fight or flight is that you do have some form of PTSD. For you in that moment, your world was crashing. It must be such a driver for you because you still see these families fall into some of the same traps. What are some of the basic traps or holes in the sidewalk that you see parents and families falling into that could otherwise be avoided?

Joe: There are a couple that immediately come to mind. One is the concept of modeling. I tell this story about a friend – if you want news to travel fast, tell a three-year-old. My friend was in the kitchen, something went wrong with the meal, and he blurted out the f-word. For probably the next 5 to 10 minutes, his three-year-old son thought this was the funniest thing and ran around the house yelling it. He had no idea what he was saying, but it was getting a reaction.

The message here is that even if kids don’t understand what’s going on, they’re absorbing it. As parents, you have to be very cognizant of your behavior around your kids – fighting in front of them, disparaging each other, talking about money, saying “I’m not going to pay child support or alimony.”

Another misnomer is “we stayed together for the kids.” As kids get older, I can tell you from my own experience – I remember my mom crying hysterically, my dad pulling away in his car packed with stuff, and she kept saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I remember saying to her, “What are you sorry about? Thank God this is over. I don’t have to listen to this anymore.” She looked at me like, “You knew what was going on?” I’m like, “Why do you think I was hiding in a closet? Because you guys were screaming so loud.”

Parents, you’re not so clever. Your kids know what’s going on. They know you’re unhappy. It’s best, in my opinion, to go your separate ways if you’re not willing to put in the work to fix it. That being said, if you’re going through a divorce, I’m not pro-divorce – I’m anti-conflict. Try and save your marriage first. There are professionals you can talk to. If you find through all that work that you’re still unable to connect, no problem.

When you’re going through divorce with kids, you don’t know what you’re doing. Most of our clients have never been divorced before. If you need help, lean into professionals to say, “I’m going through this divorce. My kid is reacting to it negatively, especially teenagers, because they’re in that all-about-me phase – ‘You’re ruining my life.'”

Somewhere along the line, we grew up, became adults, we’re supposed to be responsible, help others. We can’t just ride our bikes all summer or go hang out with our friends. That’s the role you signed up for whether you realize it or not. Be a parent. Be an adult. Your kids need you. You think you’re suffering? They’re suffering 10 times as much as you do, and they might not have the vocabulary to say it.

Thomas: You described the parallel process of dysfunction – as the family is yelling, screaming, fighting, by proxy the child is absorbing all that and becoming a saturated sponge. To survive and cope, you were hiding in the closet. Your mother sounds like an amazing, resilient woman, but she was quasi-autistic as so many parents are because when they’re in fight or flight with cortisol and adrenaline, you literally lose peripheral vision. You’re so focused, like putting blinders on horses in a horse race so they just run forward.

Those families are running whatever race they think they’re running, which is not an intentional one, and they’re not seeing the child on either side of them. I always say there’s an ROI for inaction and an ROI for action. They’re vectors that move farther and farther away from each other, and the cost of inaction only allows symptomatology to get deeper and deeper with physical, emotional, and financial tolls.

How do you sell people away from that? To me, it’s so obvious because I’m not in the midst of an angry divorce. Financially it’s the most obvious thing. Emotionally, it’s the most obvious thing. Isn’t the average divorce about a year and a half?

Joe: If you use lawyers, probably two to three years. If it’s a friendly lawyer-driven divorce, 18 to 24 months, and that’s a lot of waiting around, uncertainty, back and forth, ping-ponging. Mediation, maybe three months.

Thomas: When I think about the ROI on action and inaction – I have an MBA in finance, so my background is finance and negotiation. When you think about retirement savings or interest rates, those are hardcore numbers, but there’s emotional capital that also gets spent.

I was having this conversation last night with my wife at dinner. I’m a really glass-not-only-half-full, the-glass-is-completely-full kind of guy. I volunteer, I do positive things because I really believe that. But it seems like every single day it’s really hard to get up and be positive and motivated with the constant influx of the fire hose of bad news coming.

Now you take that noise and you’ve just drained the life out of someone, and you put them in this divorce situation where they need to tap into every emotional reserve they’ve got. The well is dry. When we talk about money in divorce, I also posit it as emotional capital. What’s in your emotional bank? If you want to go through a litigated divorce and you’re already on zero, you’re not going to survive that.

I’ve watched it. If you’re basically taking one pill to calm you the minute you wake up, then another pill at night to go to bed because you’re going through a litigated divorce, shouldn’t that tell you something? That’s where you try to get people to understand – look, there is an alternative. You know what it is. They make movies about how terrible it is. Let’s avoid that. Let’s recharge your batteries. Let’s put some cash back in your emotional and literal bank.

Most of our clients average 45 to 55 years old. I plan on living to a thousand – I’m going to live forever. But if you say to these people, “Listen, say you’re 50 and you live to 90. Do you really want to be miserable for the next 40 years?” You want to get through this, begin your healing process. You have to go through hell before you get to heaven. The sooner you can get to that, the sooner you can get on with your life and rebuild.

That’s how we try to keep people in mediation. I don’t beg, I don’t plead, but you are in charge of your own destiny here. You know the alternative. What do you want to do? My experience has shown me that people know when they’re being difficult. People know the difference between right and wrong. Unless you’re raised by wolves, you get people arguing with you and they’re like, “Yeah, okay, let’s…” If I can just get them to go, “Fine, let’s just go,” that’s a victory in my book.

Thomas: The two to three years you mentioned – the first thing I thought of was the child. I have so many families with failing-to-launch 20-somethings where you go back in the story, there were moments in those two to three years. Just two to three years of a parent – let’s say even a neurotypical child with no real risk factors – how are you able to hold space and be an attachment-based mom or dad if you’re fighting for two to three years? That in itself creates neglect. You add on top of that if a child has OCD, anxiety, depression, is possibly starting to experiment with substances.

What creates that shift where someone is able to come to their senses and recognize the child, the family, themselves are at stake?

Joe: As a negotiator, there’s a reason negotiation is taught using game theory. That’s an important word – game. It’s not meant to imply that divorce is a game by any stretch, but there is theory behind it, human nature behind it.

You see all logic goes out the window when we’re arguing and in that heat of the moment. We’re trying to inflict pain on the other person through “you” statements – pointing fingers and hurling grenades. “You did this, you did this.”

The moment where the real breakthrough comes is when the gears shift and it moves from “you” to “I.” I see this in alimony conversations a lot. You’ve got one person who works outside the home and one who works inside the home – they’re a stay-at-home parent. They’re not watching TV all day eating ice cream. They’re working harder than the other person and not getting paid for it.

It’s like, “Well, you stayed home while I worked.” The other person says, “Wait a minute. We decided that I was going to stay home.” That goes back and forth with “you, you, you.” Then comes the moment in this conversation when the person says, “Do you really think that I want your money? I want to take your money? I am happy about getting alimony?” The other person is taken aback because they’re shocked to hear, “If I could, I wouldn’t take a penny from you.”

That’s a good example of where the conversation shifts because it goes from “you” to “I.” Those are the moments where you have space for reflection and the ability to say, “I have a hand in this. I am partly responsible for this. I am fallible. I am human.”

Rather than saying, “You’re never home. You’re not a good parent,” with parenting plans you say, “Listen, I appreciate all you’ve done. I know how hard you work. I don’t know if it’s realistic for you to get home because we live in Princeton, New Jersey and you work in New York City and you want to pick the kids up from school at 3:30. I don’t see how that’s realistic despite how much I know you want that.” It’s how you shift the conversation to keep the temperature down.

Thomas: You’re basically teaching people how to look at the other person from a perspective-taking lens. How can I put myself in their shoes? Move from viewing them completely as an adversary who’s trying to take my money to actually having some empathy or compassion and then seeing the child.

The work you’re doing is so valuable and really is changing the experience of these children and families. One of the things I heard in your story which is brilliant – you went through this really barren landscape of connection with your dad, this very lacking child developmental approach in terms of your relational dynamic with him, and then to go into that same field where you help people who were in similar situations. What a huge gift that you’re doing.

Joe: It’s interesting. It’s almost like my penance. Early on in my career when I was doing mediation, there was a part of me that was hard to learn how to compartmentalize because it felt like you’d see these folks and wonder why they’re getting divorced. You were disappointed because at some point they loved each other. They maybe stood up in front of friends and family and professed their undying admiration for each other.

After a while, I started to realize, “You know what? I’m helping them avoid the meat grinder. If they’re going to do this, I’d rather they do it with me.” It’s the whole Buddhist thing of when you throw a stone in the pond – there are ripples. There are ripples that these parents I’m helping divorce, their kids’ kids are going to benefit from because they’re going to have seen their folks model healthy disagreement.

I think that’s what we’re seeing a lot of today – the inability to disagree with each other as intellectual, normal-thinking people. I’m not going to agree with everybody. We live amongst different folks of different backgrounds, different cultures. Even in a relationship, marriages come at it from different spaces. But if you can respect that person, then you have a shot at staying together. If you can’t, at least respect them through the divorce process.

Say, “Look, we’re different beings. It didn’t work out. We have this great kid or kids. Let’s model healthy behavior for them. Let’s model adulthood. We can disagree. We can fight nicely. We can end this peacefully.”

I remember a graduation when I was living in New Jersey. The weather was sketchy, so you got two tickets if it had to be held in the gym – only mom and dad could come. But if it was nice weather on the football field, everybody could come. My mom sent a ticket to my dad and said, “Please come to the graduation.” He would not come unless my mom also gave him a ticket for his girlfriend. She explained you only get two tickets because if it rains, it’s in the gym. I went to a small high school – around 97 kids.

He did not come. The worst part was it was actually held outside, so he and his girlfriend could have come, and he didn’t come. As an adult, you’re like, “Really? How emotionally immature are you? What are you, five?”

That’s the stuff I’ve worked to process over my lifetime. When I share these kinds of stories with people and get them to look in the mirror, I say, “Guys, take a real hard look at yourself. Do you really think – what if your kid was sitting here right now listening to the two of you? What do you think they would say to you two?” They’d say, “Why don’t you knock it off?” That’s probably what I would say if I was your 12-year-old.

Thomas: You are playing a role in either creating generational trauma or not as a parent going through this. For you to have the expertise, objectivity, professional know-how, sensitivity, and connection through your own experience to stand inside everyone’s shoes – that’s what’s so hard as a clinician or mediator. Your job is to really sit inside that cumulative perspective and use yourself to understand what it feels like to be a kid in this family, to be the husband or wife. You do that so well.

It’s a no-brainer to me that folks would mediate over litigated divorce because putting a child on a shelf for two to three years, even if it’s better than acrimonious, is still such a long time. The child is held in suspended animation and not able to hit the play button, which is what’s actually healthy.

If we were to summarize, what would you say is one major message you really want to get across to listeners or anyone going through or potentially going through a divorce?

Joe: Without a doubt, your kids are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. I don’t care how old they are. I don’t care if you think they’ve got their earbuds in or they’re buried in their Instagram or TikTok. They are listening. They are absorbing. They are sponging. Every move you make, every word you say, they are absorbing. Be very careful with your choices and actions. Be very intentional.

Thomas: Just to add one thing – there’s something called tear and repair. When you slip into a dysregulated parenting moment where you’re not parenting from a place of regulation and calm, when you slip into that, you can always repair. A “Millerism” said probably every day in this household is “Let’s just start this morning again” or “Let’s start this afternoon over.”

I want parents to hear before they pick up the shame stick or guilt stick that there’s something you could do today that will actually sow seeds of attachment and begin to change the trajectory from trauma pathway to health and wellness pathway.

Joe, speak to a couple of things that are unique about you – you created virtual mediation, and you have a bunch of sites throughout the country. How can folks reach out to you?

Joe: We’ve been practicing online mediation since 2011, and that’s allowed us to practice in multiple states. My wife and I have moved across the country, and without having a physical presence, we’ve developed such a process that in our opinion works better than sometimes being in a room because sometimes people have dysregulated emotions, and being in this virtual space makes them feel a little safer.

The best way to find us is our website, equitablemediation.com. If you go there, you’ll see we have a learning center where I’ve been blogging for 17 years with articles, videos, courses, and podcasts.

We practice in multiple states. I’m originally from the New York City area, so New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. When we lived in Chicago, we added Illinois. Now we live in California. Since my wife is a big Seattle grunge fan, we also practice in Washington state. So we practice in those six states.

We’ve actually done divorces in 13 states, Canada, France, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan. People have found us because they like our approach – very analytical because we’re going to prove it out with the numbers, but also family-centered, parent-centered because you don’t want this to turn into some big conflagration. You want it to be a divorce, not a disaster.

We have a free info call. You can go to our website and book a call with my partner, who’s also my wife Cheryl. She’s a divorce coach. Like you, we really believe in handling the entire client – the emotional aspect, the tactical, financial, legal. Just reach out, schedule a call, find out if mediation is right for you, and if not, we’ll let you know and direct you to some resources.

Thomas: I cannot thank you enough. I think you dispelled so many myths and rumors, and I love how you have such a heart for children, family wellness, and just not losing your mind and being an adult. Folks can go to that website, and if you forgot what Joe said, check the show notes. If you haven’t already, please sign up for the Four Peaks Parents newsletter – it’s completely free with tons of tips, tools, and strategies to help you navigate this crazy thing called parenting.

---

Contact Information:

• Website: equitablemediation.com
• States served: Washington, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
• International mediation services available (13 states plus 6 countries)
• Virtual mediation platform (pioneered in 2011)
• Free consultation calls with divorce coach Cheryl
• Comprehensive learning center with 17 years of educational content
• Host: Thomas Miller, Four Peaks Parents (fourpeaksparents.com)