When I am not practicing family law, I practice archery. This has been a very enriching practice for me, and sometimes there are some parallels between that practice and family law. I share one here because I think it has value to parties contemplating divorce or in the middle of one.
Archery is very form-based. Recurve bows, unlike the more modern compound bows, leave most of the good technique in the hands of the archer. You work on it day after day and month after month. You constantly work on improving your stance, your draw, your anchor point, your release, and your follow through.
You can get better on your own, but eventually you will hit a wall:
You are limited until you can get other people to take a look at your form. This is necessary because people (especially highly trained and educated people) will inevitably see things you don't. They will see repeating patterns and problem areas and help you address them months (or weeks or years) before you might have figured out the issue on its own. This isn't a flaw of the archer - it is just the nature of human perception. We have a hard time seeing all the important pieces when we are in the middle of something.
If it is hard to know what is going on with the simple act of shooting an arrow, at can be really hard to figure out what is going on in a divorce, where several related systems are all in play (parenting, finances, business, romance, mental health, etc.)
When people come into my office to talk about a divorce, I spend a lot of time talking about the relationship dynamics. I ask a lot of questions about how the parties interact. I ask about their upbringing. Their dating history. Their work history. Their parents. I look for unhealthy behavior patterns between the parties that repeat again and again over time. I ask because I need to occupy that same role as the observer in archery practice.
I need to use my training and experience to see what is not necessarily obvious to the parties themselves - the dysfunctional dynamics that have led them to this point. I need to identify these issues and then use the law to create new pathways that will (hopefully) keep history from repeating itself. Like the archery coach, I can hopefully asses things and take years of suffering off someone's life (or at least mitigate it substantially).
People are often shocked at the end of these long discussions. I often ask people things like how they have addressed their spouse's alcohol dependency or borderline personality disorder. Clients will have anguished facial expressions, because those labels make uncomfortable truths (conveniently overlooked or minimized) painfully obvious.
"How did I not see it?"
"It was so obvious!"
"I can't believe I waited this long to do something!"
"Why did I let my kids go through this for so long?!?"
At this point, I usually remind clients to be kind to themselves. It is challenging enough to figure out how to shoot an arrow. It is infinitely more challenging to figure out how to live a life. All of us have blind spots, and the closer something is to our love and our fear, the bigger a blind spot gets.
Failing to see certain things is not an indicator of character or intelligence. It is a sign that you are human.
As always, I hope this helps if you are struggling with this issue right now.
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