Welcome to Divorce Dialogues. I'm Catherine Miller. Divorce Dialogues brings expert guests to the airways to talk through your divorce questions and fill in the gray areas that that's separating. From thinking about divorce, to how to behave during divorce, to what to do after, this is Divorce Dialogues.
Welcome to Dialogue on Divorce. I'm Catherine Miller. I'm the founder of the Miller Law Group and the director of the Center for Understanding and Conflict. And I am on a mission to change how people divorce and help them divorce with dignity and respect.
And my guest today is Gary Freeman. Gary is co-founder of the Center for Understanding and Conflict and a mentor and longtime teacher of mine, as well as an author of the Guide to Divorce Mediation, co-author with Jack Immelstein of Challenging Conflict, and author of the much more recent Inside Out, How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients. Thank you for being on the show, Gary, and welcome. Thank you, Catherine.
I'm delighted to do this. And it really is a thrill and it's exciting. And I have to admit that I'm a little nervous to have you on the show since you were the person who, together with Jack Immelstein in 1998, introduced me to the understanding-based model and the idea that we can really solve problems best by understanding them better and understanding ourselves better first. I thought we could talk a little bit about that and how it works and what your experiences are, if that makes sense to you.
Sure. The idea of mediation is really to put in charge of the decision-making about the divorce the people that created the marriage and are going to have to live with the results of the divorce. And so it isn't so important whether or not you're going to have a relationship in the future, but to actually be the ones who, together, make the decisions about how to come apart and the financial decisions and their children's children's decisions. I think it's so much better if you can do it because you're in a much better position to know what makes most sense for the family as it goes through this change.
And for you, then people from the outside as well-intentioned as they may be, professionals or particularly judges who don't really have the time to get to know you or have the intimacy with your situation that you do. You know, I think that for so many people who face divorce, that makes a lot of sense. But the problem is if you can do it, right? I think that there's a fear or a concern.
You know, if we could do stuff like that, maybe we wouldn't be getting divorced. And what do you say to people like that? It's realistic to wonder whether or not you can pull it off. You've reached a point where obviously there's sufficient problems that you've decided you no longer want to be married to each other.
So you wonder what you can do together with them. But I think in some ways the key to this is would you want to be able to, both you and your spouse? And if you would want to be able to, you're more than halfway there. The reason that you have a mediator is because you can't do it just the two of you by yourself.
You need some outside help. And that's what mediators know how to do is to be able to help you get through the bumps and the difficulties and the challenges of being able to get through to each other and be able to find a different basis for the decisions that you're making than would be made if you were to leave this to the professionals to do for you. And so as challenging as it is to go through a divorce, just emotionally cope with the ups and downs and what your day is like, to be feeling like you're not disabled by it, that you actually, even in spite of this, whether you've chosen it or not, gives you a sense of I can actually help myself get through all this. And if you can help each other get through this, even though you disagree, then I think it's something that is least worth trying.
It's really interesting because as you've been talking and I've been listening to you, I had this idea that popped into my head that I never really, or an allergy that I never really thought of before. And it's sort of like going to a doctor to get treated for a disease, right? So the doctor's going to help you get better, but you're still going to get better on your own, right? Your body is still going to get better or not, I suppose, but you're still doing it yourself.
And in some ways, you might not know what to do to help your body to get better without the professional advice. And I think sometimes people come to mediation and they think, sometimes they said to me, well, I don't know how you're going to do it, but we want to try to work this out ourselves, but we really see this differently. And of course, the differences are normal. And sometimes people think if they have conflict with each other, oh, they shouldn't go to mediation or they should only go to mediation if they're ready to compromise.
It's not about that. It's not about compromise. It's about recognizing that you have a life that is going to go on. Sometimes you might not feel that way after the divorce and the things that are really important to you that will make your life better.
And that's true for your spouse as well and your children as well. And so if the two of you can put together what's really important to each of you and say, look, that's the foundation. We need to make decisions together that put the family in the best position going forward to be able to carry out our separate lives and be able, if they're children, to take care of the children as well. Then it's a different way of thinking about the problem than whether or not I know everything I need to know, all the intricacies of the finances or the law or any of those things.
The key is you're the expert on your life. And so if your expertise on your life is there front and center and your spouse's as well, it gives you a chance to not lose sight of the things that are really important to you as you go through what is, you know, obviously, you know, for many people, a rather traumatic experience of divorce. And this is intended to kind of lessen the pain of that. And really, I think you're saying, Gary, to focus on what you do know about yourself and your life and what's important to your kids and stay focused on those things rather than focusing on what you don't know.
Obviously, you'll need some kind of education on that and bring that intention to work with what you know and what's important instead of to argue about what you're afraid about. Yeah, you know, it is part of the mythology or the culture. You're supposed to hate your ex-spouse. And there's lots of support for that.
A lot of people, your friends, your relatives who love you, will often feel as if they're helping you by feeding the divisions between the two of you and poison between you. And I think in some ways that might feel supportive, but it also doesn't get you very far because it just leaves you so polarized. This relationship, whatever has happened, has been a central event in your life and will be a central event in your life for the rest of your life in some way that's coming to terms with what happened. And so this is a chance for you to kind of turn around a lot of the impulses that you have in yourself and from other people to want to turn your spouse into an enemy.
And it has to hurt to carry around the idea that this person that loved you, that you love, is now an enemy and something that you have to kind of hold in your heart. This is Dialogue on Divorce. I'm Catherine Miller talking today with Gary Freeman. Gary's been mediating since 1976 and teaching mediation since 1980 in various programs through the Center for Understanding and Conflict, which he co-founded with Jack Himmelstein, as well as in a variety of other programs.
And we're talking about mediation and, I guess, vulnerability in the sense that mediation could be empowering to help people find resolutions that make sense to them rather than making sense to strangers. One of the things you said a little earlier, Gary, was that it's not about compromise. So let's talk a little bit about that because oftentimes people in my office will say, we've come to mediation to compromise. We're coming to mediation because we feel that we need to find some way to compromise.
But that's not really what it's about. That's right. No, I mean, it's really about – it is a negotiation. And, of course, whatever money there is to go around has to be divided up and you're going to have to make decisions about that.
No one comes out of a divorce wealthier than they were before. So there is going to be some giving up of material things in your life for sure because it's not an economically positive thing for people to get a divorce. On the other hand, there are things that you need as you try to think about what you want your life to look like to make your life work that need to be understood by you and you need to get whatever help. You need to be able to do that to find out what the direction is that makes most sense for you in your life as you go through this.
And when you identify those things, to put those forward and your spouse to do the same as the things that really are the ground. And it's not this amount of money that I need. It's what this amount of money is intended to achieve in my life. I'm thinking about it like that.
Using that and if your spouse uses that too. And you put those together and you find, given whatever the material things that you have in your life, the best way to divide those and to be able to allocate income between you that will carry that out. That is not going to feel like a compromise. As a matter of fact, there may even be ways of cooperating with each other where you're able to find results that are better for both of you.
I mean, that is the goal. To find a result that's better for both of you than if you were to simply either use the legal standard or to just divide things up without thinking about from the family's perspective, how can we maximize income? How can we minimize expenses? How can we expand the reach of our assets and minimize our liabilities?
If you can both think like that, then oftentimes creative ideas come to mind that leave you both better off than you would if you were thinking about, well, let's just try to figure out how we're going to split things up. You know, and I think that another thing that I've experienced is that when people let go of a competitive dynamic, they really know each other very well, way better than we're ever going to know them. And they are actually often able in the right setting to support each other and help each other to craft a resolution that does actually do that, mutually support them, each other and the children. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's important if you're going to consider mediation to think this is somebody that I actually would like to be able to come to an agreement with if we can.
But to reach a good agreement, you're going to have to be willing to disagree with each other, too. And some of the disagreements you've had in the past may be quite essential for you to be able to find a way to talk about those and talk about them in a different way so that you go through the disagreements rather than get stuck in the places which have left you polarized. And that's really part of what you can expect from a mediator. And by the way, it's not just a mediator that you would necessarily be using.
You would each get the support that you each need to be able to be on top of the information that you have to understand it and to emotionally support you. So most people who go through mediation have lawyers that they at least consult with, not who speak for them, not who argue for them, but who actually support them. And they also have other people as well, other financial professionals, mental health professionals, child specialists, whatever is needed to be able to feel like you're informed enough. But you're at the center of the decision-making, not the professionals.
Gary Freeman, let's talk about what it looks like in the mediation room because as you're speaking, I'm thinking that our listeners might be wondering, all right, well, how do you actually do that? Because that's the scary part, you know, when we get to the disagreement. How are we going to be able to work it through in a way that's much more successful than what we've done in the past? Yeah.
Well, first of all, you are going to be in a room together. And I think that most mediators who work effectively work with everybody together in the same room. So part of the job of the mediator is to be able to help you do this and to bring skills, support, and a safety of space for you to really be able to speak up and to say the things that you need to, to be able to reach each other. And the mediators help get through to each other as well.
And so your thought is, and of course it's natural for everybody, to blame each other for what went wrong. Blame is often helps you feel a little bit better at the moment, but it's also rather limited in terms of being able to get through to each other. So it is an opportunity for you to not just get stuck into the picture that you have of the other person who's 100% responsible for everything that went wrong. And if you can have a more honest, more open conversation as necessary for you to be able to make the financial decisions and kid decisions that are more open than you might have had with each other in the past, it can be a great relief and a source of healing rather than something where you're each kind of stuck in the other person is what ruined my life.
This is Dialogue on Divorce. I'm Catherine Miller talking today with Gary Friedman, co-founder of the Center for Understanding and Conflict. We're on WVOX, 1460 AM in Westchester County and WVOX.com. And we're also available as a podcast on my website, www.westchesterfamilylaw.com, as well as iTunes and SoundCloud.
And Gary, if our listeners have questions for you or would like to reach you, what would be the best way for them to do that? They can write the Center for Understanding and Conflict, Gary, at understandinginconflict.org with any questions that they have or any information that they might want. And they can also learn more about the Center at www.understandinginconflict.org. And there's a lot more information, Gary, about your background there.
So we were talking about what it would look like for people in the mediation room. And one thing that you mentioned was sitting all together, and sometimes people think that mediation is sort of more along the lines of shuttle mediation, like that might happen in international or labor relations, and those kinds of mediations are fairly typical. What about that? When difficult things come up in the room, how are people able to work through conflicts together and not have separate meetings with a mediator where they can tell them what's really going on for them?
The most important thing is that you have some desire to want to be able to do that. If you have the desire to want to be able to do that and to have a more open conversation, that could lead to the kind of results that make your lives work. You've gone quite a ways along the path of doing it. It does take courage, for sure, to do this.
And it does take a willingness to make the effort to understand what it is in your life, develop a picture of what is really important to you, what you want your life to look like. And if you can do that with the help of a mediator, to actually be understood by you and then expressed by you and then understood by your spouse in return for your being willing to do the same thing. What that means, and oftentimes when we hear from another person, this is what I want, we think, oh, my goodness, that's going to come out of me. And so we try to defend or protect against that or disagree with them.
But the reality is, if you're going to reach a consensual arrangement, it needs to be something that works for the other person as well as it works for you. So a lot of the work that you're going to need to do is to be able to talk about what you care about. But you're also going to need to do the work of being willing to understand, not agree with the other person. And if you disagree with each other, it's fine.
It's normal. It's part of the process of going through an uncoupling. But the idea is you don't give up or give in or take over. It really is about joint decision-making.
And the reason why it's so important to do this with everybody together in the room is so that you're not relying on some third person to be doing the communication for you back and forth between one room and another, where misunderstandings can arise and also where it really becomes hard not to think of that person who goes back and forth between you as more like a judge than somebody who's a neutral who has no power to make any decision for you. This is really about the two of you empowering yourself to be able to make these decisions rather than turning that over to somebody else and getting whatever help you need from the outside, but you stay in the center of the decision-making. I think what you say about misunderstanding is really interesting because misunderstanding happens in the room all the time, right? When you're in it live and they are with each other and the mediator have a chance to see it or the mediator has a chance to see that misunderstanding, there's actually a chance for re-understanding, for clarity.
I think it's very powerful for people to have a fair witness when they're trying to have a conversation. It becomes, just by virtue of having a third-person part of the conversation, something different than what you would have if the two of you were alone. So I think that recognizing that and recognizing this is going to be a different kind of conversation. Whatever it is that transpired between us up to this point, that's what's happened.
What's going to transpire going forward is going to be up to us, and that's both of us. And so either one of us, of course, can make it impossible for the other, but together we can actually do things for ourselves and each other that nobody else can do for us. I think that that's the idea of having the observer there, the fair witness. In physics, I think they call that the observation phenomenon, that just having someone there observing it changes the thing in and of itself and certainly in human ration.
That is very, very true. And you have to be sure that you find somebody that you both feel comfortable with, that you trust, that you feel can be there for both of you. It doesn't do any good if you find a mediator who's very sympathetic to you and very unsympathetic to your spouse. That becomes a totally different kind of process.
What you need is somebody who's going to be there and can both have confidence, is interested and incapable of understanding both of you. Yeah, I'm going to change the subject just for a little bit. And I'd like you to tell our listeners, if you're willing, what led you to become interested in discovering mediation and figuring these things out? Well, experience as a trial lawyer.
So for the first five years of my lawyer life, that's what I did. I went to court, and when I did that, it was very interesting. I was actually pretty good at it. But what I felt was that I was often making people's lives worse by being part of a system where a decision was made, one of them was right, the other was wrong.
It didn't feel like something that I wanted to be a part of, so I stopped. And when I had this idea of trying to find a different way to be a lawyer, I decided to experiment with different ways of being a lawyer. And one of the ways in which it came out of that experiment was... a couple of people came to me and said, would you help us?
I said something about being on one side and the other person could negotiate for themselves. One of the people looked at me and said, you know, you sound like all the rest of them. Why can't you just be in the middle and use your skills and your experience to be able to help us find our way through to each other? And I thought, you know, that's pretty interesting.
I never thought of doing it before. But it actually felt much truer to me in terms of my experience of how most conflicts feel that they don't divide up into one side's right, the other's wrong. And so being in the middle felt to me a more natural and real position to be. And so I started to experiment more with that.
And quite quickly, actually, my practice took off. This was in the late 70s. And only the last four years, I've just reinforced that view that for people, this is right for, this is a process that gives them a chance to do all kinds of things that could never happen for them if they just went through the legal system. What have you learned that surprised you about people or about mediation in 40 years since?
Well, I'm surprised every day. I've done thousands of these cases. And I have to say that I still find myself quite puzzled about whether it makes for a relationship or a divorce. Some people, for example, seem to be incredibly kind to each other.
And there's a very good feeling between them, but very little tolerance for any kind of disagreement and ready to divorce. I've seen other people go at each other tooth and nail and still saying, you know, I love this person. I want to be together with this person. And their tolerance for really incredibly, what looks to me, very difficult lives is kind of amazing.
So it's not like there's one set of this is what a good marriage or a divorce looks like. People are just so different. And I find myself very interested in just seeing the variety of how people are. But most of all, I think the biggest discovery is how much people really at the deepest level in their lives want to be able to feel as if they can have the other person as a friend, somebody that they invested a significant part of their life if it was very short.
And to be able to have that, that's really gold for them for the rest of their lives. And I think going back to something you said earlier, and we're out of time, but also for me is how much courage people, so many people do have to do this work and to really bring themselves to it. It's really very hard to see that. It gives you a feeling about the world, I think, that to me is very optimistic in spite of whatever else might be happening.
Well, Gary Freeman, thank you so much for being our guest on Dialog on Divorce. It's been a real pleasure to have you on. Catherine, it's wonderful for you to have me on. And of course, one of the things I'm talking about is when I see a student who surpassed a teacher, it's thrilling.
Well, that's kind of good to say. Great work. Thank you.