Posts from — February 2009

Don’t let your sorrow come higher than your knees.  — Swedish Proverb

The divorce filing fee in North Carolina is $165.OO.   It will cost an additional $15.00 to have the sheriff serve the papers on your spouse.

Last night I conducted a Breaking-Up and Moving On! workshop at the Women’s Resource Center in Greensboro.   The turnout was great!   To every woman who attended, please know that I really appreciated your presence and participation.

The best way to find a lawyer is through referrals.  Referrals are important because if you are referred by someone the lawyer knows he or she is going to want to do a good job for you to protect his or her reputation.    How do you find referrals?  Ask everyone you know to tell you the name of a lawyer they have used in the past and would use again in the future.

That’s the name of a workshop I will be conducting tomorrow evening at the Women’s Resource Center in Greensboro.   It’s free but you must register in advance.    Call 336-275-6090 for more details.

No one - with the exception of a few celebrities — gets married with the intention of getting divorced.  We say the vows because we believe we are going to live happily ever after.  So when the marriage ends, despite your best efforts to do everything you can to save it, it may leave you feeling that you are unlovable, your self worth battered and questioning whether you will ever find love again.

How you feel is not a reflection of what is true:  it is a reflection of what you are thinking.  Just because you feel like a failure doesn’t mean you are a failure.  Your marriage failed.  That has nothing to do with who you are.  If the brakes failed on your car, would that mean that you are a failure?

Should I file for divorce if I am not happy in my marriage?

That is a question only you can answer.

Always behave like a duck — keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.

The legal system was designed to divide your stuff and to resolve legal issues regarding who should get what and who should be forced to do what. However, the fallout from divorce goes way beyond your stuff. Divorce involves fractured families, broken hearts and shattered dreams. So, even if the judge awards you the house, $10,000 a month in alimony and full custody of the kids, the underlying issues will remain to be addressed.

Recognizing that there will still be lots of work to do after your legal case is closed may make you mindful of not wasting all of your emotional energy over the stuff. Save it for the heavy lifting that needs to be done after the courtroom drama ends.

 Before going through the time, expense and trouble of getting a divorce, you and your spouse may want to try just getting away from each other for a wahile.  This can be as simple as taking separate vacations or as complex as actually separating into separate households for an indefinite period of time.

This may give each of you a chance to think about how you will like living alone, how important and trivial your problems are, and how you really feel about each other.