630-584-5550
Recent Blog Posts
How Can We Fix Our Marriage?
Every marriage has its ups and downs. Communication differences, differences in life goals and lifestyle needs, infidelity, addiction, and financial distress can all challenge a couple to the point of making them consider divorce. In many of these cases, the couple does divorce. In others, the couple chooses to remain together, sometimes in a miserable relationship and in other cases, happily and successfully after making an effort to resolve the conflicts that drove them apart.
Couples who successfully recover from marital distress do so by employing effective conflict resolution strategies. The most effective way for you and your spouse to learn more about these strategies and how to employ them in your life is to work with an experienced marital counselor.
Actions that Will Not Fix Your Marriage
Some couples attempt to fix their marriages with significant life changes like moving to a new state or having a baby. In most cases, these are not effective ways to resolve marital difficulties because they do not address the couple’s existing conflicts, they only mask them. Additionally, certain life-changing actions like having a new baby only increase a couple’s stress level, pushing their marriage closer to divorce instead of strengthening it.
Surprising Factors that Increase Your Chance of Divorce
Some divorce factors are obvious, like high levels of conflict and disparate drinking habits between a couple. But there are many other factors that can predict a couple’s likelihood of divorce, some of which are not quite obvious and can even be surprising or counterintuitive. Below are four surprising factors that can influence whether a couple’s marriage will end in divorce.
The State Where You Live
Some states have higher divorce rates than others. In fact, some regions of the United States have higher divorce rates than others. You are more likely to get divorced if you live in the South than if you live in the Northeast. But couples who live in Nevada have the highest divorce risk of all, while New Jersey couples have the lowest.
How Much You Spent on Your Wedding
Some couples think of the money they spend on their weddings as an investment in their marriages, but the opposite is actually true: couples who spend less money on their weddings are less likely to divorce than couples who spend a lot of money. To put it into perspective, couples who spend $20,000 or more on their weddings are 3.5 times more likely to divorce than couples who spend between $5,000 and $10,000, and the group with the lowest divorce rate is couples who spend less than $1,000.
Divorce Issues to Consider if You Are Over 50
Today, the divorce rate for individuals over the age of 65 is three times what it was in 1990. There are many different factors that contributed to this rise in “gray divorces,” such as Americans living longer and a reduced social stigma around divorce.
Couples who divorce at later stages in their lives have very different needs and considerations to make than younger couples. One big difference between these divorces and divorces among couples in their 20s, 30s, and 40s is that usually, couples over 50 no longer have minor children and thus, do not need to develop parenting plans or create child support orders. This does not mean their divorces are any less complicated than divorces between parents of young children, just that they are different. Below are a few important issues that older divorcing couples face.
Your Retirement Plans
Your retirement accounts are marital property, which means they are subject to equitable distribution in your divorce. The court will likely divide your retirement accounts through a qualified domestic relations order (QDRO), which ensures that an alternate payee, the spouse whose name is not on the account, receives his or her fair share of its contents.
I Am Pregnant and Going Through a Divorce. What Can I Expect?
It is easy to feel inundated with information about what to expect when you are expecting. Few pregnant women expect to get divorced while they are expecting, but it happens. Here is what you can expect from your divorce and the months that follow when you are pregnant.
You Can Make Parenting Decisions, but you Cannot Establish a Parenting Plan Before Birth
Talk to your partner about the parenting plan you will put into place when the baby is born.
Though you cannot create an official parenting plan before birth, you can be ready with tentative agreements regarding parenting time and responsibilities after your child is born.
A parenting plan for a newborn is much different from a parenting plan for an older child, especially if you plan to breastfeed and thus will need to be present almost constantly. A newborn’s attachment needs and sleep schedule also need to be taken into consideration when developing a parenting plan. Keep in mind that the parenting plan you establish shortly after birth can be modified later as your child grows.
Changing Your Name After Your Divorce
When a marriage ends, both partners can feel a sense that their identities have changed. This can be especially true for individuals, usually women, who chose to change their surnames when they married. Changing your name after your divorce is a personal choice. There are as many valid reasons to change your name as there are reasons to keep it, just like there were when you first married. Think about the following reasons why others choose to keep or change their names after divorce to determine the right course of action for yourself.
Reasons Why Divorced Women Keep Their Married Names
For many people, changing their last name to their spouse’s when they marry is not “taking” the spouse’s name, but creating a new family with the new surname. An individual with this mindset might choose to keep his or her married name after divorce because to him or her, it is as much his or her name as it is his or her former spouse’s name.
Detaching Yourself from a Codependent Relationship
In a healthy relationship, both parties can manage their own emotional and personal needs. In a codependent relationship, one or both partners cannot do this for themselves, so they rely on each other to manage all their personal needs. Do not confuse emotionally supporting a spouse with codependency – in a healthy marriage, both partners should be expected to be there for each other. Codependency goes beyond this level of emotional support. Codependency describes a relationship where one partner sacrifices his or her own needs to fulfill the other’s, causing him or her to suffer from the difficulties that come with poor coping mechanisms like internalized shame, people-pleasing behavior, and perfectionism to the point of fearing failure. A codependent relationship is not healthy for either party or if they have children, the children. Often, divorce is an important step toward recovering from codependency.
Recognizing Codependency in Your Marriage
How Divorce Can Be Healthy for Children
Some couples believe they should hold off on their divorces until their children are grown. It can be easy to see why a couple would think this way – divorce can be stressful for children, having a parenting plan means the children do not get to see both parents every day, both parents have to face the stresses of parenting individually, and when one parent finds a new partner, conflicts can arise and create wedges within the family. These are all legitimate challenges divorced couples face, but none of them are a good reason to forgo exiting an unhealthy marriage until one’s children are adults.
Why? Because when a marriage is marred by constant conflict, divorce is the healthiest solution for every member of the family. In fact, it is better for children to experience a divorce and grow up with healthy, functional parents than it is for them to grow up in “intact” families where fighting and stress are the norm.
How to Know It Is Time to File for Divorce
It is not always easy to recognize when your marriage has reached a point that divorce is necessary. We become accustomed to certain patterns and over time, can become so used to a certain lifestyle that we cannot see that it is toxic.
Take a step back and look objectively at your marriage. Every marriage has rough patches, but when a rough patch becomes a permanent way of life, it might be time to exit the marriage. If you are not sure if your marriage is a healthy one, discuss it with an experienced mental health care professional to get deeper insight into the difficulties you are facing and possible solutions. You might be able to change your lifestyle to rebuild your marriage, or you might find that divorce is the healthiest choice for everybody in your household. If one or more of the following is true, divorce might be the way to go.
You Cannot Resolve Conflicts in a Healthy Way
If all your attempts to resolve conflicts in a productive way end in screaming matches, slammed doors, and hurt feelings, you are not communicating in a healthy way.
Successful Co-Parenting During the Summer Months
Summer vacation is right around the corner. If this will be your first summer co-parenting with a parenting plan, it can be easy to get confused about how co-parenting works once school is out for the summer. If you included specific summer vacation plans in your parenting plan, co-parenting this summer can be easy. If you did not, talk to your former spouse about creating a modified parenting schedule for the summer. If you agree on a modification, you can alter your parenting plan at any time.
Adjusting to life after a divorce can be difficult for every member of your family. Use the following guidelines to make this summer the easiest transition possible.
If You Have a Summer Vacation Parenting Plan, Follow It
Many divorcing parents include a summer vacation plan in their parenting time schedules. While the children are out of school, they might spend more weekdays with their non-custodial parent or switch to a weekly alternating schedule, rather than a schedule where they only spend a few fixed days each week with one parent. In your summer parenting plan, be sure to include the start and end date for the seasonal schedule and if applicable, specific, recurring vacations each parent takes. If your child has specific plans for each summer, such as going to summer camp the first week in August, include this as well.
What Are the Long-Term Effects of Domestic Violence?
Domestic violence always has negative effects on a victim. Many of these effects, like lowered self-esteem, bruises, broken bones, and anxiety, are immediate and appear concurrently with the abuse. Others do not become apparent for months or years after the abuse begins. In some cases, an individual experiences long-term effects of domestic violence even after leaving the abusive relationship.
If you face domestic violence, discuss it with your doctor so he or she can have more context with which to diagnose your physical health conditions. Your doctor can also refer you to a mental health specialist to help you work through the lasting psychological effects of facing domestic violence. Below are a few of the long-term issues domestic violence victims face:
Increased Severity of Chronic Conditions
Domestic violence is stressful, and stress exacerbates all other health conditions. When an individual faces domestic violence, his or her risk of suffering from chronic pain, asthma, heart disease, and arthritis increases.
630-584-5550