What if at least one person said, “I know this better way you can get help and agree on things and you don’t have to go to court”?  Although many people have now at least heard about mediation, too few people are aware of Consensual Dispute Resolution (CDR).  What if someone they trust told them they will need help from a good team of legal, mental health and financial professionals who will help them with their joint goal of separating things in order to go on with their lives with less stress.   One of the main areas of interest of CDR is to explore how to reshape the public narrative to see CDR as the first step rather than litigation.

The dilemma has been how to reach the public.  The experience of members of the California Institute for Consensual Divorce is that efforts by practice groups and professional organizations has had minimal impact.  Free presentations aimed directly at the public to provide information about divorce in general and consensual processes in particular draw few people.  Advertising is prohibitively expensive for most practitioners and groups, and the referrals it brings often do not turn out to be appropriate.  Without a coordinated, nation-wide, well-funded public education media campaign, it would be hard to target effectively the person in crisis going through a divorce. There was hope that the increasing use of internet searches would play a role in helping people find information about CDR, but an informal survey of professional consensual groups suggested websites have not shown to be effective, even when there was effort into maximizing hits.

Educating helping professionals about CDR could prove to be a more effective way to reshape the narrative of the divorce process rather than trying to educate the public directly.  CDR should be a part of the curriculum in law schools and mental health graduate programs since it has practical applications for those professions.  People in these professions are likely to be seen as trusted advisors to a person as the start of a divorce.  They are high-status influencers.

Staying with the idea that many people in divorce crisis may think of finding a lawyer as their first step, they may turn to lawyers they are already involved with such as trust or civil lawyers.   Most lawyers do not have a sophisticated understanding of CDR beyond settlement attempts just before a hearing.  They are likely to gloss over orders to meet and confer.  What practical training lawyers get in law school is aimed at litigation, when, in fact, the day-to-day work of most lawyers in all fields of law is negotiation and settlement.   Getting CDR into the curriculum at law schools and part of continuing education for attorneys in diverse fields, not just family law, needs to be the goal!

Many people are in couples or individual therapy when their relationships are breaking down.  How their therapist helps them think through coping with the crisis of divorce can have a profound influence on their client.  However, mental health professionals get little or no education on the psychological and practical needs of people going through the divorce process and are likely to refer to their own divorce experience or others close to them as a guide.  Most mental health graduate programs and continuing education is aimed at treating the individual with a diagnosis.  In reality, dealing with conflict resolution and complex family dynamics is part of helping most people deal with problems they walk into their therapist’s office with.

We at The California Institute for Consensual Divorce Institute wish to explore ways of getting the message out to law schools and mental health graduate programs and continuing education, both because it will provide skills needed for their work in the diverse applications of law and mental health and because these trusted professionals could be the way to influence the public about their first, most important choice in getting a divorce.  Reshaping the narrative to Consensual Divorce is the first step!