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LEAD BY EXAMPLE I interviewed Sarah Armstrong for this week’s podcast.  She authored a book titled The Mom’s Guide to a Good Divorce.  Sarah wrote it to fill the void in the divorce book community, which was a simple, easy book to read that was brief yet poignant, topic-driven, and addressed every issue that she […]

The greatest fear of any loving parent going through divorce is that their soon-to-be ex will get sole custody and shut them out of parenting. Men, especially, fear sole custody.  The question becomes why one parent would not want the other parent to participate in loving and raising their children.  Let’s look at the range […]

I am not a teacher of mental illness; I am an observer and a student of this disease.  Never before did I think about mental illness until I started to work in the field of general mediation, and then divorce mediation. What I noticed when I entered the practice of mediation is that many people […]

When a client with a cultural background outside of the American culture calls to file for divorce I typically ask, “What do I need to know about your culture that may affect the divorce settlement?”  I ask because even though divorce is a civil law matter, I realize that people bring their cultures with them […]

The Erika Jayne & Tom Girardi divorce is quite different than the usual run-of-the-mill contentious divorce.  This one really is a Circus, a Horse of a Different Color, with anyone working on this case risking their heads if they put it in the Lion’s Mouth of the legal system.  Where is Honesty, that Elephant in […]

Our interview this week was with Dr. Lydia Hughes-Evan, Ed.D., a child of parental separation; not quite a divorce, but with the same arrangement as a divorce.  She lived in a one-parent household with her mother, and had visitation time with her father.  Her parents didn’t speak to one another.  Lydia’s parents never divorced because […]

Picture this, you’re at work, you’re in the middle of a divorce, and you see angry, demanding, disturbing emails and texts from your spouse.  Dilema; what to do?  Respond? Don’t respond? How to respond? Be apologetic or subservient in response out of fear that your spouse will be even more upset? Respond in the same […]

What do you do when you’ve lived a lifestyle based on your spouse’s wealth and less on your own, and you’ve made wealth a defining aspect of who you are?  Wealth comes and goes, so does this mean that your value comes and goes? If you’re a prisoner of your wealth, meaning that what you’re […]

How much wealth do you have to have to be as wealthy as your other cast mates on a Bravo reality Housewives show?  No one knows the answer because no one really knows how much wealth each person has, or how their wealth was and still is being earned. When Erika “Jayne” Girardi joined the […]

When I was with the circus timing was everything: I watched how important split-second timing was for acrobatic acts, the timing of a dangerous act like the tightrope walker or the Lion & Tiger acts; the timing of a clown gag; the timing of scheduling cities to perform in as we were a large tented […]