Collaborative Divorce

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Divorce is a legal, financial, and emotional process. Divorce does not have to be devastating! Have you considered a Collaborative Divorce?

  • Are you and/or your spouse contemplating divorce?
  • Do you have concerns about the impact of your divorce on your children?
  • Have you worried about the cost of maintaining two households, dividing your assets, liabilities, and finances?
  • Do you wonder how you will move on and begin again?

Collaborative Divorce is an out of court legal process, whereby you will have a team of specially trained legal, financial, and mental health experts working together in a safe and amicable environment, guiding you and your spouse to develop options for reasonably dividing your marital estate, while you develop the necessary skills to live independent of one another, share your children, maintain the integrity of your family relationships, and move on, in peace.

Your Collaborative Divorce Team will include a specialized composition of professionals who will meet the specific needs of your family. This Team will include you, the divorcing couple, each of you being represented by a Collaborative Attorney, a Neutral Financial Professional, who will assist you to divide and utilize your resources in the best possible way to preserve your financial future and a Mental Health professional who will facilitate the process, and guide you and your Team toward making the necessary decisions toward the resolution of your marital issues in an efficient, cost-effective way.

As a part of this team, Dr. Heller promotes respectful communication, goal setting, problem-solving, and co-parenting; utilizing each member of the team’s knowledge, expertise, experience and input to creatively develop an action plan toward the dissolution of the marriage and the restructuring of their family while providing for the needs of the entire family.

Dr. Heller has researched and published her doctoral dissertation on Competency and the Role of the Mental Health Counselor in the Collaborative Family Law. She has presented on this topic both statewide and nationally and has also published several book chapters and articles on this topic. READ MORE>>>

Listen to my on-air broadcast and podcast appearances about the Collaborative Process:

The Various Roles of the Mental Health Professional (MHP) in Collaborative Practice: What Do They Do? 

MHPs play an invaluable role in the Collaborative Divorce process for attorneys and clients alike.
For attorneys, the MHP serves in a critical resource by helping them understand their clients’ emotional triggers, fears, and concerns, and can provide crucial assistance in settlement negotiations by identifying emotional and psychological roadblocks to settlement—explaining how the clients’ feelings are inhibiting progress and suggesting a framework for more fruitful outcomes. MHPs can further assist attorneys in understanding how their own reactions and behaviors may be causing anger or annoyance to one or both clients and can recommend that the attorneys approach problems in different ways that will be better received by the clients.
The MHP may additionally be included on a Collaborative Divorce team as a “Child Specialist” capacity, which brings the voice and needs of a child into the process. A Child Specialist does not provide therapy for children. They will meet with them and will then give the clients feedback on their children’s experiences, which helps the parents understand what the children are thinking and feeling and can improve their ability to talk to the children about difficult issues. The “Child Specialist” may also work with adult children of divorce as they too experience challenges and may need guidance and direction. In order to navigate difficult discussions. with their parents about their divorce.
For clients, although MHPs do not treat or diagnose clients when working in this process, the MHP on the Collaborative Divorce team is specially trained and can assist in identifying and handling the challenging client behaviors and can diffuse the intensity when the clients’ emotional and psychological challenges cause them to be reactive or get stuck. READ MORE>>>