Renegotiating Family Relationships: Divorce, Child Custody, and Mediation

257 Pages·2011·2.13 MB·English

by  Robert E. Emery

Renegotiating Family Relationships

Renegotiating
Family
Relationships
Divorce, Child Custody,
and Mediation

second edition
RobeRt e. emeRy
t G P
he uilford ress
new york london
©2012 The Guilford Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emery, Robert E.
Renegotiating family relationships : divorce, child custody, and mediation / by Robert E.
Emery. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60918-981-5 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Divorce mediation—United States. 2. Custody of children—United States. 3.
Divorced parents—Counseling of—United States. I. Title.
HQ834.E48 2012
306.89—dc23
2011030417
To every parent who has put aside
his or her own hurt and anger
for the sake of his or her children
And to every child whose parents haven’t
about the authoR
Robert E. Emery, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Director of the
Center for Children, Families, and the Law at the University of Virginia.
His research focuses on family relationships and children’s mental health,
with interests including parental conflict, divorce, mediation, child cus-
tody, family violence, genetically informed studies of family life, and
associated legal and policy issues. He has authored over 150 scientific
publications. His other books on divorce include Marriage, Divorce, and
Children’s Adjustment, Second Edition (1999), and The Truth about
Children and Divorce: Dealing with the Emotions So You and Your Chil-
dren Can Thrive (2006). He also is coauthor, with Thomas F. Oltmanns,
of Abnormal Psychology, Seventh Edition (2012). Dr. Emery maintains a
private practice as a clinical psychologist and mediator and is the father
of five children.
vi
pReFace
m
ediators work in what amounts to an emergency room for family
relationships. Some parents use the ER for routine, even preventative,
care. More are in crisis.
A wife discovers that her husband of 15 years is having an affair—
with her best friend. Furious, hurt, and emotionally devastated, she is
faced with the prospect of losing her home, finding a (better) job, divid-
ing and potentially damaging her children, and “moving on” into a hope-
less future, alone.
A husband returns from a business trip to find his wife, children,
and furniture gone. Desperate to preserve his family, he instead is told he
must give up half of the time with his children (probably much more),
divide up everything he owns, and pay support for years to a woman
who, he believes, abandoned him.
Parents in circumstances like these walk into a mediator’s or a law-
yer’s office, ostensibly seeking guidance about the legal aspects of their
divided family. Yet, of course, no one checks their emotions at the door.
A divorce (meaning the breakup of a family, married or not) com-
monly begins as a crisis, the eruption of the worst thing that has or prob-
ably ever will happen in a person’s life. Most children, and parents, are
resilient, even in the face of divorce. Most children and parents bounce
back from all of the upheaval, uncertainty, and pain. Yet, the bounce
hurts—more than you can imagine until you are there yourself.
How parents manage the immediate aftermath of a broken mar-
riage, and how well professionals help them to do so, is partly a matter of
vii
viii Preface
crisis management. It also is a crucial choice point. The choice is between
perhaps destroying already devastated relationships or, hopefully, begin-
ning to repair and redefine them. In this sense, resilience is a choice for
adults and especially a parent’s choice for children. How parents manage
their relationships with their children, and their relationship with each
other, is critical to their children’s well-being in divorce. That is the rea-
son why this book focuses mostly on parents even though my concern is
mostly with children.
This book is the story of what I have learned from my many efforts
to help families in the “mediation emergency room.” I have learned much
from my research on mediation, children and divorce, and on related
topics such as young adults’ painful feelings about their parents’ divorce
or the process of grieving relationship resolution. I have learned just as
much from my clinical work with so many families in crisis, for example,
about the primal power (and nature) of emotion, the process of grieving
a potentially revocable loss (it is both more subtle and more intense and
volatile than normal grief), and the complexity of relationships in family
systems. In this book, I weave together the lessons I have learned from
both research and practice. That is the best way I know to tell my story. I
hope empirically-minded readers will test my hypotheses and clinical sug-
gestions in hard-data studies in the future. I hope that practice-oriented
readers will be persuaded by my research and be able to apply my theo-
ries and suggestions right now.
This book is an outgrowth of my research and applied experiences
with mediation, but, as the title suggests, Renegotiating Family Relation-
ships is not just about mediation. The book is also about the emotional
process of coming apart, about family relationship dynamics in divorce,
about divorce and custody law, and about how to help parents resolve all
kinds of disputes in a manner that protects their children. I never viewed
mediation as a panacea. I fully embrace the efforts of collaborative law-
yers, judges, more traditional lawyers, parenting coordinators, family
therapists, and other professionals working to help make a devastating
process less devastating. Different professionals need to work together,
not in opposition to one another, if we truly want to embrace that elusive
goal of promoting children’s best interests in divorce.
While outlining what this book is, I should also note what it is not.
This book is not an attempt to review every empirical study, legal issue,
or controversy, or every professional role, variation in divorce experi-
ence, or intervention technique. In focusing on my own work, I leave
much to you, the reader, to translate into your own profession, context,
and methods. I think it will be an easy translation.
Of course, “my” work is not “all about me.” I have had the pleasure
and benefit of working with and learning from a great many students
Preface ix
and colleagues. Joanne Jackson helped to establish and run the mediation
service I created in order to study mediation. We also spent many hours
in the trenches together as co-mediators. Judge Ralph Zehler allowed me
to randomly assign real court cases, and he firmly supported both the
mediation service and the mediation research. Graduate students Susan
Peterman, Melissa Wyer, Sheila Matthews, Danny Shaw, Jeff Haugaard,
and Nick Smith all were deeply involved in the initial study and the first
18-month follow-up. A few years later, graduate student Katherine Kitz-
mann worked creatively with data analysis, as did Peter Dillon, who also
conducted a pilot study that, thankfully, got me started with the 12-year
follow-up. Graduate students Lisa Laumann-Billings, Dave Sbarra, and
Mary Waldron all were central contributors not only to the 12-year
follow-up but also to ideas that still get me excited: psychological pain
(Lisa), grieving relationship loss (Dave), and genetically informed fam-
ily research (Mary). Most recently, Hyun Joo Shim followed me back
from Seoul, South Korea, to become a graduate student who is deeply
involved in new analyses of the mediation data and broadening my cul-
tural perspectives. Graduate student Jennifer Simpson read and carefully
critiqued the entire manuscript for style and clarity, as did Connie Beck,
who offered numerous helpful, substantive suggestions. Bailey Ocker
and Erin Horn cheerfully completed a great deal of practical, academic,
and conceptual legwork that was essential in helping me pull this book
together. I also am grateful to Jim Nageotte for his editorial support,
whether dealing with “big-picture” issues or line editing. Jane Keislar
also deserves praise for all of her editorial and administrative efforts.
Over the years, Mavis Hetherington has been an influential, sup-
portive, and fun colleague in the Department of Psychology. The same
description applies to Elizabeth Scott, formerly in the School of Law at
the University of Virginia. The William T. Grant Foundation funded all
of the mediation research described here. The Grant Foundation also
supported an amazing consortium of divorce researchers of which I was
fortunate to be a member. I would mention names, but the list is too
long and too good to believe. The same is true of the list of experts, and
friends, from across the United States and many other countries who
have influenced, altered, and broadened my thinking. I am also grateful
for financial support over the years from the James McKeen Cattell Fund,
the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia, the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Institute for Child
Health and Human Development.
My wife, Kimberly Emery, has been a wonderful intellectual com-
panion and life partner for an amazing 20 years. Recently, she has even
become an occasional co-mediator. Kimberly read and critiqued the entire
manuscript with her incisive skill and brutal honesty. Kimberly and our