Divorce Is Not The War Of The Roses

Or it should not be. But often, the desire to harm the other exceeds the need to start a new life in peace, happiness...

For many years, teachers of Family Law, probably psychologists, recommended the lawyers that whenever their clients wanted to get a divorce, they should watch the "The War of the Roses" movie to sensitize them to how they could exacerbate the desire for revenge in a destructive process of separation.

"Civilized" people are beginning to spread. They decide to terminate a marriage, agree on whom the children should live with, how they will contact the other parent, how much one is entitled to keep the children, who will keep living at home, who will go away, how to divide the property, etc.

Going to their lawyers, those verbal agreements that they established are given a legal status and there is a divorce by mutual agreement and an end of the conflict (at least in legal terms). This is how things should be, but they are not always like that. In fact, not may people get separated in good terms.

When one spouse feels extremely hurt or morally cheated on, they can take out their worst instincts.

They can do things no one imagines that person is capable of doing.

The sole purpose seems to be to destroy the other, to punish them and to make them lose everything: not only their money, but their friends, work and social reputation, too.

You can punish the other deliberately by breaking their most cherished personal belongings, while having no economic value.

Sending letters or photos to the family and friends revealing intimacies that were part of the life of the couple would be an example.

Scandals can be assembled at their work, jeopardizing that person’s source of income and working as a side effect of the child support thing.

You can put together a series of surreal associations from a real event that reveal a distorted image of the other.

You can also show the other as an imperfect human being, although you shared a table and a bed, the home and the travelling, as well as the children and you had friends in common until recently.

This REVENGE is so subjective that it is not even necessarily to relate to those cases in which the number of accusations is significant.

No litigation: fighting.
No dialogue: acting.

No one mourns for the lost love: they want to destroy you, to make you suffer a narcissistic injury or to learn of an affair with an acquaintance.

Fortunately, this stage is short in some cases, but it has devastating effects on the link between the former spouses and the links with the outside world. There is no need to discuss the intra-psychic effects...!

Some people respond to that violence with more violence. There are those who endure the onslaught, knowing that nothing lasts forever.

Even this apparent hate sometimes ceases immediately by saying a magic word, usually having to do with the recognition of the other and of the happy times you lived together.

Family lawyers have to be instruments of peace and not let themselves led by the customers’ or clients’ temporary insanity and it is not recommended that they embark on the thousands of cases out there, just to differentiate a psychological issue from a legal one. However, these two are so closely related in the divorce trial that they are sometimes mistaken for one another...