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February 23, 2001/Shevet 30, 5761, Vol. 53, No.21
Women aim to ease divorce pain
BETH OLSON
Editorial Assistant
Talia Katz of Scottsdale is a family law attorney who decided, after 10 years of litigating divorces, that there had to be a better way for couples to end their marriages. She found an answer by way of her friend, Vicki Carpel-Miller of Scottsdale, a marriage and family therapist who was preparing to learn a new approach to working with divorcing families: collaborative divorce.
Collaborative divorce involves all members of a divorcing family working with specially trained attorneys, mental-health professionals and financial planners to end marriages using problem-solving techniques rather than conflict and litigation.
Each of the divorcing partners works with his or her own attorney, as well as a mental-health professional. When there are children, they are assigned their own counselor.
Carpel-Miller sees the child therapist as key to the collaborative divorce process. She says that in a typical litigated divorce, each partner hires a separate mental-health professional to address the children's needs from their own angle; with collaborative divorce, one therapist presents to both parents their children's feelings, needs and interests.
"It helps to strengthen the bond between the children and both parents by using one person who can accurately represent to the parents what is going on with the children," Miller says.
The divorcing partners also agree to use one financial planner specifically trained in collaborative divorce, whose role is to remain neutral. "They're providing the clients with information, and they're not going to be adversarial," says Katz.
Carpel-Miller became intrigued by the collaborative divorce concept when she attended a conference in Sedona a year ago this month. She then attended a training session in Minneapolis and brought Katz along with her.
Carpel-Miller has degrees in nursing and counseling psychology and is a certified mediator. She had been assisting divorcing couples with parenting agreements.
"There's always something happening emotionally that's preventing the client from negotiating their settlement," she says. "Because of the current process, there's no way of communicating among the parties and among the professionals involved in the case to get past those things, so everyone can understand what is really going on. They're spending tons of time and tons of money going through the litigation process, dancing around what the actual issues are. (Collaborative divorce) gives them a way to prioritize them, to discuss them, to have them out on the table in a safe environment."
Katz says she was skeptical at first, but the training conference made her a "true believer." She says she always thought that there had to be a better way than litigation. "As an attorney, I know that every single one of my clients is going through tremendous upheaval. It's just a fact of divorce. But as an attorney and (through) the litigation process, we don't really have a mechanism to deal with that," she explains. "I'd recognize that people really have to have a forum to deal with those emotional issues that inevitably impact the piece that I do - the legal piece."
Another aspect of collaborative divorce that differs from litigated divorce is that the attorneys are allowed to communicate with the other members of the team. "There is a stipulation signed in the very beginning before we even start, that the professionals on the team are allowed and even encouraged to communicate among each other, which in a litigated divorce would never happen," explains Carpel-Miller.
When training in Minneapolis, Carpel-Miller and Katz realized that they would need to make training available to other professionals in the Phoenix area, in order to make the process work here. They arranged to have the trainers come to Scottsdale to lead a conference for local professionals but ended up with a national response.
The January conference brought together 150 people from 15 states and Canada, including 22 from the Valley and about 15 from Tucson.
For more information on collaborative divorce, call Vicki Carpel-Miller at 602-953-6690, or Talia Katz at 602-953-7688.
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