How to Tell a Woman She is No Longer a Wife: The Irreducible Minimum
This chapter originally appeared in. The Divorce Puzzle: Connecting the Pieces Collaboratively 1st Edition (J. Jenkins ed)
By Anne Purcell PhD
You are working in a one-coach model. The venue is your office. Meeting number two is starting, and you are welcoming your team and clients. As you begin to introduce agenda item number one, you notice the wife, Bridget, nervously fidgeting in her chair. She is a well-dressed woman in her thirties. Despite the stress of her divorce, she always seems in control, so you are surprised to see her looking nervous. As you make your introductions, she looks you in the eye and waves her hand a bit, clearly wanting to say something. “Bridget, is there something you need before we get started?” you politely ask.
With a strong, yet shaky voice, looking deeply into her husband’s eyes, Bridget begins, “I’d like to pause the collaborative process. I have realised that our marriage is not over for me. I have come to this meeting to ask Mike if he will consider reconciling our relationship.”
This is news to everyone. The lawyers shuffle papers and say nothing.
Mike, a polished businessman, immediately looks away. He is still for a moment that seems an eternity. A long, heavy silence envelops the room. Finally, with his eyes looking forward but focused nowhere in particular, he slowly says, “Reconciliation will not be possible.”
Before he can continue, Bridget interrupts, “But Mike, we have so much together, how can you just throw that all away. I love…”
“Natasha is pregnant.” Mike interrupts. “We’re getting married. I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
Stunned, Bridget looks Mike directly in the eyes and says, “Natasha? My best friend?”
An emotional tsunami has hit, and it will be your job to navigate it. All of your preparation for this meeting does not matter now. Your agenda for the meeting is in tatters. Your colleagues are searching your face for clues on how to proceed. What do you do?
Triage
First, switch gears. Adjust your thinking from process management to crisis control. There will be no meeting now. Be nimble in thought and movement, decisive but unobtrusive. Ask everyone, except Bridget, to leave the room. Ask her if she’d like her lawyer to stay. Don’t allow anyone in again until she has recovered her composure. This will take as long as it takes.
Second, find your case notes, even if they are not close to hand. You will need them, especially the page that lists her goals and interests.
Third, manage your colleagues. This was unplanned, so no one will know what to do in this moment. They will be milling in the halls, wondering what will happen next. You all know that collaborative teams work best when they have invested in preparation. But what do you do when no amount of preparation can prepare you for an emotional curve ball? Convene an emergency team meeting, stressing that you do not want to leave Bridget alone for long because it is your priority now to be with her. Ask Mike’s lawyer to stay with him. Tell them it will take as long as it takes. Give Mike’s lawyer some advice on how to manage the husband and to not allow him to leave. He may be needed later.
Quietly alert your administration staff that a difficult meeting is occurring. You know they will be sensitive because you have trained them to respect emotion as well as process but remind them of the fundamentals. Talk in low voices. If the office kitchen is near the meeting rooms, keep dish noises to a minimum. There should be no beeping microwaves, chatter, laughter, or food smells from the lunchroom. Avoid any signs of “life as usual.” For this woman on this day, nothing about life is usual. If there is nothing to eat except office kitchen fare, send someone out to buy something to nibble on for both meeting rooms. This is going to take a while, and some people like to eat while they think. This is as important as ensuring both client’s privacy by never leaving them in rooms with glass walls or doors where their grief and shock will be on display.
Hold the Space
Go and be with Bridget. If she is sitting, sit beside her. If she is standing, stand with her, shoulder-to-shoulder. You might look out the window together, but avoid the physical and emotional confrontation of too much eye contact just now. Just be there with her.
If she rages, let her. The client who externalises is usually easier to manage than the one whose body doubles over in silent screams. Ultimately, but not now, challenge her if she threatens to “see him in court.” Remind her of her own goals of protecting her family from litigation. It would be easy to entrench her in this position now, but this is not why you do this work, is it?
If she is silent or stunned or unreachable, say nothing. When she asks, “What will I do now?”; “What will I tell the kids?’’; “How will I go on without him?,” do not provide any answers. Understand that your job is not to identify solutions or to ‘fix it.’ This is her job, but that will come later.
Add nothing new to the conversation. Rather, just loop her own thoughts back to her by saying things like, “We’ll have to figure out something to tell the kids, won’t we?” Just help her get to ‘yes.’ This is the first step toward her future, and really, it’s all you can achieve in this moment.
She could nod her head deeply. Or cry. Or stand very still. If she asks, “What would you do?,” don’t respond directly. Instead, remind her, “This is about you, not me. You are what is important now.” Remind yourself that you are not there to impact an outcome but to guide her toward hers. Just hold the space.
Shift the Focus
Know what to do when she repeats herself, or keeps circling back to what she was talking about a half hour ago, or starts bargaining with her grief again (“If only”; I’ll try harder to make it work”; “He could change his mind”). With an intuition that was borne of many moments like this, you will know when it is time to begin to shift her focus.
You will do this by guiding her to recall her goals. Your notes that list her goals and interests will be to hand, but you probably won’t need them to jog your memory. Her goals are likely as familiar to you as they now are to her. Together, you have identified, defined, and questioned them so many times. But, if her goals represent her future, and right now, she is revisiting her past, simply put your notes on the table. This is why you needed them. It was for this moment. She needs to see them to remember what her future looks like because all she can see now is her past. Hand her a pen and tell her to rewrite them if necessary. Guide her from emotion to reason. Help her remember her irreducible truth.
Revisit Her Goals
Now, you will draw on the work you carefully and skillfully did with her weeks before when you helped her to identify her goals. Among the many broad, hazy goals, the mélange of previously unarticulated desires and unspoken hopes, a truth emerged.
You helped her articulate one goal that would set her future life’s course, should she dare to wish for it. Don’t remind her of it as though you are the knower-of-all-things; rather, lead her to that part for herself. She will recall that really, there is only one thing she desires in a relationship and that is to prioritise her partner, and to have him prioritise her. For her, it is about putting the relationship before everything else. Without this, she would rather have no relationship at all.
This is her irreducible minimum.
You know this because she told you so herself. Use her name, and ask her if you had remembered this correctly. When she tells you “yes,” and she will because you didn’t make it up, you are only telling her what she told you in the first place she will realise, probably not for the first time, that this relationship is not good for her. She may quietly weep now because she knows her marriage is over. Allow silence to descend. Hold the space, and be still in the moment.
How do you tell a woman she is no longer a wife? You don’t. Remain quiet. Your skill will have guided her to her new truth. Words are superfluous now.
As this happens, allow her to loop back into her grief as if it’s the first time she has heard it. Expect denial, anger, bargaining, and sadness. Expect or all of these, or none of them. The experience is unique to her, and so too will be her reaction. Just wait.
Know Your Place
Be careful with the information you have. If she asks, tell her what you know. But don’t tell her the hurtful details that will only create demons in her mind. Don’t give her the answers to the questions she has not asked. You might know some of the sordid details, but if she doesn’t ask, don’t tell. Now is not the time.
She may need to ask him the questions herself and see his face when he tells her. She may never want to know. That will be up to her to decide, and her choices may be different from yours. Don’t assume you know what’s best for her. You don’t. In this moment, she may not either. But time and space will bring her enough clarity to ask a new set of questions.
Don’t judge her for not being further along this path; for agreeing to a divorce and then having second thoughts; for lacking clarity and not being certain of her own mind. This woman’s decision to stay in her marriage for so long as she did is hers alone. This is about her perspective, not yours. Park your judgment at the door, and be alert to your own triggers or potential for transference.
Do not present her with a silver lining. Never say “at least”: “At least you finally have the answers you were seeking”; “At least the decision has been made for you now.” There is no “at least.” Saying so is unhelpful.
Be Alert to Your Clients’ Needs
Help her manage this moment. If you don’t know what she needs right now, ask. Walk with her to the bathroom if the route there means she has to pass the room where her husband waits.
She may recover enough to decide she wants to continue with the meeting. You know this is not a good idea, but let her decide. If she wants to meet with her husband first, ask her if she wants you to be present. It is very likely she will, and when you do, you will be there for both her and him. This is difficult for him, too. They need you to reaffirm the tenets of respect and their common goals, and to model for them why they chose to do this collaboratively in the first place. You are the only team member who can work with both clients like this.
Later, when she is leaving, don’t initiate it yourself, but be ready for her to reach out and embrace you. Sometimes this happens. If it does, embrace her back. Understand that if she seeks human connection, it’s a good sign that her mind is connected sufficiently to her body so that she can act on this. It means her mind is reeling less. You have facilitated this.
Reset the Course
Your responsibility is to give your team members the information they need to make process decisions. Convene a team debrief immediately after the clients have left. With their counsel, strategise about how to keep the process on course, albeit with altered timing. Discuss process options. Remember what you learned of her today in her unguarded moments is for you alone. Treat this with the utmost discretion.
When your team leaves and you reenter your office, demonstrate this discretion again. The office staff need not search your face for clues of this woman’s most personal and raw self. Be the guardian of her privacy. Respect her grief.
It goes without saying that you will call her tomorrow to check in on her and to begin to plan her next steps, however altered they may be. Feed this information back to your colleagues, and together, you will move the process forward.
When you get home, blend into the tone of your house the same way you blended into her space today. Avoid bringing the weight of your day with you. Your life is not her life, but you were with her on one of the worst days of her life. This was a privilege, and you recognise it at as such. Cook your dinner, chew your food slowly, and think about what you contributed – to her, to your team, to society. You helped a family today.
That is your irreducible minimum.
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