THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Divorce: A better way

Divorce: A better way

Shefali O'Hara below makes a good case for the best way through a divorce. She points to the undeirability of involving lawyers in the process. I agree with her. I have had 4 marriages and 4 divorces and none of the divorces involved lawyers.

So what is the secret of that? How can one avoid lawyering up? I think the key is not to be angry. I am almost incapable of anger so I found that easy -- but others may not. In my case I had an understanding of the woman's motivations and did not attack or abuse her over them. And because of that anger absence I was able to have civil discussions with the lady concerned and was ready to be geneous with her. And that was reciprocated. Because I was prepared to be generous and accepting the lady was too. There were no unresolved issues between us.

But being angry would be very destructive to acceptance and generosity. Being able to bypass anger is the key to a good divorce

We can read plenty of stories about messy celebrity divorces, such as that between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. While their divorce was finalized back in 2017, the drama between them still makes headlines.

Celebrity divorces aren't the only ones that can destroy lives.

I have heard some horror stories from friends about divorce. Either their own, or that of one of their children.

An expensive mess of a divorce

One friend of mine told me about her daughter's experience. The daughter's husband repeatedly cheated on her. She tried counseling with him to try to salvage the marriage, but after several years of him continuing to cheat, she finally filed for divorce.

He became vindictive and vengeful.

The couple had two children. Instead of considering what impact the divorce was having on them, he hired an expensive lawyer and quit his job to avoid paying child support. She hired an expensive lawyer to counteract his tactics.

Between the two of them, they spent so much on the divorce that they both walked away deeply in debt. They spent over $60,000 apiece. That ate up all the equity they'd had in their house and then some.

My friend helped her daughter out so at least she is not in debt, but she and her children were left with nothing. The former son-in-law works jobs on the side for cash to avoid paying child support.

Yet divorces don't have to be so messy.

Another friend tried mediation
A friend of mine who was an Air Force pilot is an example.

He and his wife had three children. When the wife filed for divorce, at first he was very angry and was thinking of going down the toxic route. But his mother talked him out of it.

"Think of your children," she said.

The wife had already lawyered up, so he needed to get a lawyer as well, but he asked if they could first try mediation. They ended up using their lawyers to hammer out the final deal, but because most of their issues were resolved during mediation, the total cost of the divorce was only about $10,000.

My friend told me that he'd had to give up on a few things. He felt that overall, the settlement favored his wife, butâ€¦ it also allowed him regular access to his children and ensured a good working relationship with his ex.

"I gave up part of my retirement account, which was fair, since we both agreed she would stay home with the kids. However, she also got to keep the house, which meant she ended up with about 60% of our assets, and she also gets a good amount of child support due to my salary," he groused.

Yet he also admits that she bends over backwards to make sure his children are available to him, and he gets to spend a lot of time with them because of that. She also does not criticize him in front of their children. By showing generosity towards her, he's received it in return.

Of course, this only worked out because she is not a vindictive person. Aside from trying to assure a secure environment for herself and her children, she has tried to make sure he gets what is important to him.

The two don't fight and the children spend time with both parents. My friend has traveled with his children, had them for birthday parties and at least half the holidays and in general has maintained close bonds with his kids.

My own divorce

With my own divorce, we were lucky that neither of us prioritized revenge. We both tried to treat each other fairly.

We ended up not even hiring any lawyers. We wrote up our own divorce decree, had a lawyer friend look it over, and then filed it in court.

Total cost? Less than $200.

My lawyer friend told me that if we'd gone to court, I might have gotten a larger settlement. But the cost of paying a lawyer would have eaten up any money I might have gained and then some.

By negotiating in an amicable fashion, we both came out ahead.

https://shefaliohara.medium.com/scorched-earth-divorce-65898292a6e7

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Divorce: A better way

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