Why Oregon Needs to Focus Divorce Laws on Family Mental Health

I have been traveling through Oregon for the last year or so to promote my issue. I want counties to teach parents involved in high-conflict divorce and child custody battles mental health and communication skills instead of requiring them to go through lengthy, time and money-consuming courtroom battles.

I went through a child custody battle that lasted a decade or so, if you count all the years that led up to my ex-husband trying to take custody of our daughter away from me, and then the aftermath of his continuing harassment of me until our daughter turned 17, and there wasn't much time to fight over custody of her anymore.

I won the battle so thoroughly that the judge in the case ordered my ex-husband to pay 90 percent of my attorney's fees. My attorney told me that such wins are rare. I knew that to be true because I am a former psychiatric nurse who worked with survivors of child sex abuse and domestic violence who lost their children to the men who abused them because they could not afford the therapy and lawyers I was able to afford. Now I was just barely able to afford therapy and lawyers, but just barely able to afford therapy and lawyers is light-years ahead of not being able to afford therapy and lawyers.

I also met a father accused by his ex-wife of some wrongdoing that meant he could only see his daughters in supervised visitation. The problem was that his ex-wife rarely brought the daughters to supervised visitation. The supervisor offered to testify on his behalf if he went to court to force his ex-wife to comply with the judge's orders, but his daughters were already teenagers. He did not have much time left. If he filed a court case to obtain a court order to force his ex-wife to obey the previous court order, his daughters might turn 16--the age when the decision of visitation is up to them--before a judge would even hear the case.

A good lawyer is worth their weight in gold. But a good therapist is worth their weight in diamonds. A highly skilled family systems therapist reunited me with my daughter after a year and a half with minimal contact between us by having her name three things she liked about me for every thing she wanted to change about me. It turned out there was far more that she liked about me than she wanted to change.

Unfortunately, we never processed what happened in our extended family, what her father, stepmother, and stepsister said and did that affected our relationship, but that is another story for another time.

There is something else that helped me--my children's therapists. I didn't have enough money for my own therapist, but my children's therapists helped me more than the therapists I had gone to see before the custody battle. The therapists told me about things such as a court-ordered parenting coordinator, Nonviolent Communication, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. I obtained a court order for the Parenting Coordinator, and he gave me even more good mental health advice. I bought books on Nonviolent Communication and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, watched YouTube videos, read websites, and learned. The cost of lawyers and therapists for my family precluded me from having enough money to pay for classes and study modules on these mental health skills, but working on my own was still really valuable.

Most parents can't afford therapy and lawyers, but we could still teach them skills such as Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, and other skills taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Nonviolent Communication. If they divorce or separate, we could require them to retake the classes on these skills and to communicate via the parenting app or email. If the parents are having co-parenting problems, a social worker or therapist could review their communications to see which parent is trying harder to learn and use healthy communication and mental health skills. Custody of children and child support should go to the better parent, not to the parent who can afford the better lawyer. The long-term goal is to make all families more mentally healthy and to decrease parental and family conflict, although that may take a generation or two.

What do you think?