Expanding your client’s toolbox by opening them up to see beyond expectations

These excerpts are from Lynn Lott’s Positive Divorce workshop, April 3, 2009, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In her own words:

Most of us have just a small number of tools to use when handling life’s challenges. Many people use just one tool. We wouldn’t think of hiring a carpenter to build our next home if he came to the meeting with the architect and said, “By the way, I only use a hammer when I build a house.”

Yet, in dealing with a marriage relationship, or a divorce, most people only have limited tools. In my therapy, what I give people are navigational tools to help them through life. I do this because once people are open to change, they are open to learn, grow and get rid of black and white thinking. When people are stressed, as they are when they think they might need to get divorced, they get into black and white thinking.

As a therapist, I help people see more choices. As I help them expand their toolbox, I tell them that they will be able to use these new tools in their new life. And you, as a marriage counselor or therapist, will be able to use these tools in your practice and in adversarial situations, as well as with your clients. The purpose of these tools is for each of us to feel our power.

When people are in an adversarial situation like divorce, they often don’t know the rules of engagement, and also ignore the effect of their behavior on their children. One of the things that happens too little in divorce is parents involving the children. Parents think they know what the kids are feeling, but when I talk to their kids, the kids have other issues, ideas and input. An important tool to add to the life skills toolbox is for parents to listen to their children instead of assuming things.

Another tool to open people to change is to remove the blame game. In Positive Divorce, we’re looking for solutions, not who to blame.

When people come to me because they want to get divorced, the first thing I tell them is that you may ultimately decide not to get divorced, or you may decide to get divorced. Don’t lock yourself into one position right away. Because before you get divorced, you will want to be sure you are certain that you want to be divorced. I’ve noticed that when people come to me and want to get divorced, they have a pre-conceived notion of what that process will be like, what will happen and how it will all work out.

When I got divorced, nothing went the way I expected . That’s where people start. As the actual reality begins to unfold, I find that there is a gap between people’s expectations and what really is unfolding. The bigger the gap between expectations and reality, the more the stress that the two divorcing people will feel. Being aware of this paradigm of stress is an important tool. Learning how to move the expectations and the reality closer together is another tool.

So when I entered the divorce process myself, I had to learn acceptance. As soon as I could accept what is, rather than what I thought “should be,” then I could begin to think of options. It takes time to make changes. Yet when clients come to us, they want change to be immediate, and they want that change to happen in everybody around them, not in themselves. But the only real change has to happen within the client for it to lead to a new action and a new life.

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