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People, situations and needs change over time. Often, what worked for you at the time of your divorce is not working now. Maybe you just received a great job offer across the country or need to figure out where your child should go to school and how to pay for it. Maybe you have met someone and want to get married again. Situations like these can have a major impact on your original divorce agreement and may change how you need to handle decision-making about your child’s future, visitation, spousal support, etc.

There are many ways that people choose to handle their changing needs post-divorce:

You can go back to court. For many people, going back to their lawyer and the court system is the obvious and best option. After all, they have a lawyer who they have worked with and who knows their situation. They have gotten a divorce by working it out in the courts, so a legal approach is one they know and they feel that works.

For some though, the prospect of going back to court and incurring even more legal expenses when they are still paying the first round of legal bills can be too much. They need to change their agreement, but they want to move on and recover financially.

The idea of taking yet another legal action has an emotional impact as well. Some don’t feel that they got a fair deal the first time—what if that happens again? Will I be heard? When does this end? Will I have to keep figuring things out through my lawyer every time something changes in my life or my ex-spouse’s life?

You can try to work it out. For many people, the first step is trying to negotiate a solution directly with their ex-spouse. Maybe it’s a phone call, a letter or an email. You try to explain your side and get a solution that works for you. The ideal would be that the two of you have a productive, civil conversation where you work out an agreement that is to the advantage of you both.

The reality is that for most people, that ideal seems impossible. When you talk to your ex-spouse, you may tend to fall back into your old ways of communicating that do not work. One doesn’t listen to reason, another won’t think of compromising, accusations of "you always do that…" One thing leads to another and before you know it, you’re fighting again.

Sometimes, you may give in just to have it be over. Other times you spend so much emotional energy to get what you want and need, you wonder if it’s worth it. People may end up coming to an agreement in the end, but it may feel like a lose/lose solution. Is there a better way?

You can try mediation. At the first sign of conflict, some people call a mediator. This person could be someone that helped them work through their initial divorce and who knows their situation. Other times, it is someone recommended to them by a friend or a colleague. Maybe, nothing else has worked and you figure it can’t hurt to try something new.

A mediator is there to help you resolve your conflict—whether it be to revisit a question decided earlier in your divorce or tackling an entirely new problem that you hadn’t anticipated. This person can help create a safe environment where you—not a lawyer or a judge—can have a voice in your future and give you the tools to figure out a solution that works for both of you—a win/win, instead of a lose/lose.

One of the most important things a mediator does is to show you and your ex-spouse how to communicate with each other. A mediator helps you to see things in a different way, figure out what your interests are and how to cut through the old patterns of communication that are holding you back.

The goal in mediation is to empower you and your ex-spouse to make good decisions together and to communicate well, so each interaction with your ex-spouse and others is productive.

At a recent mediation, I had a couple that had divorced about seven years before. They had two children from their marriage—a young, severely disabled son requiring almost constant care and a teenage son. The former husband and wife had each remarried and the husband now had two other children with his current wife.

The boys’ mother had physical custody and was asking for more child support. After hearing from each of them about their needs and situations, it became apparent that while she wanted and needed more support, he was in a very difficult financial situation, trying to support four children. We worked through the state’s child support guidelines and found that the amount recommended was only a few dollars more than she was already receiving. The court would want a good explanation of why she was requesting such a substantially higher amount.

The discussion soon dissolved into the following: She wanted a certain amount of money and he said he didn’t have it. As they started to get stuck in these positions, the question I asked them was—why? Why was she set on getting that specific amount of money? What would it do for her?

She finally admitted that she was really just worn out by meeting the needs of a severely disabled child and a growing teenager. She needed help, which she felt money could in part provide. His response was that while he couldn’t provide more money, at least not with his current circumstances, he could provide non-monetary help. At that point in the session, I let them know that based on their stated needs, it did not seem as if a child support payment was going to be the whole answer. Was there something else they could think of that would solve their problem?

What happened next was a mind-set shift for both of them. They suddenly realized they could come up with any solution—they weren’t restricted simply to a child support payment. They began throwing out ideas. He offered to take the kids one weekend a month, so she would have a break. She liked that he would be spending more time with the kids. She reduced the amount of child support she was asking for to a level that he could afford. That made him feel that she was giving something too. They were finally working together.

It is unlikely they would have come up with that hybrid solution of changing the child support and creating a special visitation schedule, simply through requesting a change to child support in the legal system. Before the mediation, they couldn’t stop fighting long enough to figure it out on their own either. Mediation gave them the opportunity and ability to create a solution hand-tailored to them—something that they could stick with. The mediation session had also helped them to lay the groundwork for better communication in the future and gave them the confidence to know that they could figure things out.

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