The 12-Step Divorce Recovery Approach with Karen McMahon
Karen McMahon and The 12 Step Divorce Recovery Program
When you’re thinking about divorce or going through it, you can lose yourself in the negative energies swirling around you. Do you let the conflict eat away at you? Does fiction start becoming fact? Are you holding on too tightly to the things that annoy you? Karen McMahon brings her 12 Step Divorce Recovery Program to the Toaster today to talk with Seth and Pete about the challenges everyone going through a divorce faces and how you can learn to pay attention to what’s going on internally so you can let go of the things you can’t control and better handle the things you can.
There’s a conversation about the differences between fact and fiction and how your monkey mind might be latching on to the fictional when you need to just focus on the factual. They discuss mindfulness and the power you’ll find when you learn to manage your internal self. Breathing. Letting go. There are a lot of tips discussed in today’s episode to help you get through your own divorce with more ease and focus.
About Karen
Karen McMahon is a Certified Relationship and Divorce Coach and Founder of Journey Beyond Divorce. She began divorce coaching in 2010 after recognizing that the pain of her divorce led her on a transformational journey into an incredible new life. Karen leads a team of divorce coaches in supporting men and women around the world to become calm, clear and confident as they navigate divorce. Karen is the host of the acclaimed Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast, co-author of Stepping out of Chaos: Turning Pain to Possibility and creator of JBD’s exclusive 12-Step Divorce Recovery Program.
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Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Welcome to How To Split a Toaster, a divorce podcast about saving your relationships from True Story FM. Today, let's get your toaster on the 12 Steps.
Seth Nelson:
Welcome to the show everybody. I'm Seth Nelson, and as always, I'm here with my good friend, Pete Wright. If you're a regular listener to this show, we hope you've learned a few important things. First, the law doesn't care how you feel. Second, how you feel is the only thing that matters when it comes to rebuilding your life when the law is finished with you. This week on the show, we're talking to Karen McMahon. Karen is a certified relationship and divorce coach and the founder of Journey Beyond Divorce, host of the Journey Beyond Divorce podcast, and co-creator of the 12 Step Divorce Recovery Program, all dedicated to helping people navigate both the emotional and practical difficulties of relationships and divorce. Karen, welcome to The Toaster.
Karen McMahon:
Hi. Thanks so much for having me on.
Pete Wright:
Karen, we're so glad you're here and so interested in what you are doing with your practice as a divorce coach and helping people through. We think about the 12 steps for the legendary Twelve Steps for overcoming addiction and alcohol, and you have rebranded it. What is that all about?
Karen McMahon:
Yeah. So part of it is the Twelve Steps, Al-Anon, in particular, saved my life going through a divorce, and so I always talk about them. I talk about the slogans and the messages, and about three or four years into our business, I sat down with my business partner and said, "What are the typical emotional struggles that our clients go through? And let's see if we can't create a program." And when we really boiled it down, it fit 12 Steps. And I thought, "Well, this is great. We're going to have our own 12 Step recovery program." And so it doesn't parallel the Twelve Steps everyone knows about, but it is a powerful program.
Pete Wright:
Well, I don't want to necessarily go down a path of you giving us just a liturgical reading of your 12 Steps, but I am curious how they shape the experience of overcoming a divorce. Can you give us the high points and give us a place to start?
Karen McMahon:
When people find themselves at the precipice of divorce, the first thing they think about is the attorney and the logistics. And it's like drop-shipping people into a foreign land where they have no map, they have no translation, but they've already been in a bad situation. Either their spouses decided and they feel sideswiped or they've been ruminating for a while. It's a very difficult decision and they finally made it. And so what we've noticed in Journey Beyond Divorces, the less regulated they are, the longer and more expensive their divorce can be, the less of a effective partner they are with their attorney in figuring out the negotiations and the settlement, and when they can pay attention.
And here's the key with our 12 Step Program. Keep the focus on yourself. When you keep the focus on yourself and you begin to pay attention to your behaviors that didn't serve you through the marriage, they're not going to serve you through the divorce, and you work on those, you not only set yourself up for a better divorce experience and settlement, but you set yourself up for more opportunity to have healthier relationships going forward with your children and any romantic relationships you want. And so that's the foundation of it is, my favorite saying is, "Every upset is a setup." And when you use every trigger, and God knows divorce is filled with triggers, to look inward rather than blame and accuse outward, you are on a path to really solid recovery.
Seth Nelson:
Well, I want to point out something right off the bat because you just said something that I was like, "Oh, my God, this happens every day in my line of work," is I'll get calls from potential clients and they immediately want to start telling me about the other party. They're not focused on themselves. And I will slow them down and say, "Wait, they're not my client. You're my client. I want to know about you and your goals," and I can explain if those goals are achievable and I can go through the lawyerly things, but I spend a lot of time getting potential clients and clients to focus on them and not on the other. And it's really hard for people when you're focused on yourself to start bitching, right? We don't usually blame ourselves and complain all the time.
And when I find that, and I'm putting "bitching" in quotes because I'm not saying they're just complaining about the other side. What they're doing is telling me things that they're concerned about and how it's going to impact them. My point is, when they focus on them, we get more work done, we get through the process quicker. They take steps. They feel like they're empowered and that they have agency in the process, in a process, to your point, which I hope people understand is it is a foreign language. It is a different world, and it's the lawyer's job to try to demystify that and get you through it. But focusing on yourself is so key and so easy to do when it's pointed out. Sometimes I have to point it out two or three times in the first conversation, Pete, but they get it and then they know they can call me and talk about an issue, but I'm always going to ask them, "What are their goals? What are our options? How are we going to get there?"
Karen McMahon:
Absolutely. And I love that you said that piece about agency because I think that everybody feels out of control going through a divorce. You don't have control over your ex, over the courts, over your attorney, over everything that's going to take place and all of the uncertainty. And so you feel very out of control. When we feel out of control, we get reactive, we become a hot mess. Well, when you're focusing on yourself, you have full agency. It's the only place you have full agency, and so when you stay in that neighborhood and you keep your focus there, you can quickly rebuild self-confidence and clarity and find your voice and show up better.
Pete Wright:
You're talking about agency and being out of control. Is this what you refer to as the monkey mind? Is that the concept, that just out of control space? How does that manifest?
Karen McMahon:
Well, the monkey mind actually is addressed in Step three and seven. The way I like to describe it is, there are the facts, and then there's the fiction. The monkey mind lives in the world of fiction. So the fact may be that your ex is the primary earner and told you that he's going to leave you penniless and that he's really angry. What you do with that information, where your fear goes with that information, is you create an entire scenario and you also hear not what he's saying to you, but your interpretation, your fear interpretation of what he's saying. The monkey mind goes off and before you know it, you're espousing things that aren't true. You're reacting to things that aren't true, and you're actually pouring fuel on the fire that you really want to have go out.
Seth Nelson:
Oh, my God, Karen, this is great because you say calm your monkey mind, which I think is brilliant and very eloquent. And then you say, "Hey, this is what it means." I play that a little differently. When that happens I play my favorite game with my clients. It's called bullshit. So it's not nearly as eloquent as you are putting it.
Pete Wright:
It's also a drinking game. Man, his firm is amazing.
Seth Nelson:
What we really do, I will talk to clients. I will say, "Tell me what your spouse says to you." And they'll say, "I'll never have any money and I'll be left on the street homeless." And I say, "This is how the game is played. That's bullshit. Okay, what's the next thing they say?" And some people take three sentences to pick up on the game most people don't. And then I tell them, "Don't listen to what he's saying. He's pushing your buttons. They're your buttons. Don't let them be pushed. Don't go down that rabbit hole." I like your explanation. Don't live in the fantasy world, right, and calm the monkey mind. But that is just great, great advice.
Karen McMahon:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
It just feels so much like if you... This is the experience of mindfulness for me, and what I'm hearing is just that when you feel out of control, if you stop and ask yourself, "What right now is fact and truth? What right now can I verify?" I can verify this text message, I can interpret it as positive or negative, but I know a text message was sent. That's the fact. Everything else that's going on in my head is a story. I'm not living in fact. I'm living in fantasy. And I really like that as a reminder to those in the emotional storm to stop. To build a practice around recognizing when the monkey mind has taken control, when you're no longer living inside of fact and truth and things that you can verify, but you've gone into the story. Am I interpreting that kind of...
Karen McMahon:
Absolutely. I had a client just yesterday and she had a court hearing, and so she told me what her soon-to-be ex said. And then she told me why he said it, what he was thinking, what he was planning on doing next. And I said, "Now, okay, I heard the whole story. Very creative, incredibly creative. Now just tell me, what's factual in that?" "Well, he stood up before the judge and he said this. The rest of it was fiction." "So then what part of what he did upset you?" "Well, most of what upset me was my story. Most of what upset me was the fiction that I wrote." And that's really powerful because once people begin to realize that if I just stop at the fact, I could be annoyed or disappointed, but, boy, does my monkey mind take me to complete suffering by creating the reasons why and the what's going to happen next and all of this other stuff, which right now is not true.
Pete Wright:
So how do you coach your clients? I assume some of the effort of helping them through the monkey mind is to coach them on recognizing when they're doing it and building a practice in their daily lives when they're not talking to you, when they don't have you sitting there telling them to stop talking when they're done with the facts, to actually learn to do it themselves. Do you have any tips for those who need to develop more of a practice around this?
Karen McMahon:
Yeah, and the first step in the 12 Step Program is curb the conflict. The conflict is happening outside of you, but the conflict is also happening between your ears. In fact, most of the suffering that we experience happens between our ears. So that's the first thing is, when we work with a client and help them to understand the difference between fact and fiction and step one is curb the conflict. So, okay, what happens when you and your soon-to-be ex have an engagement where you disagree? And they begin to find out that they are highly reactive, or that they tend to implode and shut down and withdraw into their cave and they lost their voice and they don't speak it, so now they get to be a victim.
Seth Nelson:
Okay. So, they see all that. If they can recognize it, do you give them a trigger to say, "Look, when you feel this way, then you do X?" What do they do with that information, assuming they can actually identify that they're in that current state?
Karen McMahon:
Pete said it a minute ago. He used the term "their buttons". And so step one, the strategies in step one are, number one, slow it down. So we go from zero to 100 in a hot second, and now you're throwing emotional bombs across the room and there's shrapnel going everywhere. You want to stop doing that. So the first thing you do is, the moment you're triggered, you withdraw. You slow it down. Now, this takes practice. If it's a text messaging argument, take your fingers off of the keyboard. If you're on the phone, "I need to call you back in a few minutes." If you're face-to-face, you give yourself a time-out. In the beginning it seems impossible, but very quickly clients begin to realize that if they can slow it down and say, "Well, wait a second, before I focus on what he's saying, what was that button that just got pushed?" And that's a real key. Is it my disrespect button? Is it my unforgiveness button? Is it my judgmental? Is it my insecurity? Once I know what the button-
Seth Nelson:
Is it all of the above?
Pete Wright:
Is it all of the above? Yeah.
Karen McMahon:
And when I know that, then I can begin to do that inner exploration of, "What is this about? Where else did these issues actually create more conflict for me?" And as when we're coaching one-on-one, we look at them.
Seth Nelson:
I'm listening to this and I'm feeling like I'm going to talk to a client and they're going to be like, "Really? I'm worried about my kids, where I'm going to live. I don't have a job yet. I'm worried about alimony. He's going to kick me on this stuff. You want me to do an inner exploration about how is this all happening? I feel like I'm going to be talking about how he was raised as a child when I'm just trying to get through the freaking day."
Karen McMahon:
Right.
Seth Nelson:
Is it overwhelming just trying to get through this process? Are we adding another process that they're unfamiliar with on top of the divorce process? And how do we not pile it on, so to speak, even though it's going to help them?
Karen McMahon:
Well, so people who enter the 12 Step Program, the first thing they say right at step one, they all write. They're like, "Oh, my God." It's almost like a light bulb goes on. So granted, you and I are both going to have clients where it's like, "Screw that. I don't want to do that work. I just want to get the divorce done, I want to put the nails to my ex," whatever. But for those people who are like, "I am suffering and I need some guidance because I want to be a better parent. I don't want to walk around unhinged all of the time, and I would like a good settlement." Our point is, your settlement is going to be better if you do this work.
Your attorney is going to appreciate it because you are going to show up calm, clear, and confident. You're going to be level-minded. You are not going to be calling him or her 100 times on things that they can't do anything about. And so in 12 Step Program they say, if you go from zero to 100, if it's hysterical, it's historical. In those cases, we do actually take a few minutes with the client, and so I was a raving lunatic. I was a rageaholic. I was [inaudible 00:16:02]-
Seth Nelson:
In your own divorce?
Karen McMahon:
In my own divorce, yes.
Seth Nelson:
Okay.
Karen McMahon:
Absolute. I was a hot mess in my divorce. I was going through the 12 Step Program. I've done a lot of personal work, but in the beginning I was like frothing at the mouth, I was so angry. I was in a relationship with someone who was a high-conflict personality. I felt totally out of control. I had two little kids. I was scared to death. And when I began to realize that my behavior was making things worse, that there was actually something I could do to make things less worse, I was all in. That's what I learned through the 12 Step Program.
Seth Nelson:
So, Karen, when you were going through that and you were talking to your lawyer, do you think your lawyer was telling you, "Hey, we need to focus on X, Y and Z, be less emotional. Let's work the problem." Were they communicating to you in a way where you actually heard it? Or do you think, maybe they were, but you weren't hearing it at the time in hindsight? How did that happen?
Karen McMahon:
I think that attorneys, first of all, there is so much hostility that people have that is targeted toward matrimonial attorneys. There's such a bad rap for matrimonial attorneys. And when you're walking around in conflict, everyone's the villain and you are the victim, so your job is much harder than mine. When they come to me, they're baring their heart and their soul and they immediately see me as someone who's nonjudgmental and listening. I'm not directing the legal. They're not mad at me for anything.
When they come to us, they're able to create that space, very different than what they do in therapy. In fact, what clients will say to me is, "I'm in therapy. Great. Love my therapist, but I still don't know what the hell to do when I'm in this fight with my soon-to-be ex." And so they don't have that immediate strategy and skill that they need in the moment, and that's what we provide.
Pete Wright:
I'm going to circle back to this because you said something that I found triggered a thought and potentially a story. This whole idea of you, your words, frothing at the mouth, that you were in such an emotional state. I have a friend and a wonderful therapist in his own right, James Ochoa, and he's cornered the market on emotional storms. When you're in an emotional storm, what are the signs and signals that you're in an emotional storm? That you're in a rage state or hysteric state, a fear state, whatever those states are. And the practice, the mindfulness practice that it takes, we keep talking about how it takes practice to do this. The practice is, not necessarily to be aware of the external environment, about what's going on around you, but to be aware of things like your heart, your breathing, your pulse, that when you feel your heart beating in your throat, you'll know something's gone wrong in the way you're interacting with the world.
And I just love the way he talks about that, Ochoa, because it brings the space, all of the practice work, the signal work, to things you can control. Your power ends with your skin. I can't go make Seth do what I want him to do. I can't go manipulate him and do... I can control me. I can control myself. And so if you walk away from anything with this, looking about the 12 Steps, to me it seems like, let's go inward. Let's look at the actual verifiable, physiological symptoms that are happening, that are taking place in your body as an indicator that maybe it's time to give yourself a break. Give yourself a time out. You don't even need to know what's happening in the world that you're reacting to first. You just need to know to back away from it. Does that line up with your thinking here?
Karen McMahon:
That's very, very aligned because you're really saying, slow it down, quiet down enough to understand you. Most of us can wax on quite well about what's wrong with our soon-to-be ex. It's really understanding. And I have so many clients and we deal a lot in high-conflict divorce, and so they know the shortcomings of their ex, but when they start understanding that they have codependent tendencies, that they have lost their voice, that they implode or explode when conflict happens or run away from it, when they start noticing their behaviors, it's like that if it didn't serve you in your marriage, it's not going to serve you raising your teenagers. It's not going to serve you in that next relationship you want to get into.
Seth Nelson:
Well, let's be honest, let... Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Pete Wright:
Nothing's going to help you with teenagers.
Seth Nelson:
You just went right over that. That's where I'm going, Pete. Nothing's going to help with raising teenagers. Okay. We're trying to get you through a divorce and we always say it's one of the worst parts of your life. What we don't tell you is raising teenagers might be worse. Okay?
Karen McMahon:
Right. It's like neck and neck.
Pete Wright:
Long drawn out. You thought your divorce took a long time. 18 is a lot of years.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So when you-
Seth Nelson:
No.
Pete Wright:
Do you have something, Seth? I was going to...
Seth Nelson:
Well, no, I was going to just talk about that point, is that if you can just control your breathing. And I will tell you, I do this in court because I know that sometimes I can try to make a persuasive argument and if I get jacked up about it I don't think it's as persuasive as being almost quiet and methodical. And all my trials are in front of a judge. There's no jury, so I don't need the theatrics. And they hear a lot of divorce [inaudible 00:21:54] pound on the table. And I think there's a time and a place in persuasive arguments to be more animated than not.
And when I feel myself being animated in a spot that I don't think it's going to be persuasive, I really try to dial it back. And one way I do that is just breathe and be slow and methodical. And I think that happens with all of us in all different settings and relationships, whether it's you're talking to your divorce lawyer or talking to your friends, talking with your ex, dealing with your ex, whatever that is, just the breathe in, breathe out, is so powerful and simple.
Karen McMahon:
And one of the things we often will talk to our clients about is, just start a breathing... You don't have to call it meditation. Just start with three minutes a day. See if you can work your way up to five. And everyone wants to control their mind. And it's like, "No, you're not going to control your mind. They just want you to pay attention to it." And when you see that story start, which you won't the first time, the story will start, you'll jump on the back of the emotional stallion, you'll go flying off into the wild. And then when your three minute chime goes off, you'll realize that you got lost. And then you keep doing it and all of a sudden you notice that you are riding away on the emotional back of a thought and you just let the thought go like a butterfly, and you come back and you just start breathing again.
And just that, just that practice of starting to pay attention to where your mind goes and where your emotions go, if you do nothing about it, you just notice that's building a muscle so that in the midst of conflict you'll notice. You'll notice your body, you'll notice your thoughts, and then you can start working on doing something about it. And the whole 12 Steps, like Step four is to be solution-oriented rather than problem-focused. I mean, Seth, how often it's like, "No, I still want to talk about the problem." Well, we know the problem. We're crystal clear on the problem. All of your agency now is in figuring out the solution. That's a big one. And so all of these little steps help people become more and more aligned with the path that they want to be on. I think so often people don't realize that what they're doing is blowing up the very thing that they want. And this 12 Step Program is designed to help them pull back and be more conscious and intentional as they go through it.
Seth Nelson:
And I think your point about working the problem, you cannot focus on this all day, every day. So something will happen. I'll talk to my clients and say, "Okay, here's the problem. Here's our plan. Here's what we're going to do. It's not happening over the long weekend. There's no homework for you to do. Please try to set this aside. Let it go. We're going to come back when we meet on Tuesday." And I think living your life and not your divorce, that's what I mean by that, because so many people will just worry and worry and worry, and you can't do anything about it at the time. Nothing.
Pete Wright:
You had another point. You recommended that you would like to talk about a couple of things on this show, and I'm curious about one in particular as we get toward the bottom half of our conversation here, which is, how to remedy regret? Where does regret fall in the 12 Steps? And how do you approach it with people who have lived through a divorce and are now trying to recuperate?
Karen McMahon:
Regret is really more about the stories you tell yourself. So the story of regret is a liar. So here's the story. You can fill in the blanks. If I had done X differently, I would be better off. Says who? According to who? I had one client, she came to me five years post-divorce. Made a good living, in a good relationship, just drenched in regret. And when we started poking around at the story, she had a story that had she addressed things differently, she would be better off. And it was just a matter of saying, "Okay, so one thing that could have happened was this positive thing."
And when we started looking at the whole span of it, you could have easily been worse off. You've just decided that what you did wasn't the right thing to do, and so you've set yourself on this, "I feel regret. There's not a damn thing I could do about it. It's in the past. I have no control, but I'm going to make myself miserable with my story, my story of fiction." And a good example would be, "I should have divorced sooner. I should have divorced later." I mean, Seth, it's like, don't divorce when the kids are little. Don't divorce when they're in grade school.
Seth Nelson:
I've never heard, "I should have divorced later."
Karen McMahon:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
I've never heard that one. I've always heard, "I should have divorced sooner."
Pete Wright:
Maybe I should never have gotten married. But... Right.
Seth Nelson:
And usually the people that are saying that are my former spouses. No, but I agree with you. I think that the "I should have done it sooner," when I hear that, I said, "Well, there's some assumptions there, that you're assuming it would've been better, it would've been easier, it would've been this, it would've been that. Even if all of that is true, there's nothing you can do about it, so you got to just let that go. Where are you now?" Right? And I agree that it is a fiction. They're going to play it out that it was better, but it could have been worse. Maybe you got divorced and you got the house and it was in 2006 right before the crash. So maybe that wasn't going to be such a good thing to have. I mean, there's all these sort of things that people talk about.
What I hear them say when they say, "I should have done it sooner," is, "Oh, my God, I feel so much better now. I was in this relationship for so long where I felt bad for so long, I'm just glad that I'm feeling better now." So I try to repivot that a little bit and how they're thinking about what they're saying and what does that really mean, that I should have done it sooner. Are you really just saying, "I feel better now than I did over the last few years?" Maybe that's not that you should have done it sooner. You just never really know.
Karen McMahon:
Yeah. And so whatever it is you're regretting, and I think we've all got things where we can stop and say, "I really regret." And when you look, and the story always goes, "Because it would've been better. I would've been better off." And that's the piece that a big part of what we do as coaches is we just poke at people's thoughts. And the question I probably ask the most is, "How true is that?"
Seth Nelson:
That's a good question.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it's a great question.
Karen McMahon:
"I'm going to be in the street." Okay, and this is what fear is. Fear is the worst case scenario squared. You're going through a divorce. There's so much uncertainty. There's fear everywhere. So I'm not just going to fear that I'm going to go from a beautiful home to a little two-bedroom apartment. No, I'm going to be homeless, in the street, with my kids by my side. And then you can laugh at, you bring a little humor in. How true is it? "Well, would your mom take you in?" "Yeah, but that would be worse than being homeless in the street." "Okay, but at least now you have some options. You have shitty options, but at least you have options."
So everything is about poking at their thought process, their stories, to help them see that you have choice here. You actually have a lot of choice. Sometimes the choices all suck, but you always have choice, and the more you accept where you're at, the more you can begin to assess your choices and make decisions. And acceptance is Step nine. Practicing acceptance is huge. I mean, Seth, how often have clients told you, "I can't believe my spouse did X." And it's like, "Has she ever done that before?" "Yeah, she spends money like that all the time."
Pete Wright:
She does it all the time.
Karen McMahon:
What part of it can't you believe then?
Pete Wright:
That's right.
Karen McMahon:
That's a perfect example of resistance.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
Right. We also get stuff where one spouse will say to the other one, "She constantly spends, spends, spends, spends, spends, spends. I can't believe I have to pay alimony." I'm like, "That's the law, but the way you're telling me she spends, compared to the alimony she's going to get, you're going to get a raise because she's not going to be able to spend as much." Right? And the reverse side is, "He never does anything with the kids. He never does anything with the kids. He never does anything with the kids." And they're angry about that. And then their next thing is, "So he shouldn't have time with the kids."
I said, "You're actually saying that you want him to have time with the kids. He never does it. If he would do it, that would be great." And then there's going to be, "Well, he's not going to do it right." So there is no right. Something's right, you got to give the medication at a certain time. There's kids that have some sort of disabilities that it helps how you respond to them. Don't react. You got to think it through. There's triggers for kids in all sorts of disabilities. So there are wrong and right ways to do things, or better. It's a continuum. It's a gray area, but sometimes exactly what they're saying they're annoyed about is exactly what they're holding onto.
Karen McMahon:
Exactly. And a 12 Step question is, how important is it? I had this one client who started talking about her daughter was getting fed, I don't know, Cocoa Pebbles or Fruit Loops or something for dinner. And I'm like, "Okay, not great. Is it court worthy? How important is it?" Right?
Seth Nelson:
Wait a minute. What's wrong with that? I thought you were going to complain about what kind of milk went in it, and now you're just telling me the cereal's the problem?
Pete Wright:
It's the cereal?
Seth Nelson:
I thought that's not good with oatmeal.
Pete Wright:
Can I latch onto something you said just as a final point? You hit me with something that I see all the time, and I think it's really important to say out loud. You said, "You always have choices." Sometimes the choices suck. How often do you hear people come to you and say, "I don't have a choice. I don't have a choice, I have to do this one thing, X, Y, Z." That goes back to living, in fact, in truth. I mean, never tell an attorney there are no choices. There's always a choice, right, Seth?
Seth Nelson:
I hear it all the time. They say, "Well, I don't have a choice. I have to sign this agreement." I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, you don't. We can go to court and the judge can decide."
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
"Oh, but then I will have to pay all this money and I might not get my fees paid." That's true. But that's a choice.
Pete Wright:
That sucks.
Seth Nelson:
Right, that sucks.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
And so, going to trial is going to... Making up a number. Going to cost you $10,000. You should be getting another $12,000. Is it worth spending 10,000 to get ultimately two more? So I think it's always important to figure out what are we arguing about? What's the cost of doing business? Litigation? And do you want to even make the choice to argue about it first? So forget about what you're getting or not. Is this something I want to argue about? Is this something that I want to pay a lawyer to go represent me in court and go through that wonderful system we call civil procedure? Right? I mean, and that's agency, and people don't feel like they have it.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Seth Nelson:
They feel like the other person isn't giving something. I have to fight, I have to pay the lawyer. And I'm like, "No, you don't. I can get your case settled in 10 minutes. Agree with everything the other side wants." They're like, "Well, I'm not going to do that." I said, "Well, there's the rub."
Pete Wright:
And that's your choice.
Karen McMahon:
And those are your choices. And I think that that's really valuable when a client can step back and realize, "Okay, I do have choice."
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
And let's be clear about this. I'm not saying that's a good choice. Pete, to your point.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
So, don't hear this, listeners out there, and friends of our show, like, "Oh, well, that's not really a choice." It really is a choice. It's a shitty choice, and we all know the choice you're going to pick. You're going to go pick to go have your lawyer argue for you and get the information so you can make informed decisions and make sure there wasn't fraud and duress and financial infidelity. We're going to go through all that, but there's a process, and understanding then the process. That's right.
Pete Wright:
That is 100% the point. And I think one of the best things you can do for yourself and for your relationship with your attorney and for your relationship with your soon-to-be former spouse is stop. Catch yourself using that language, because the sooner you stop saying, "I have no choice," the sooner you get to the part of the process where you're solving problems and-
Seth Nelson:
And then you're getting out of the process quicker.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And getting out of it quicker.
Seth Nelson:
And that's always a good idea.
Pete Wright:
And you don't feel bad about it. You don't-
Seth Nelson:
And then you're out of your monkey mind.
Pete Wright:
Then you're out of your monkey mind. You're not frothing mad. Look at all these problems we solved today.
Karen McMahon:
See that?
Seth Nelson:
We're good.
Pete Wright:
Karen, you're fantastic. Your inspirational nuggets buried in the 12 Steps, we've only talked about a couple of them, but you need to tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and your work and your book and your podcast. Where do you want to start?
Karen McMahon:
Thanks so much. So we're Journey Beyond Divorce. The podcast is Journey Beyond Divorce, Journeybeyonddivorce.com for the website and all social media. And we have a special gift, if I could mention it.
Pete Wright:
Please.
Karen McMahon:
We offer a free rapid relief call. It's a one-hour coaching call to anybody who reaches out. It's our gift to you if you're struggling, and you can go to rapidreliefcall.com and book your ideal time and me or one of the members of my coaching team will jump on the line with you for an hour.
Seth Nelson:
That's awesome.
Karen McMahon:
And you'll walk away with a lot of value.
Pete Wright:
That's fantastic. Yeah.
Karen McMahon:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Well, this is fantastic. Karen McMahon, thank you so much for hanging out with us today in The Toaster. We appreciate you.
Karen McMahon:
Thank you. Thanks for the invite. It was great.
Pete Wright:
And thank you everybody else for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget, you can ask us questions. Just head over to HowtoSplitaToaster.com and push the button that says Ask a Question, and you'll be able to ask it. It'll come right to us. We'll talk about you on the show, and I look forward to that. Anytime we can talk about other people on the show that aren't Seth, I'm in a better mood.
Seth Nelson:
That's awesome.
Pete Wright:
There you go. On behalf of Karen McMahon and the good Seth Nelson, you know him, America's favorite divorce attorney. I'm Pete Wright. We'll catch you back here next week, right here on How to Split a Toaster. A divorce podcast about saving your relationships.
Speaker 4:
Seth Nelson is an attorney with NLG Divorce and Family Law, with offices in Tampa, Florida. While we may be discussing family law topics, How to Split a Toaster is not intended to, nor is it providing legal advice. Every situation is different. If you have specific questions regarding your situation, please seek your own legal counsel with an attorney licensed to practice law in your jurisdiction. Pete Wright is not an attorney or employee of NLG Divorce and Family Law. Seth Nelson is licensed to practice law in Florida.
