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Recent Blog Posts
Detaching Yourself from a Codependent Relationship
In a healthy relationship, both parties can manage their own emotional and personal needs. In a codependent relationship, one or both partners cannot do this for themselves, so they rely on each other to manage all their personal needs. Do not confuse emotionally supporting a spouse with codependency – in a healthy marriage, both partners should be expected to be there for each other. Codependency goes beyond this level of emotional support. Codependency describes a relationship where one partner sacrifices his or her own needs to fulfill the other’s, causing him or her to suffer from the difficulties that come with poor coping mechanisms like internalized shame, people-pleasing behavior, and perfectionism to the point of fearing failure. A codependent relationship is not healthy for either party or if they have children, the children. Often, divorce is an important step toward recovering from codependency.
Recognizing Codependency in Your Marriage
How Divorce Can Be Healthy for Children
Some couples believe they should hold off on their divorces until their children are grown. It can be easy to see why a couple would think this way – divorce can be stressful for children, having a parenting plan means the children do not get to see both parents every day, both parents have to face the stresses of parenting individually, and when one parent finds a new partner, conflicts can arise and create wedges within the family. These are all legitimate challenges divorced couples face, but none of them are a good reason to forgo exiting an unhealthy marriage until one’s children are adults.
Why? Because when a marriage is marred by constant conflict, divorce is the healthiest solution for every member of the family. In fact, it is better for children to experience a divorce and grow up with healthy, functional parents than it is for them to grow up in “intact” families where fighting and stress are the norm.
How to Know It Is Time to File for Divorce
It is not always easy to recognize when your marriage has reached a point that divorce is necessary. We become accustomed to certain patterns and over time, can become so used to a certain lifestyle that we cannot see that it is toxic.
Take a step back and look objectively at your marriage. Every marriage has rough patches, but when a rough patch becomes a permanent way of life, it might be time to exit the marriage. If you are not sure if your marriage is a healthy one, discuss it with an experienced mental health care professional to get deeper insight into the difficulties you are facing and possible solutions. You might be able to change your lifestyle to rebuild your marriage, or you might find that divorce is the healthiest choice for everybody in your household. If one or more of the following is true, divorce might be the way to go.
You Cannot Resolve Conflicts in a Healthy Way
If all your attempts to resolve conflicts in a productive way end in screaming matches, slammed doors, and hurt feelings, you are not communicating in a healthy way.
Successful Co-Parenting During the Summer Months
Summer vacation is right around the corner. If this will be your first summer co-parenting with a parenting plan, it can be easy to get confused about how co-parenting works once school is out for the summer. If you included specific summer vacation plans in your parenting plan, co-parenting this summer can be easy. If you did not, talk to your former spouse about creating a modified parenting schedule for the summer. If you agree on a modification, you can alter your parenting plan at any time.
Adjusting to life after a divorce can be difficult for every member of your family. Use the following guidelines to make this summer the easiest transition possible.
If You Have a Summer Vacation Parenting Plan, Follow It
Many divorcing parents include a summer vacation plan in their parenting time schedules. While the children are out of school, they might spend more weekdays with their non-custodial parent or switch to a weekly alternating schedule, rather than a schedule where they only spend a few fixed days each week with one parent. In your summer parenting plan, be sure to include the start and end date for the seasonal schedule and if applicable, specific, recurring vacations each parent takes. If your child has specific plans for each summer, such as going to summer camp the first week in August, include this as well.
What Are the Long-Term Effects of Domestic Violence?
Domestic violence always has negative effects on a victim. Many of these effects, like lowered self-esteem, bruises, broken bones, and anxiety, are immediate and appear concurrently with the abuse. Others do not become apparent for months or years after the abuse begins. In some cases, an individual experiences long-term effects of domestic violence even after leaving the abusive relationship.
If you face domestic violence, discuss it with your doctor so he or she can have more context with which to diagnose your physical health conditions. Your doctor can also refer you to a mental health specialist to help you work through the lasting psychological effects of facing domestic violence. Below are a few of the long-term issues domestic violence victims face:
Increased Severity of Chronic Conditions
Domestic violence is stressful, and stress exacerbates all other health conditions. When an individual faces domestic violence, his or her risk of suffering from chronic pain, asthma, heart disease, and arthritis increases.
What Parenting Styles Are Different Between Co-Parents
If anybody told you co-parenting was easy, they were either lying to you or woefully misinformed. Co-parenting with your former partner can be quite a challenge after your divorce, even if the divorce itself was fairly amicable. When your parenting styles differ, it can be difficult to find a “middle ground” that serves your children in terms of structure, expectations, discipline, and parental involvement in your children’s daily lives. But difficult does not mean impossible. You can work cooperatively with your former spouse to co-parent your children, but you both have to be willing to be flexible. Keep the following in mind as you, your former spouse, and your children settle into their new parenting plan.
Communicate Your Concerns
Put your negative feelings toward your former spouse aside and talk to him or her about your children. If you have concerns about the way he or she is parenting your children, discuss them. You should not feel entitled to control how your former spouse parents your children, but you should also feel comfortable raising concerns with him or her and expect that your concerns be validated.
Navigating Social Media While Your Divorce Is Pending
If you are going through a divorce, be careful with how you use social media. If you are the type of person who shares every thought and moment of your day with your followers, now is the time to start tapering off your social media usage and getting yourself used to a more private existence. Once you post something on social media, you cannot control where it ends up or how it might be used later. When you are working through the divorce process, keeping tight control on your social media profiles will help you keep your divorce and any “ammunition” your former partner can use against you under control.
Below is a list of what to do, and what not to do with your social media profiles while your divorce is pending. For additional advice tailored to your specific case, speak with an experienced divorce lawyer.
What to Do on Social Media
Take a closer look at your current privacy settings to see who can view your posts. Consider making your privacy settings more stringent and removing friends and followers who you do not want to have access to your content. Remember, though, that removing somebody from your followers list cannot completely prevent him or her from seeing what you post – all it takes is one of your remaining followers taking a screenshot of your content and sharing it with the follower you removed.
The Four Parenting Styles: Which Are You?
In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Later, researchers Maccoby and Martin theorized that the parenting style identified as permissive by Baumrind has two types, indulgent and uninvolved. Identifying and understanding your parenting style can help you co-parent with your former partner and relate to your child more effectively. When the court develops a parenting agreement, it considers the child’s relationship with each parent and each parent’s ability to provide for the child’s needs, which can both be tied to the parent’s parenting style. Keep in mind that very few parents fit neatly into one of the boxes below. Rather, these types are the pillars of a parenting style spectrum, and nearly all parents fall somewhere between two or more of these pillars.
Authoritarian
What Can I Do if Mediation Is Not Working for My Divorce?
When a couple chooses to divorce through mediation, they work with a neutral third party to develop their divorce settlement. Usually, mediation is a less expensive, less stressful option than divorce in the courtroom.
Mediation only works when a couple is capable of working amicably together. Sometimes, couples who initially think they can mediate their divorce successfully find that it is a much different process than they envisioned. If you face challenges with your mediation, take the following steps to determine your best course of action:
Talk to Your Spouse About Your Issues to Work Them Out
Address your difficulties with your spouse directly. If you feel he or she is not taking the mediation process as seriously as you are or that he or she is not being cooperative, talk about it. Successful mediation is only possible when both partners are willing to communicate and cooperate. Your spouse might not realize he or she is being difficult or stalling the mediation process, or he or she might be unwilling to move forward and actively trying to sabotage it.
Grandparents’ Rights in Illinois
Many grandparents and parents are familiar with the term “grandparents’ rights,” but do not fully understand it as a concept. It does not mean that grandparents automatically have the right to spend time with their grandchildren or seek custody of them by the virtue of being grandparents. What it means is that under certain specific circumstances, grandparents have the right to petition the court for visitation with their grandchild. Grandparents’ rights vary from state to state, but they exist in some form in every state. They are an important part of family law, the legal area that governs family relationships.
Circumstances Under Which Grandparents can Sue for Visitation with a Child
In Illinois, grandparents may file petitions for visitation with their grandchildren if an “unreasonable denial of visitation” has occurred. This could be in conjunction with a child’s parents’ divorce, the issuance of a parenting plan, or because there is a reason why the parent through whom the grandparent would access the child cannot facilitate their relationship. This could be because the child’s parent is incarcerated, deceased, legally incompetent, or has been reported as missing to law enforcement. Typically, it is easier for grandparents to be granted visitation rights when one of the child’s parents is unavailable to maintain their relationship with the child.
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