Episode Description - Leaving While There’s Still Love? How to Have a Good Divorce
Conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t leave your marriage until it has completely broken down. But what if that’s not true? What if leaving while you and your spouse still care about each other is the key to having a good divorce?
When her marriage was floundering, Karen McNenny found herself paralyzed by fear. She didn’t want to give up on her marriage if it could be saved. But she didn’t want to wait until she and her ex hated each other before she left.
That’s when she discovered a life-changing truth: leaving while there's still love can lead to a healthier post-divorce relationship than waiting until things completely fall apart.
Karen has now created the "Good Divorce Experience." It's a process that isn’t about winning or losing, but about creating a healthier dynamic for everyone.
Using her "Good Divorce Process" Karen guides couples to transform what's typically seen as a legal battle into a thoughtful family transition. She works with both partners simultaneously, helping them navigate everything from telling their children about their divorce to creating detailed parenting schedules, all while charging a flat monthly fee to ensure accessibility and open communication.
If you’re looking for a kinder and gentler way to divorce and you and your spouse don’t hate each other already, the “Good Divorce Process” may be just what you need to end your marriage with love.
Show Notes
About Karen
Karen McNenny is working to change the way families navigate divorce. Divorcing families are starving for better outcomes with less debt, destruction and despair. Through her signature Good Divorce Experience™, Karen utilizes her training as a mediator and divorce coach to guide couples through the legal process of GETTING divorced. More importantly, as a trained therapist and co-parenting specialist, she teaches them HOW TO BE DIVORCED once the ink is dry. The marriage may be over, but where children are involved, the relationship is forever. As a leading voice in the field of human behavior and relationships, Karen ultimately sees herself as a social activist, working towards world peace, one family at a time.
Connect with Karen
You can connect with Karen on Facebook at Karen McNenny The Good Divorce Coach and on LinkedIn at Karen McNenny – The Good Divorce Coach. Follow Karen on Instagram at Good Divorce Coach and on YouTube at Good Divorce Coach. To learn more about Karen’s work and any upcoming events visit her website at Karen McNenny.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Karen
- Karen McNenny is a mediator, divorce coach, and therapist with 25+ years of experience who created "The Good Divorce Experience" based on her own divorce journey 13 years ago.
- She believes divorce can be a tool to improve relationships rather than destroy them, especially for co-parents who will continue to have a lifelong relationship through their children.
- McNenny advocates "leaving while there's still love" instead of waiting for relationship deterioration.
- Her process treats divorce as a family event with a legal component, not a legal event with a family component, prioritizing family dynamics before financial discussions.
- She works with both spouses through flat-fee joint and individual sessions and helps couples prepare for critical conversations like telling children about divorce.
- Her approach involves finding a neutral lawyer who can handle the legal paperwork once the couple has reached agreements on major issues, rather than having adversarial representation.
- Her approach isn't for cases involving abuse, narcissism or high-conflict personalities.
- She hosts "The Good Divorce Show" featuring experts and successfully divorced couples.
- McNenny offers free consultations, emphasizing that researching divorce doesn't commit someone to it.
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Transcript
Leaving While There’s Still Love? How to Have a Good Divorce
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
intentional relationships, non-adversarial, co-parenting
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Karen McNenny
Karen Covy Host
00:10
Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making so we can discover what keeps us stuck and, more importantly, how we can get unstuck and start making even tough decisions with confidence. I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator and arbitrator, turned coach, author and entrepreneur. And now, without further ado, let's get on with the show.
With me today is Karen McNenny, and Karen is a mediator, divorce coach and therapist dedicated to transforming how families navigate divorce. Through her good divorce experience, she helps couples not only get divorced, but also learn how to maintain healthy post-divorce relationships, especially where children are involved. With more than 25 years of expertise, Karen focuses on co-parenting, financial planning and relationship literacy, guiding families toward compassionate outcomes. A TEDx speaker and the host of the Good Divorce Show podcast, Karen draws from her own divorce journey to offer hope and healing. She lives in Missoula, Montana, with her family and dog, enjoying the outdoors in the Rocky Mountains. Karen, welcome to the show.
Karen McNenny Guest
01:27
Thanks for having me. Fellow Karen Delighted to be here.
Karen Covy Host
01:32
Fellow Karen and fellow divorce coach, yes, so I was just intrigued and I want to jump right in and ask you what is a good divorce in your opinion?
Karen McNenny Guest
01:45
Well, for one, it's recognizing from the beginning that even if your marriage is ending, your relationship is not and I'm speaking to your listeners who have children which is distinctly different than those who don't. But if you have entangled your DNA, you are going to walk a journey from graduation to grandbabies and beyond. And so there is just great wisdom and at the starting gate and I think you share this philosophy, Karen like, be intentional, be thoughtful. Your first phone call does not need to be to a lawyer and you don't have to be adversarial and go to war and be enemies with your co-parent, which was my fear, and I was paralyzed in my marriage because I was so afraid of divorce.
Karen Covy Host
02:29
Yeah, yeah, I can. I can understand that completely. So what? Give people a little sense of your backstory? I mean you got divorced. Tell me about that. What kind of experience was that.
Karen McNenny Guest
02:41
Well, our children were five and seven at the time and the husband and I were in marriage counseling, as many of us are, because you know, I am pro-family, I am pro-marriage. Let's try to keep it together, do the hard work, but when the off-ramp appears and I don't know about you and your work, Karen, but I think where people get it long or get it wrong is they stay too long, Karen. You're right Like, oh, there must be destruction happening in order to justify the exit, and I kind of believe like there can still be a sense of love. I mean, there was a love story here. Our children came from love and so that became my mantra and I moved from stay for the kids, stay for the kids, stay for the kids to I think I need to leave for the kids. I think they're going to have happier, healthier parents across two homes rather than this you know already obviously eroding partnership. And, as our marriage counselor said, I think you're just poorly married, you're just not a very good compatible match.
03:46
But where we were compatible was in our parenting values. So we, you know, even in that moment, when our marriage counselor said, you know, basically I think my work here is done and the decision was made, and I said can you keep meeting with us? Can you help us through now this divorce process, she said, well, that's kind of out of my scope, like we don't know how to talk to our kids, we don't know how to make a schedule, we I mean, let alone the legal part but can we? We need a guide. So, honestly, I built the business I was looking for 13 years ago when I was facing my own divorce, and I wish that there had been, like you, like me, a coach, a consultant, a guide, because lawyers are going to help us get divorced. They're not necessarily going to help us know how to be divorced. And that is the long tail of this experience is that we are now going to need to learn how to function as a family and how to repair ourselves in this new autonomous world. So those are the big stepping stones.
Karen Covy Host
04:52
Yeah, that you know what you've said is just so important and I really hope that people hear it because just looking at I mean, I come at this from a different background, from the legal side of it, but the part that you've said that resonates so much is that you know there's a long haul in this.
05:11
There's not just the time of divorce, which tends to be bumpy for everybody, but what most people don't realize is that on any given day in divorce court or now Zoom court, wherever people are doing the court in whatever jurisdiction but the point is, in any divorce court in the country on any given day, you probably I would estimate there's at least 30% to maybe 40 or 50% of the people who were there that day are already divorced, and so the fact that you're helping people find a way to manage that relationship after the divorce is huge. But I want to dive into something you said that you know it's people have to wait, or they think they have to wait, until everything is in shambles and they're at each other's throat. You wrote an article that was and I'm getting the title wrong. I apologize, but something about you should divorce while you're still in love.
Karen McNenny Guest
06:08
Like when it's not that bad.
Karen Covy Host
06:10
Talk to me about that.
Karen McNenny Guest
06:12
The leave while there's still love. That's the coin phrase Leave while there's still love. If someone is listening and their journey sounds like mine, which was, I knew my truth long before I started to speak it. Most of us do. But my marriage wasn't filled with infidelity, with abuse, with addiction problems, with people embezzling or hiding money. It wasn't this capital T traumatic marriage. It was barely a small T traumatic marriage. Again, it just wasn't a good fit and because of those incompatibilities it started to create so much strain in the home.
06:58
My concern is that if we don't take the off ramp when we see it and we stay, we start creating problems and people become passive, aggressive. Then addictions might start to show up again, infidelity might become present. We begin acting out in our otherwise sort of benign vanilla toast marriage so that then we can say to the judge and jury of our friends, our family ourselves see how bad it is, see how terrible he's having an affair, I'm drinking again, the kids are being beaten, but like we have to get divorced right. Very dramatic, and that's not the truth. And in that moment, when I realized I was becoming inflamed, there were habits that were starting to show up for both of us that were just going to get worse, and one day I said I need to leave while there's still love, I still have a respect and a kind, soft heart for this man because we are going to raise children together.
08:03
We have a forever relationship and honestly, I don't want to be married to him, but I don't want to be his enemy, and so I think, socially, we need to give a little more permission for people to be able to look at divorce not as a weapon but as a tool, and as a divorce lawyer, I'm going to run this by you, Karen.
08:26
I'm curious about your reaction that I believe divorce actually exists as a tool to improve the primary relationship, not make it worse. If you want it to get worse, stay in the bad marriage, it will get worse. But if we could really shift our paradigm and this is a big one for lawyers, because, again, you're trained to do what you do very well, which is to fight for your client, and you exist in an industry that is built on adversary energy right, it is an adversarial process, but if the good divorce says, hey, we see the exit, we want to maintain a relationship that is compassionate and kind. We don't have to be best friends and we certainly don't have to stay married. Let's find an intentional, thoughtful path out of the bad marriage in order to make our relationship better.
Karen Covy Host
09:27
I love that, but I'm going to play devil's advocate with you. Because so many people struggle and I think you hit the nail on the hat. It's societal norms, expectations, what other people will think. But you, so many people struggle and they stay because it's not bad enough to leave. A they feel there's a sense of guilt. If you're going to leave a marriage that isn't bad enough. What would you say to those people who say, no, you're obligated to stay until you've exhausted every possibility and you're at each other's throats.
Karen McNenny Guest
10:00
Well, I would ask the question of what do we gain in that approach? Like what you know, I come from a background as a business consultant and whenever we're making a decision or there's a change event happening, I say what is value added? You know, literally that's the phrase. What is the value-added return on investment? What are we going to gain from that? And I do say exhaust your options, go to marriage counseling.
10:31
Figure, you know one of the things I do with couples who have decided to separate but are still needing to live in the same house for a period of time for a variety of reasons.
10:42
And we do on-duty, off-duty schedule and we literally take every day of the week and we decide who's doing breakfast, who's dropping the kids off, who's packing the lunches, who's the after-school runner, who's the bedtime, who's in the house, who's out of the house, so that people are not on top of each other so much when they've already decided to make a divorce and maybe haven't told the children yet, or they're held hostage by their mortgage rates, or they haven't found the second home yet.
11:08
Right, there's lots of reasons. And as we make this on-duty, off-duty equalization of domestic affairs and caregiving, they all go. Oh my gosh, I wish we would have done this while we were married. There might've been less irritation, less challenge. And so you know, that's a tool that I would say in your marriage, try and create parity on the domestic home front and that might help go to individual counseling. Go to couples counseling and, if we went way upstream, not just pre-marriage counseling but pre-engagement Find out about your compatibility, because the romantic fairy tale of attraction and chemistry is not enough to carry what really becomes a business contract of marriage between two people. And you know this, Karen, it's so easy to get married, it's really complicated to get divorced.
Karen Covy Host
12:04
Right? The divorce lawyers I know used to get together and joke that there should be a law that when you get your marriage license, part of the requirement is you've got to spend three hours in a premarital counseling class with divorce lawyers, right and see. Because people have no idea what getting a divorce really looks like, what it's going to mean in their life. They think they want it but they don't know how bad it can actually get, and hopefully it doesn't have to get that bad. I mean, I'm in the same boat as you and the same mindset as you. It does not have to be this bad. But the problem is the system as it exists right now isn't designed to make it good, right? So what do you do with your clients to help take them out of the bad and help them make it good?
Karen McNenny Guest
13:02
Yeah. So as a divorce consultant and that's really what I see as a therapist, a mediator, a CDC divorce coach, a co-parenting specialist I become their project manager. I do risk management, I'm a communications director and we reach out to experts as needed. So I say please call a coach, call a Karen, before you call a lawyer. And part of what's unique about the good divorce experience is I work with both individuals simultaneously and I work for a flat fee, not hourly and not by the minute. So already I have in my hands a couple who says good divorce. Okay, we don't hear those words in the same sentence very often, but that's what we want. And there's a lot of normal neurotics like myself and my former spouse who, like we don't, we don't have a big battle to have, we want to have equal custody, we want to have 50, 50, like, just help us get on married, please, and help us know how to manage our co-parenting relationship. So that's a big part of it. So I'll take that couple and I meet with both of them together for 90 minutes on one week and the next week I meet with each of them individually for an hour and then together and apart, together and apart. What that does is it allows each individual to have their place to say this is what I'm most afraid of. He's going to take this. She never I five years ago. I'm still angry about it, right, so they have a place to process. But when we're together, we're doing the business of divorce. They're in divorce school with me and then I graduate them and that's how we talk about it and how we think about it. I'm going to teach you how to have a functional divorce and along the way, we're going to take care of your emotionally, your reinvention. And in those joint sessions. I just last week spent three hours in two separate sessions with a couple getting them ready to have the conversation with their three children.
15:01
Like that, in and of itself, who would even think about? Oh yeah, we should send a message or meet with all the teachers and the counselors and make sure that you know if someone died, if the dog died, we would let their school teacher know. You know, Susie Jane, it might be a little bit distracted this week or might be having some bigger emotional. You don't need to talk to her about her parents' divorce, but we want you to know that's what's going on we talk about if you have a 14-year-old and a six-year-old in your family, that's probably two different conversations, not the same. Helping them know what's age appropriate, not just what we're going to say to our kids, but when we're going to say it, where we're going to have that conversation. Say to our kids, but when we're going to say it, where we're going to have that conversation. So that's one nugget we talk about.
15:51
When does dating start? I don't care what the green light is, but you two better be in agreement, because one person thinks the day we said the word divorce, I'm free. The other is thinking when the ink is dry on the documents. That's when we begin. I just help them guide what is otherwise a highly emotional charge conversation that they probably won't even have with each other until they find out their former spouse or their soon-to-be former spouse is already in another relationship. And then that just hurts, right? It's just an ouch and it can take the good divorce experience and pull it right off the track.
Karen Covy Host
16:25
So lots of preemptive work that we're doing along the way you know, I'm curious because it sounds like a significant portion of what you do is what I would typically think of as mediation. I mean, do you help the two people knock out the terms of their agreement and say like, okay, you're gonna get this, I'm gonna get that, this is our schedule for the kids, this is blah, blah, blah, all the things. Do you actually help them mediate their divorce and then write those terms down so they can take them to a lawyer, or is what you're doing different than?
Karen McNenny Guest
17:03
That’s a great question. I am a certified mediator, so we do what's called progressive mediation and my philosophy is family before finances. So the examples I just gave you is what we're going to do in those early weeks. We're going to stabilize the couple, the household and the children. And if we're moving into two homes or we're nesting all those schedules before we talk about any asset, because, as you know, money is a trigger and it's what we've been told divorce is all about. It's a land grab. Get as much as you can and find a lawyer who's going to fight, even when there's not a battle. Right, a lot of times a couple isn't even having a battle and you know a lawyer. Well, the longer they're in conflict, the bigger my paycheck, and there are some lawyers who see that as their role is to keep the fight going until you can get as much as you can. But I don't see them as two separate entities. I still see the family as a whole. So what is good for both of you?
18:11
So in those early weeks I might, for example mom might say I really think I can buy him out of the house and I want to stay in the family home, but I am afraid he is going to make a big fuss about it just to spite me. Then I have an individual conversation with dad and I say what are your thoughts about the living arrangements and the family home? Right, super benign, it gives him a place to process. Well, I know, I don't want the big family home. I have no interest in it, it's too much for me to take on. I want to downsize and it's full of all sorts of ghosts and bad memories. Okay, so I already know where each individual is, because I'm the person in conversation with both of them simultaneously. So then, when we come back into a shared conversation, right, one of our business meetings say so we're going to talk about the family home today, and it's my understanding that, mom, you can you see a future where you would be able to retain it and would want that, and dad, you see a future where you would want to release that? Tell me more, let's talk a little bit about that. And then I get them in a shared discussion that is level-headed, not ignited, not through a scarcity lens. It's an abundance of like. Yeah, it would be good to keep the family home for the kids for at least till the end of the school year, or maybe for two years, whatever, they start to unify. Which is why I do the family kid part first, because right away it gets them realizing oh, we're a parent team and we're going to stay a parent team, so we're sewing that together and over time then we're talking about where are the cars, we do their financial disclosure, everything gets laid out. We begin to have discussions about retirement accounts and then we're like well, let's talk to a CDFA, a certified divorce financial analyst, who's going to help us look at this retirement account? Versus that, what's the tax treatment? This is how I would suggest you divide it. They're designing their divorce. You can be in charge and, Karen, I know you share this philosophy. When we're good and ready we haven't made every decision, but we've made a lot of them Then I go searching and vetting for one lawyer who will be a neutral and I have found these lawyers in Washington, California, Colorado, Texas, Montana.
20:27
Right, there are lawyers out there who, in fact, I just recruited one in Southern California. He said this is a really interesting concept. So, I don't have to do any of the drama or any of the relationship stuff or the kid business. You just want me to interpret the law, educate the clients about the law and then do all their legal writing as they make the decisions. I said yes, and they said that's awesome. I love that and they see me as an ally and I guide them through writing their parenting plan as well.
Karen Covy Host
21:02
So all right, if I'm understanding how this works with you, then the couple is there sometimes separately, sometimes together. Are you writing things up like bullet points and then giving that to the lawyer, or is the lawyer in your meetings, or how does that work?
Karen McNenny Guest
21:22
So this particular case study I've been with a family for two months and all we've been doing is stabilizing the relationship. The kids the conversation with the kids just happened. They're starting to lay out all their assets, get you know, kind of de-escalating the situation and coming to terms with the emotional grief.
21:42
Right, there's a death going on, and that's the other part that I bring is really allow them to feel all the feelings, that is, grief and relief simultaneously, and then, when that lawyer right, I vet I tell them what our process is, how we'd like to use them. Then the clients they go together and meet with the lawyer on a meet and greet, make sure that they feel like it's a good fit, because it needs to be their choice, and then we all start meeting together and we meet with a lawyer three to five times and that's it. And they usually offer a flat fee as well to just do the non-contested writing up of the documents, answering questions they're not advising either individual. And once the documents are all complete, I encourage each of you can go to a third-party lawyer, have them reviewed, have your own advocate, look at them, make sure that there aren't any big glaring things that you're missing, you know, and then we sign them and we graduate.
22:43
I'm curious, though, because it is unethical in every state in the country for a lawyer to do what you just said it can represent both people.
Karen McNenny Guest
22:52
No, but you can act as the neutral.
Karen Covy Host
Tell me more. What do you mean by that?
Karen McNenny Guest
So all they're doing again is educating to how the law is written right, how it should be written so that it's enforceable in a court, should you ever need to do that? And they're not advising another couple to say you know, Jane, I really think that you could get the house and you could buy them out at this amount. You know, Bob, she's probably got money in another account at this amount. Like, we're doing all of that mediating, all that disclosure and the lawyers overseeing that.
23:30
And I just had this conversation with a lawyer in Washington who said I can't do that. I said, actually you can, and so she went to the bar, she went through all of the regulations and then she, 15 minutes later, sent me an email and said oh, here it is, Karen, neutral, this is where I can do this. And again, within Montana, Washington, California, Colorado, there are, and not every lawyer wants to do it. I just spoke to a lawyer and said, yeah, no, we really just are best when we're representing one client. This is part of the paradigm shift that I want to change is you know and know, and we have collaborative law that's coming more on the docket and there may be states, because there's state jurisdiction. But what I have found and I'm not the expert like you, Karen, you're the lawyer that within most of the regulations in the Bar Association, lawyers can act as the neutral, that a couple can come to them and say we're non-contested, we're filing together and we need someone to write legal documents for us.
Karen Covy Host
24:36
I think it depends on whether the state you, whether you can file together, because a lawyer, by definition, the system is one person against another, which is part of the problem. In terms of a divorce or a family situation. That doesn't work. You're immediately making people take sides, right. But that being aside, for example, in Illinois there is no one lawyer that I could not write paperwork for both people. I just don't know that I could do it, something that I'm going to look into after the conversation. But the key, though, is that lawyer. The key, though, is that lawyer. Somebody is going to have to walk the couple through the court system. Who does that?
Karen McNenny Guest
25:25
That's the lawyer. I mean, they're the ones who will take the information They'll file. Right, it's a joint filing. The couple is filing jointly.
Karen Covy Host
25:36
I think it depends on whether the state allows that Correct, and some states do not. As a matter of fact, most of the states that I know do not unless there's certain parameters and obviously everything would have to be agreed. But secondly, it's interesting they usually allow that kind of thing for people on the lower end of the income scale. You don't have real estate, you don't have retirement accounts to split. Sometimes they require you don't have kids, so that it's clean. So, it's super simple. But they have parameters around what can be a joint filing and what can't, and most of it can't. But I can see how your concept. I mean it would make all the sense in the world. It could still work if then one person just took whatever the document was to their lawyer and said, hey, here's what we agreed, write it up. So you're as they would with a mediator.
Karen McNenny Guest
26:36
Correct. Yep, exactly that. I'm just doing kind of soup to nuts this whole journey along the way and the things that come up. That again. You know, as I said earlier, I'm I early. I decided to charge a flat fee per month and when I was going through my divorce, part of the insult to injury was I have a question. I need support. I don't. This isn't clear. I'm going to send an email to my lawyer. I'm going to wait three weeks for a response. It's going to go to their assistant and then their paralegal and then to them, and then I'm going to get it back and then I'm going to get a bill for one hundred and eighty-two dollars for that three sentence email and then the next thing is I stop sending the email.
Karen Covy Host
27:20
A hundred percent. I see that all the time with clients. I say to them you've got to ask your lawyer this this, this, this and this, we need this information and they don't want to do it because they don't want to have to pay, like you said, hundreds of dollars to send a couple sentence email and get a few sentence response if they even get a response.
Karen McNenny Guest
27:41
That's right, and what I care most about is the process and the outcome. So for a flat fee one. It's divided by each of them and if it's 50-50, great. If they find it 70-30, if it's still out of their shared funds, like together we're getting divorced. So we're both invested in this. They can budget for it because they know what that amount is. There's no surprises, and they're guaranteed at least two joint sessions every month and each of them gets two individuals a session every month. And I'm on call. I'm not 911.
28:17
But if on Sunday afternoon mom discovers dad's new relationship and is hot as hell, I want to hear about it. If on Sunday afternoon dad is paralyzed because he can't actually get the photos off the wall to pack, to move, and he is in tears, he can call and if I'm available we'll make a plan, we'll do the emotional reparation. Then In the case of the new relationship, I'm like I want to put that fire out. Do not go ruining your good divorce on my watch. They can send me the email, they can send the text.
28:52
I just got a long email after a joint session from one of the partners and oh, it was just a rant and I can't believe in this and that and, in the end, like I don't need a response.
29:06
I just love that I have somewhere where I can dump this and that I have witness and somebody who sees the whole picture and I stay as a neutral. And if I get that rant from both of them, my response is so glad you reached out, glad you got it off your chest. It sounds so difficult and I'm here to tell you it will not last forever and that's the support. Part of the support is, you know, not only being a model of a good divorce in my own journey and what Michael and I have come through and what we've learned along the way to pass on, and I am proud of my good divorce. We live six blocks apart. We've been at every single important event for our kids and we've been in each other's homes. We talk and text as needed, right, and it doesn't stop at 18. That is a fallacy.
Karen Covy Host
29:56
This is so beautiful. I think it's so important for people to hear, because we all hear in the media and, you know, online, blah, blah, blah. We hear about all of the divorces that are horrible, and everybody talks about their divorce from a narcissist and how they've been fighting for years and years and years. Do those exist? A hundred percent, but is it possible to build something that's very different from that? Also, a hundred percent, and it sounds like that's exactly what you've done.
Karen McNenny Guest
30:28
And it's part of why I launched my podcast, the Good Divorce Show, which not only brings experts like yourself, Karen, who are on the side of making it better. Right, I'm never going to have the shark lawyer like I'm gonna tell you how to get the most. I'm not gonna broadcast that. We've got enough of that. But, more importantly, half of my guests are real people couples coming on the show and laughing and supporting and getting tearful, and this respectful conversation about how they've been doing it for five years or 10 years, adult children of divorce, step siblings who found each other's divorce like only broadcasting what it looks and sounds like when it's done well, and there are examples out there.
Karen Covy Host
31:13
Right, and you know, I'm so glad that you said that, because I struggle too. I mean, do I know what the dirty tricks are? Oh yeah, I mean I can tell, but I purposely won't write about them, don't want to talk about them, because then that's just putting them out in the world and for the person who's looking for the shark tactics, I just gave them ammunition. That makes no sense to me.
Karen McNenny Guest
31:37
Yeah, we're all looking for tools, but if everything in the toolbox is a weapon, then that doesn't leave much choice for people. So I really you know so appreciate sharing in this conversation so that we can broadcast and amplify and disrupt what has become a very complex industry that has been hijacked by the legal system, and I believe divorce is a family event with a legal component, not a legal event with a family component. We really can use divorce as a tool to improve the situation that you're already in, not to make it worse. Why would we set out to do that?
Karen Covy Host
32:23
Yeah, nobody wants to intentionally make their life miserable or screw up their kids, right? So I love the work that you do. I have one more quick question before we call it a wrap, and that is where do you work with people? I know you're based in Montana and you know it depends on states. Every state's law is different. Do you work with people all over the country, just in a few states? Where do you? Where? What people should you know be looking for you?
Karen McNenny Guest
32:53
Yeah, so I can work with people all over the country, because the work that I do is not bound by state and then we find a lawyer in their state that's the part that matters and they do a little research. I do a little research, we interview they, you know, we know what we're looking for, and sometimes it's somebody who's you know the collaborative law process is taking hold. That's a different thing. We're really in the cooperative process. That's why we're looking for the neutral, or that I will step into a collaborative team, which is when everyone is represented by their own lawyer but we're always in the same room together and then there's a mental health professional or a child life specialist or a financial specialist.
33:38
It can be expensive because you've got a lot of experts in the room every time. Altogether, you know, my background and expertise checks a lot of those boxes and when we need to find a real estate agent or a CDFA or a tax account or a lawyer, that's part of my service is to help them to build out their team in the spirit of coming to a good divorce. And for the record, Karen, as I speak to a lawyer today and to other people, I'm grateful for the lawyers when there is a narcissist, when there has been domestic abuse, when there is alienation. It is not always a rosy exit. I'm just trying to create a space for people who are not dealing with those oversized problems that need devoted legal representation.
Thank goodness, find your lawyer who's going to protect you and your rights, but there's a lot of us who just need to get unmarried with less damage, despair and debt
Karen Covy Host
34:31
I love that and I and I'm so glad you made that distinction because you know I'm in of a similar mindset there are some people who need the shark, there are some people who need to go to court and if you are one of those people, if you are married to someone who has got an addiction, a personality disorder, you know is a high conflict person for whatever reason, right, you and you try to go through a process nicely and you know, be friendly and be amicable.
35:16
It's either not going to work or you're going to totally get hosed. So it's a big part of the work I think that both of us do is helping people assess what's your situation, what do you need, and then getting you down the right path, whatever that path may be. So I love this. We could keep talking for hours and hours but in the interest of being respectful for your time in the audience's ears, tell people where can they find you if they want to learn more.
Karen McNenny Guest
35:51
It's so simple Google The Good Divorce Coach or The Good Divorce Show or just Good Divorce, and it's going to lead you to me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, my website and to each of you. There is a button on my website The Good Divorce Coach or karenmcnenny.com. That's a few more letters to remember and it'll say Connect with Karen. The first hour is always free with me, and that might be for you and your spouse together. It might be each of you individually. It might just be you who is listening to this podcast today, and I'm here to remind you just because you research divorce doesn't mean you're going to get divorced, and we are under skilled and under-knowledged, coming into this decision, about what it is that we're signing up for. So you can spend a confidential hour with me without charge and just ask your questions, settle your mind, and then maybe we'll end up having a conversation with your spouse as well. No obligation, no fee. A safe place to explore TheGooddivorcecoach.com.
Karen Covy Host
37:01
Karen, that is absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge, your wisdom, your approach, which I personally find very refreshing, with me, with the audience and for those of you who are out there listening or watching, please, if you can do me a favor. If watching, please, if you can do me a favor, if you like this episode, if you want to hear more episodes, just like this, do me a big favor, like, subscribe, and I look forward to hearing or talking with you again next time. Thank you.
