Domestic Relations
When are adult partners a family? What is the importance of being a family? Why would or why does one enter ceremonial marriage? Are there alternatives to ceremonial marriage?
These questions and the subsequent issues and respective answers often have challenged me in my career as a practitioner in both clinical and forensic psychology contending with marriage and its alternatives and the legal structuring of adult-to-adult familial relationships.
What can I conclude looking back on my take-away, practically speaking, regarding the legal structures of adult-to-adult familial relations? Well, before I answer this one, I must throw a few more questions into the hopper, which I might add have been equally if not even more challenging to come to peace with in the context of this line of sight.
What constitutes family dissolution, that is, divorce grounds and procedures? I can tell you all I have some ideas and seen some pretty creative answers by way of human acting-out on this for sure. My most vulnerable front, and resultant challenging developmental growth experience on numerous professional emotional levels and fronts has been contending with and working through child custody and the psychological warfare against the mind of the innocents in this horror.
How do we, that being our supposed esteemed counselors of law and the triers of fact, frame legal recognition of parent-child relationships? How is this respectively responsive to or reconciled with common-sense respect and empathy for the elegance of the human condition not in “trade-craft” but rather “street-craft” of family struggles with betrayal, losses, and coercion in inevitably reconstituted or even blended family alliances, or horrifically forcing innocents through all flavors of lobbyists (as subtle and complicated as racism has become) to choose lucky parents with wanting to remain or wanting to go live with them?
What can I conclude you ask? What answers have I developed in the context of this all? Just this. What the hell are you looking at me for? My answer is best summed up accordingly to you all as this. It all came to me the other night when my son and me were watching Hannah Montana and Billy Ray Cyrus said to Rico Suave something about “you’re like a long tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs.” Now I ask you, “Who said Hannah Montana is really only for kids?”
One conclusion I have formulated here is that the powers to be beyond the realm of the familial constellation (that being ground zero), our doctrines concerning families, parents and children, spouses, and domestic partners, are maybe now more than ever in a revolutionary dynamo. Why you ask? Well look around you. Don’t you see it? I sure as hell am seeing it. Look at our supposed long-settled principles and practices regarding marriage, divorce, marital property, and I must cross myself before I say this one, spousal support; and it seems always coming last but certainly not least, which reverberates as strongly as the synopsis originating from War of the Roses, child custody—all have changed, or worse yet, been abandoned or have substantially become modified over the decades.
Testy intruders lying wait on the perimeter no longer content as observer’s of the fish bowl want to mix it up with the best of us in this psychological warfare against the mind. It now seems they have become far more important than before. Who are they? They’re our unmarried cohabitants, our same-sex couples, and our single-parent families. That’s who.
One thing in my mind is certain now. These and a host of other issues are definitely in flux. Oh yeah. No doubt here. Now to the business at hand. These questions turn on the need for them to be considered from a number of perspectives. That is knowing that these questions and their salvation likely turn on Insights Without Borders, and even more so in a manner of speaking, Insights From Outside The Borders.
In keeping with the spirit of this, I guess in the context of my training and respect for the art and skill in conflict resolution and mediation, the links in this broad area (our invitation for you to travel and develop insights from outside the borders) present many different voices and accounts we wish will not privilege any particular voice, doctrine, principles or practices on these difficult social issues in domestic relations.
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