In my practice we must learn to listen, listen to what the client has to say. We try hard to listen until the end even when we feel we can already predict the end of the story because we’ve heard it over and over again from another client.
Sally decides to divorce:
Sally sounded very angry, Sally looked angry and Sally was actually extremely angry when she told us why she wanted the divorce. We didn’t understand what was wrong with her story but the anger was palpable. After telling her side of the story, Sally said it: “I will never forgive him”.
This was the red flag for us indicating that this wasn’t going to be an easy case, because we knew that an agreement would have to wait until Sally learns to forgive. Sally needs to forgive Harry but it won’t be enough, Sally will have to forgive herself. Sally must let it go, be at peace with herself.
Sally’s was another case where good people lose their way, good people do bad things – we thought Sally was a “lost case”, we were certain from past experiences that she was not ready for any type of agreement. Sally proved we were wrong about her.
Harry was neither a good husband, nor a good father. Harry was the product of a broken family, who somehow not only survived, but succeeded at earning a Master’s degree and landing a very good paying job as the CEO of a large corporation. What Harry never learned was the basic human decency of respecting women, something we later learned he had inherited from his own father. Harry, we believed, would need years of therapy.
The change:
Harry started to see a psychologist a few days after the separation, right after we met Sally for the first time. In the meantime the couple separated with a peaceful oral agreement. Harry proved we were wrong about him.
Sally asked us to prepare the lawsuit and later the divorce agreement. A few days after the court decision (separation or “Peruk Shituf” in Hebrew), after two years of actual separation and court rooms, Sally suddenly disappeared. She left Israel and left the two children with her sister. Sally was seriously considering relocation back to London.
Life is full of surprises:
Sally came back and we met her and Harry in our office believing they were finally signing the divorce agreement and the request for a GET, but to our total surprise, they asked for time to freeze the case. That same day, we asked the Judge for another postponement, knowing that as usual these moments of “trying again” don’t bring remedy very often.
Another eight months passed, we were visited again by the couple. Something was different now, something was really strange. We thought that they were hiding something from us, some “secret”, something we could not figure out – something was wrong.
Wrong:
As we learned, there was something very wrong – something wrong with us as lawyers. We lost connection with the goodness of these people, with their will power, the real care and love they had to each other.
Harry had been in psychotherapy for more than one year, Sally was also seeing a professional and both were also under the auspices of a Rabbi. They believed they had changed. They now believed in forgiveness, and as a result they worked hard to forgive, the other and themselves.
Easy to forgive – hard to forget
They both felt the same: In the beginning they thought they could not forgive each other but in fact they could not forget each other. They refused to forget the good, the positive, the good times, the good chemistry they had and all the good moments they had together with their children.
These moments, they told us, were what they called the power behind their decision to make it work. It was easy they said, easy to forgive, it was a question of time, but to forget, to erase the past or to rewrite the facts was impossible.
Memories:
We all have good and bad memories. Bad memories are harder to forget and somehow they keep coming back to us.
Personally I felt the same after my own divorce, therefore I can relate to these good people and understand the process they went through.
Unfortunately, most people can’t let the bad memories go, they are glued to them, they need them to survive because they can’t forgive themselves.
Don’t do it! Learn to forgive.
