The usual prelude to a divorce is separation. Now there's controlled separation negotiated by therapists, a movement that's gaining adherents across the country.
Hilary Stout reports on Family Matters in the Wall St Journal (subscription only)
Separation in the U.S. has become essentially a prelude to divorce. But a new approach that has quietly attracted interest over the past few years aims to do the opposite. Controlled separation is usually negotiated in a therapist's office, never in a lawyer's, and its ultimate goal is to save the marriage by putting a concrete limit on the time apart (usually no more than six months) -- and negotiating more than a dozen hot points into a written contract to eliminate the uncertainty, insecurity and second-guessing that can become toxic in a troubled relationship.
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In most separations, there are few rules. Legal separations, negotiated by lawyers, generally cover only finances and children. So-called trial separations, in which one spouse simply moves out with no guidance, are generally emotional and unpredictable since no one is ever sure what the other is up to. A marriage and family therapist in Wisconsin, Lee Raffel, developed the idea of controlled separation in the late 1990s out of "sheer frustration," after some three decades of counseling couples.
"I could see that when couples separated, they were having a terrible time," she says. "They didn't know if they wanted to stay or go. They only knew they were unhappy. They didn't know how to solve their problems and they did a lot of nasty things to each other."
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It doesn't always work, though. Elsie Radtke, associate director for the family ministries office at the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, says that more than half of the couples she counsels through controlled separation end up divorcing. But she feels that the process benefits those couples too. The split, she says, is often far less acrimonious as a result of the controlled separation.