Is my husband’s behavior abuse? What are my options?

Even if you’ve been unhappy for a really long time, it’s sometimes hard to put a label on your relationship, especially if that label is “abusive.” Its kind of like rape.  We all understand what it is, but, at the end of the day, often have a hard time describing our own experiences in these...

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Virginia Divorce After 15 Years of Marriage

By any reckoning, 15 years is a fairly lengthy marriage.  At some point – and I’d theorize that’s somewhere along the ten year mark – there comes a time when, even if you break up, you and your soon-to-be ex owe something to each other. The longer the marriage, the more difficult it is to...

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Spare the Child: Virginia Custody Disputes

As everyone always says, there’s no book on how to be a good parent.  The nurses at the hospital didn’t send you home with a manual.  There are books and online courses and old wives tales, but there’s no consensus on how to raise a child in the best way possible. We all screw up...

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Child Abuse Cases in Virginia

  I’ve said it before and, though it pains me, I’ll say it again. Where domestic violence and child abuse are concerned, the court is very, very jaded. It’s not just the courts, either. Attorneys, too, can become jaded. We hear terrible stories, day in and day out, and, sometimes, they’re not true, or they’re...

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Your Boundaries and Virginia Divorce

Boundaries are a hard thing for women everywhere. There are a million reasons, but I think that most of us feel essentially required to take care of the feelings of everyone around us. The feeling that we’ve disappointed someone is almost physically painful, and we take a lot of abuse – we’re programmed, in a...

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Virginia Abusive Divorce and Custody Litigation

  Most people want to avoid extensive litigation if at all possible. After all, it makes a case take longer, cost more, and (generally speaking) yield poorer results. Most people, after getting a couple bills from their attorney, will suddenly become much less litigious. Most people, of course, are fairly sensible. They’ll instead start to...

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Most people have a lot of questions about the divorce process – even if they understand the basics. After all, there’s a lot that is really fact specific, and it can be hard to apply a general principle to a specific situation. Even if you can sort of guess what the answer might be, you...

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Do family law lawyers make conflict worse?

I was recently reading a book (that I mentioned in the articles I shared with you on Monday and Wednesday of this week as well), where the author, Greg Ellis, alleged that, in his high conflict divorce and custody case spanning over 5 years and costing in excess of a million dollars, family law attorneys...

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