WHO’S DRIVING THE TRAIN?
Want to guarantee misery and financial destruction from your divorce? Let someone else drive the train.
The train is a metaphor for your life, and the direction it is taking. Ideally, you should be the one determining where you are going and how you will get there. Your lawyer is the conductor, there to assist you in making choices about direction and destination. But you make the decisons.
Divorce is both an emotional and financial process. Sometimes, emotions take center stage, and determine your course of conduct. You want to make the other person pay for all the bad things he or she did. You want revenge, payback or to punish your soon-to-be ex. When you act on those emotions, you let someone else drive the train of your life.
Your lawyer will be only too happy to litigate small issues, or pursue strategies that will contribute little to the ultimate resolution of the case. Why not, the lawyer gets paid win or lose.
But if you want to minimize the damage to your finances and your life, you must put aside the emotion. You must make decisions based upon rational considerations and probable outcomes, not emotions. You must drive the train of your life yourself.