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I’m Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, the owner and managing partner of Primus Family Law Group, and today we are doing our Turn the Tables, Family Law Matters. So I know you all know that it’s usually Michael who asks me questions about my legal expertise in the family law arena, but it’s really important to understand that we work together in conjunction because part of family law is dealing with your clients and their family’s emotional health during these kinds of proceedings. So Michael, you’ve heard all of our recent sessions on modifications, which usually happens after judgments are filed and done and the major litigation is over.

What can you tell me about the impact on the family going back to court to make a modification of child support, spousal support, or even visitation of those children? That’s a great question and it’s not just the impact on the family, but we can even narrow this down and talk about the impact on the children in particular. So we all want and think we must have stability and predictability and certainty, and of course there is no such thing as predictability and certainty. That’s just not the way the real world exists, but we think we must have it.

So we’ve settled it. Thank goodness it’s over. It’s behind me.

I’m not looking back. Move forward with life. Everything is going to be good now until one day I knock on the door or I open my email or whatever it may be and whoops, they want to change it.

Oh my goodness, this throws my life into upheaval. I think that what the impact is, is it causes us to get into this should, S-H-O-U-L-D mindset. He shouldn’t have done this.

She shouldn’t have done this and we make ourselves angry. We make ourselves enraged. We make ourselves sick and that spills over to children.

Children want stability and expect it perhaps more than adults do because adults have lived to understand maybe it doesn’t always happen that way. So I think that what we need to be under, what we would to be wise to understand is this is an opportunity to demonstrate emotional regulation. Okay, this is not what I wanted.

This is not what I expected. I never would have predicted this, but I can handle it. Now, some would say, why is she doing this to me? Why is he doing this to me? The better question is, what can I learn from this? And I think that you see this as an opportunity for emotional health instead of something to become, to make yourself enraged about.

Remember, it’s not a far step from anger to rage to God forbid, some really, really heinous act. So let’s wheel it back in and let’s say when we hear that knock on the door of, guess what? Something changed. We call Bonnie Rabinovich Mantell at Primus Family Law.

Michael, isn’t that a little bit for, you know, of learning a bit of coping skills and being able to show your children, they watch not just what you do, but what you don’t do and how you react, right? So my clients or clients going or anybody going through a family law proceeding has any life coaching needs that they want to have for, you know, I think we all need a life coach to get through these kinds of proceedings. It’s very daunting. It’s one of the harshest things people go through.

How can they reach you for such help? They can reach me very, very straightforwardly. I don’t have a bunch of barriers. I have an open access.

Dr. Mantell, M-A-N-T-E-L-L at me, M-E dot com. That’s D-R-M-A-N-T-E-L-L at me dot com. I’m there.

I will answer your email almost immediately if I can, if I’m not in session with someone else and we can talk and see how I can be of real help to you. Sometimes people just need a couple moments of, you know, hey, try this. Great.

But sometimes people need some more information and we can spend some time chatting. That’s wonderful. As always.

Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Bonnie. Pleasure.