Counselling Alongside a Family Law Matter

A family lawyer handles the legal question. What they cannot handle is the part that keeps you awake: whether you are doing the right thing by your children, what to say to them, and how to manage conversations with someone you once organised your whole life around.

Those are not legal problems, and lawyers are usually the first to say so. But they sit right in the middle of a separation, and left unattended they tend to make the legal process longer, more expensive and more painful than it needed to be.

Two Different Jobs

It helps to be clear about the division, because people often expect one professional to cover both.

Your lawyer's job is your legal position: what the law provides, what is realistic, what to file and when. They advise on the case.

A counsellor's job is the part underneath: managing the stress so you can make decisions rather than react, working out what you actually want as distinct from what you want to win, and dealing with the grief — because a separation is a loss even when it is the right decision, and even when you initiated it.

Those two things support each other. A client who is regulated makes better instructions. A client who is not tends to make expensive ones.

What the Court Is Actually Weighing

One of the more useful things to understand early is what "best interests of the child" means in practice, because it is not a vague sentiment. Under the federal Divorce Act, section 16(1) is blunt: "The court shall take into consideration only the best interests of the child of the marriage in making a parenting order or a contact order."

And section 16(2) sets the priority: "When considering the factors referred to in subsection (3), the court shall give primary consideration to the child's physical, emotional and psychological safety, security and well-being."

The factors themselves are listed, and two of them tend to surprise people:

• "each spouse's willingness to support the development and maintenance of the child's relationship with the other spouse"
• "the ability and willingness of each person in respect of whom the order would apply to communicate and cooperate, in particular with one another, on matters affecting the child"

Read plainly, that means the way you conduct yourself toward the other parent is itself something the court weighs. Not as a moral judgement — as a factor.

The list also includes "any family violence and its impact on relevant considerations", and it is important not to read the cooperation factors as an expectation that everyone should simply get along. Where there is violence, that is a separate and serious matter, and safety comes first. Your lawyer is the person to speak to about that.

Where Counselling Helps Most

Keeping the children out of the middle. Almost every separating parent intends this and many struggle with it in practice, usually not through malice but through exhaustion — a remark made within earshot, a question asked about the other household, a silence that a child fills in for themselves. Working this out in session rather than in the moment makes a real difference.

Managing the communication itself. Much of the cost in a contested file comes from escalation that could have been avoided. Learning to answer the message rather than the tone is a skill, and it is teachable.

Deciding what you actually want. Separation invites you to fight over things you do not want because the other person wants them. Getting clear on your genuine priorities before negotiating tends to shorten everything.

Grieving the relationship. This is the part that gets postponed until the legal process ends, at which point it arrives all at once. It does not have to be deferred.

A Point About Confidentiality

Worth raising directly at the start rather than assuming, particularly when there is a legal matter running.

Therapeutic counselling and a court-ordered assessment are different things with different rules. A counsellor you see for your own support is not an assessor, is not evaluating your parenting, and is not producing a report for the court. If a report of any kind is ever required, that is a separate arrangement you would agree to explicitly, not something that happens by default.

Ask at the outset what is recorded, what circumstances would require disclosure, and what would happen if a lawyer requested records. Any competent clinician expects the question from someone in the middle of a family law matter, and a clear answer is part of feeling safe enough to speak freely.

On Involving the Children

Parents often ask whether the children should see someone too. Sometimes yes — but not automatically, and not as a way of demonstrating diligence to anyone.

A child who is managing well does not necessarily need therapy because their parents separated. A child who has become withdrawn, whose sleep or school has changed, who has taken on the job of looking after a parent's feelings, or who is carrying messages between households, is worth a conversation. Children's therapy is its own piece of work with its own pacing.

What helps nearly every child, regardless, is consistency between households on the few things that matter and permission to love both parents openly.

Timing

People often wait until the legal process is finished, on the reasoning that there is no point processing something still in motion. In practice the middle is when support is most useful, because that is when the decisions are being made and when the stress is highest.

It does not need to be weekly or open-ended. For some people it is a handful of sessions at the points where something has to be decided.

If You Need Help Right Now

If you are having thoughts of suicide or feel unsafe, call or text 9-8-8, the Suicide Crisis Helpline, at any hour. In an emergency, call 9-1-1.

Starting the Conversation

I provide counselling support alongside family law matters in Ottawa, in English and French, in person and virtually, and work with the grief and anxiety that usually travel with a separation.

Nothing about a first conversation commits you to anything. It can simply be about what has become hardest.