5 Steps How to Get Out of the Divorce Child Custody Trap

and Maintain Your Independence…

Today is a day to celebrate the freedom our founding fathers gave to us. You can be assured that your judge is celebrating his or her freedom today with their family and not giving a second though to depriving you of your freedom based on nothing more than his or her opinion. This violates everything our founding fathers stood for and everything we celebrate today.

The way attorneys do things currently is they make you think that there is something to fight over. Everything you fight over costs you money. A retainer for an attorney might be anywhere from $5 to $10,000. And attorneys don’t have a cap on how much more they might need to keep fighting. So if you fight over who gets the furniture and the furniture originally cost you $30,000 by the time you are done fighting over the furniture you might have spent $30,000 in attorney’s fees.  We have seen people spend over $20,000 in one month. How much do you make in a year? Everything you ask an attorney to ask a judge for has a dollar figure attached to it. Every phone call you make to your attorney has a dollar figure and will be billed usually at 15 minutes minimum.

PITFALL –You are fighting the wrong fight.

TIP: Know what to ask for.

An attorney will make you think that you need to beg a judge for rights to your child. They don’t tell you that you enter the proceedings with your full and equal rights intact. They don’t tell you that what they are doing is taking your rights away from you, and that all a judge can do is take your rights. An attorney might make you think that you should fight to win rights. Nope. Remember, you already have them.

The attorneys don’t tell you, but your fight is really going to be with the judge taking your rights. And attorneys typically try to get you to ask the judge to appoint someone to decide your rights like an amicus or a Guardian ad Litem (GAL). These are people who do investigations on your life and your parenting styles and decisions. The amicus or GAL takes this information back to the judge so that the judge can use it to take rights from either you or the other parent. You are paying for this invasion of your privacy. And asking for an amicus or a GAL will be seen by the Court as you granting them permission for them to invade your privacy. Be aware that court facilitators and parenting evaluators are just another label to serve the same purpose as an amicus or a GAL, they just focus more on your dispute with the other parent, but they also serve the judge and the judge will look to them to base his/her decision on what rights to take from you.

 

There is a different way to approach this and that is to frame your case right from the beginning if you want to stay in control of your life.

If you frame your case with your rights in mind, then you are not opening the door to the judge to decide your life for you and your child. This is a less expensive path, does not require invasion of your privacy, does not require you to beat up the other parent or air dirty laundry to the court (which is public), and does not require you to have long delays for continuing investigations and more invasive discovery than necessary. The sooner you get out of the court process, the less you will spend.

Maintain Your Independence — Don’t Take a Chance with Your Rights

Protect them from the Beginning — And You will be Starting Your New Life Sooner Rather than Being Trapped in this Litigation Hell.

Every day we watch fathers and mothers and children suffer because they were manipulated and mis-lead. We watch child custody battles go on for years because a father or mother did not take the time to think about what they are getting into, they did not know, they were not told, and parents have not had a way to figure this out because the information was not available. Attorneys don’t usually explain all of the details involved in the process and the decisions that you will be asked to make along the way that impact and affect your every day life and your future. Most attorneys do not tell you that once the Court gets ahold of you and starts stripping you of rights they also can and usually make you subject to orders that could easily put you in jail just for going through a hardship, losing a job, and not being able to pay the amicus, GAL, child support, or alimony or spousal support (spousal maintenance).

Just check the tabloids and you will see the many stories on celebrities even going to jail for being unable to pay. Look at John Schneider, Bo Duke of Dukes of Hazzard. Hulk Hogan’s ex-wife recently has filed and is asking for 40% of his income. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie now have been fighting over child custody issues for 2 years now. This means that their legal costs have been ongoing throughout this period of time.These are common stories and not rare at all. The average divorce costs about $77,000, but most we have heard about have been much more. Some parents have paid a million dollars.

This happens every day in family court, it even happens to fathers or mothers who were never married to the other parent, just on a smaller scale. Rather than being ordered to pay $18,000 a month you might be ordered to pay $3000 a month. This might be child support and spousal maintenance combined. But that won’t even include half of un-reimbursed medical costs, childcare, and extra-curricular activities. You will have to pay that in addition to the amount ordered. And for the parents in Texas, as of September 1, 2018, you will have to pay Dental and some additional medical related costs as well.

In the past, attorneys were able to enjoy a racket where nobody knew anything about divorce and child custody battles, parents thought that judges and attorneys could be trusted. You might have thought that hiring an attorney would protect you from your narcissistic ex. You thought that the retainer you paid would be enough, until the attorney kept asking you to pay more. When you questioned the attorney, they just tell you that the retainer was just to get them started, and that they cannot tell you for sure how much it will cost you to finish, or that there is a possibility that you won’t be finished until you run out of money. And if you do run out of money, that you will be dumped by your attorney and you will be stuck with whatever orders are in place at that time, regardless of whether you can live with those orders.

You thought that the truth would be enough. You thought that because you didn’t do anything wrong there was no way anything bad could happen in court. You thought that you had plenty of evidence to win your case. You thought that your attorney would fight for you. You thought that the judge would protect your rights. You thought that the judge would care about the truth. You thought that the judge used law and not personal beliefs, bias, and prejudice. You didn’t know how to make decisions or how to get what you wanted, or what to evaluate, or what to expect. You didn’t know how each of your decisions would impact the rest of your life. You depended on your attorney for all of that. In the end what you have paid for is manipulation, harassment, stress, and usually horribly orders that violate your civil rights and make it impossible to continue to parent and raise your child how you see fit.

So once you realize that the system is corrupt and that they are going to try and screw you, steal your child, and nothing works the way you thought it should, you are broke, some are bankrupt, you are in temporary orders that you may never get out of, and you are scared, suffering, stressed, losing sleep, developing health issues like anxiety and depression, high blood pressure, are traumatized, and probably having difficulty focusing at work, if you are able to work anymore at all.

Today decide to use the strength of the rights that your founding fathers of America fought for and the soldiers of this country continue to fight to protect. Make tomorrow the day you revoke any consent you might have given for the courts or your ex to take advantage of you. So if you are ready to take your life back, keep reading.

Here are the 5 steps for getting out of the divorce court trap:

  1. Write down for your attorney that you do not consent, concede, or waive any rights. They won’t like this and will tell you that this is not how they do things. That’s the point, you don’t want to do things the way they have been done. That is why so many parents and children are harmed because they don’t know any different. Your attorney can do this, they just most likely will not want to because this will make the judges and other attorneys question why they are rocking the boat.
  2. Write down that you are not asking the judge to make a best interest determination for your child in your place and that you do not consent to the judge appointing anyone to make this decision for you or for the judge. You are only asking that the judge protect the rights you already have as the constitution demands that they do.
  3. Write down that your case involves fundamental rights and that you want protection for these fundamental rights. See our motions package for examples on how you might help your attorney with this.
  4. Ask your attorney to show you the statutes that allow the judge to take over your rights when you and your ex disagree, and then tell the attorney you want to object and challenge those statutes, and that it is unconstitutional to force you into an expensive adversarial litigation fight. Merely complaints about how you parent is what you are challenging as not sufficient to force you into a trial over your legal rights. You will want to know if you have an attorney who is willing to argue that the statute is unconstitutionally authorizing an invasion into your privacy. (You will need more here, but this gives you the idea of where you need to start from.) Your attorney will try to explain to you why divorce is different and doesn’t follow these rules. Push through and continue onto step 5.
  5. Ask your attorney to look at the pre-trial motions that we have created to challenge the lack of fundamental rights protections and to protect the record from error as an effort to prevent the Court from creating an erroneous order that violates yours and your child’s constitutional legal rights. Use our examples to help you get this right.

These are just the beginning steps. You will get resistance and challenge from your attorney, so you will need more support and guidance and need to learn your rights and how they work, and how to integrate this civil rights approach into your strategy. We have a membership site to help you with that. Keep reading and you will find links to take you there at the end of this blog.

Proceeding to trial without taking these steps will cost you dearly, you could lose more precious time with your child, you could lose your freedom and go to jail, litigation could go on and on, you might run out of money and your temporary orders will be just like permanent orders since you won’t be able to afford to get them changed, and it costs you more the longer you are in the trial process.

Vow to get your life out of limbo and start the process of taking your life back today!

Get a membership, get the motions package, start reading the books (included in the membership), take the online class (included in the membership), and get in touch with us to help you with steps for making progress on this approach. This applies even if you were never married and are wanting to protected your separated parents rights.

*DISCLAIMER: We are not attorneys, we are not a substitute for an attorney, we do not practice law and are not trained in the law. Please seek the help of an attorney for implementing any information that you get from us.