Personality Disorders in Family Law and How to Help
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Many of the people who go to court to settle their divorce have a different set of goals than the norm. Using game theory, you can help them and transform the system itself.
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Personality Disorders in Family Law and How to Help
- 1. Who Does That? Personality Disorders and the Legal System By Don Boice, LCSWR
- 2. What questions do you have before I start ?
- 3. What Do All Personality Disorders Share? “Enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior… • That deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture • Ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people and events • Range, intensity, liability and appropriateness of emotional response • Interpersonal functioning impaired • Impulse control is compromised
- 4. Personality Disorder Traits (Continued) • Inflexible and pervasive across a broad range • Leads to clinically significant distress • Stable and long duration • Not a manifestation or consequence of another mental disorder • Not attributed to physiological effect of a substance or another medical condition” Any of your clients comes to mind? Who actually goes to court?
- 5. Set The Stage • They must know what to expect, clear, concrete and specific • We expect you to set goals for this and be goal directed • Avoid innuendo, sarcasm or irony in your speech • Information is complete, public, shared • Break down complex decisions to their parts • Avoid, at all costs, the “dispute trap” or pitting them against one another
- 6. Avoid these harmful mindsets If you want the legal system to achieve its potential, try working with these first and watch how much better you feel, how much happier the client is and how much less conflict there is: • Attribution of fault in a no-fault state- guarantee antics • Legal Outcomes are confused with “Long Term Life Goals” • Divorce is mistakenly seen as a Zero Sum Game • There is a dispute behind every bush- pit them against partner • Children are property, not human beings with feelings
- 7. Avoid (continued) • Selfish strategies are best (Nash Equilibrium –better long term outcomes come from people looking out for their interests and the interest of the other person) • Winning is not only important, it is the only thing (pitting people) • Divorce is confused with the end of the relationship, so it doesn’t matter how we treat each other during court
- 8. What do you need to know? • Unpredictable, unreasonable, not what you’d expect • “Who does that?” -They do • Not shared goals but yes goal-oriented • Empathy and compassion lacking maybe • They’re maybe okay with hurting people • Hurting people hurt people You must be the one to take control and set the atmosphere!
- 9. Be direct 1 “What are your goals in coming to court?” 2 “Which of those stated goals could you not meet outside of court?” (Subjective value of court)
- 10. Want Results? Do This • Even one attorney can influence the rules by interacting in certain ways with the other attorney. • Tell them what they are in for, if they still choose court, and let them know how to be a “good litigant” • Describe divorce not as a dispute resolution process but as a Goal Based Planning process • Useful to delay addressing legal outcomes until objective and subjective payoff values and goals have been fleshed out • Don’t drag it out – “Let’s keep this going.”
- 11. Do This • Remind them what they already know about non zero sum -“The parents were no longer dividing days (a Zero Sum Game), but rather were organizing post-separation parenting responsibility (a Non-zero Sum Game).” • Your goal is to stay on track towards meeting goals, call them on every single “slow down “ manipulation • Please do not let them get away with stalling • You likely will remind them, “You’re not special or the exception”
- 12. Content Standards You own the process and hold them accountable: • Are the agreements a good plan for reaching specific issue goals? • Is the agreement a good plan for reaching the long term life goals for both parties? Want more practical information? Everything on Game Theory is directly from: “Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law” by Kenneth Waldron PhD and Allan Koritzinsky, Esq
- 13. Process Standards Process Standards: Five E’s • Are the parties Educated (information is public, perfect and complete)? • Are the agreements Equitable (as a whole, reasonably fair to both parties, in terms of accomplishing their long term goals, not balance sheets as legal outcomes)? • Are the agreements Effective (unambiguous and clear)? • Are the agreements Equilibrant (can no longer be improved for either party, without diminishing value for either of them)? • Are the agreements Envy Free (where neither of the parties would exchange their total package of agreements with the other party)?
- 14. Goal Based Planning Changes the Game • Ask questions differently to reach goals and don’t buy into antiquated assumptions! • What is the goal and why (the rationale gives us the subjective value and the hidden agenda)? • Keep them focused on the goals and do not let them get away with delaying. “Stay on target” • “The decision is going to be the same no matter what you tell me.” • Goal is rarely spoken- “My goal is to hurt my ex” “If we drag this out, it hurts my spouse. I don’t care if I get hurt as long at it hurts him/her.”
- 15. Resources to Learn More About Disorders • Please see your handouts for more practical information on this • When I am dusting or sweeping etc, I listen to YouTube videos on this. Short bursts… and then I want to re listen to a few because they are so insightful, informative a practical.
- 16. Using Game Theory to Change the Game • Game Theory gets around many of these issues by changing the game and how it is played. To learn more, listen to the following YouTube videos and consider purchasing the book “Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law” by Kenneth Waldron PhD and Allan Koritzinsky, Esq • https://youtu.be/fc7ConEuT8w • https://youtu.be/90mv4eYMD20 • https://youtu.be/j-81sBi0qkQ • https://youtu.be/sOXNfk6Wnl4
Editor's Notes
- JUDGES VS Attorneys vs mediators- changes the presentation and handouts- truncated for judges Live stream and in person in NYC
- (Write down- Don)
- Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law
- As a matter of information, people come up with their best agreements if they are both selfish (thinking about their own long term goals) and a little altruistic (thinking about the long term goals of the other person, and in your case the children). There is nothing wrong with being openly selfish as long as it is balanced with altruism.” Principle Two: The Manager of the Game Can Control the Rules, Payoffs or Both: establish rules that employ Game Theory Principles and define payoffs as long term life goals, not legal outcomes. as managers of the settlement process, have some control over the rules and the payoffs. Even one attorney can influence the rules by interacting in certain ways with the other attorney. Principle Three: Games Have Solutions: solutions are points of equilibria reached through the Scientific Method or the Bounded Rationality Method and must be the product of the parties, not the lawyer or the Mediator. take turns with proposals and counter- proposals and include the objective and subjective payoff values in play in those proposals and counter-proposals. This invokes Bayes Rule and the convergence of expectations on optimal outcomes Two of the main factors in spousal support are need and ability to pay; * another one is fairness to both parties. *Tell me about some of your long term financial goals *so we can begin to understand how much support you will need to reach those goals, what is fair to both of you, and so forth That depends on your goals for the children and each of the parents. ***Let’s start with your goals. Tell me about what kind of relationship you want the children to have with each of you. ***Tell me how you would like them to look back on their schooling and how involved you were with them. **There is pretty good research that says that children do best in school if both parents are involved, but there can be the hassle factor of them going back and forth. How important is it to you that they do well in school?”***
- GOAL BASED STANDARDS REGARDING FINAL SETTLEMENT 1. Content Standards: Goal Based a. Whether the individual agreements on each Simple and Single Game are a good plan for reaching specific issue goals b. Whether the groups of agreements are a good plan for reaching group goals? c. Whether the Marital Settlement Agreement is a good plan for reaching the long term life goals for both parties Process Standards: Five E’s d. Are the parties Educated (information is public, perfect and complete)? e. Are the agreements Equitable (as a whole, reasonably fair to both parties, in terms of accomplishing their long term goals, not balance sheets as legal outcomes)? f. Are the agreements Effective (unambiguous and clear)? g. Are the agreements Equilibrant (can longer be improved for either party, without diminishing value for either of them)? h. Are the agreements Envy Free (where neither of the parties would exchange their total package of agreements with the other party)?
- The first reason for measuring the entire settlement package against the axioms is to determine whether the agreements on the legal outcomes are good plans to reach the long term goals of the parties. This will already partially have been completed when looking at agreements in the Win-Win-Plus Bargaining Phase. As agreements are reviewed with an eye to improving them, improvements are viewed in terms of accomplishing long term goals. The Process Standards are the Five-E’s: 1. Are the parties Educated (information is public, perfect and complete)? 2. Are the agreements Equitable (as a whole, reasonably fair to both parties)? 3. Are the agreements Effective (unambiguous and clear)? 4. Are the agreements Equilibrant (can no longer be improved for either party without diminishing value for either of them)? 5. Are the agreements Envy Free (where neither of the parties would exchange their total package of agreements with the other party.)? 86 This last step, measuring the agreements by the Process Standards, can be frightening and important. In some situations, reaching a total set of agreements can seem fragile, and attorneys, Mediators and even the parties might be concerned about looking too closely, for fear that the settlement might not survive. Our contention, however, is that if a settlement falls apart when examined against these axioms, this is likely a good thing, because the fundamental goal of the mediation has not been met. When a settlement package fails, it is usually because of just one or two issues. Revisiting those issues and reworking them often leads to improvements. When a carpenter finishes a project, he or she usually will examine the work for flaws, and if there are flaws, correct the situation. This is simply getting the job done right and should not make people anxious. The carpenter might be disappointed or even frustrated if the correction is time consuming, but the goal is to have a good product. The same is true in mediation. Finding that the settlement package does not meet an axiom might be disappointing, and even frustrating, but the commitment to finishing the mediation with a good settlement package is important. A second reason for measuring the entire settlement package against the axioms is that it forces the parties to accept the limitations of reality. Each party might have believed that a couple of the agreements were unfair or be experiencing the loss involved. By focusing on the entire settlement package and accepting it as a whole, it likely meets the axiom of equitable. Accepting the losses on individual agreements becomes easier—sad, but easier.
- At first glance, bargaining with Game Theory Principles might appear to be more complex, but it is simply a different way of looking at the process. Rather than a competition for limited resources, it is a planning process, where the gains of the parties are enhanced and expanded, and where cooperative strategies are more likely to produce optimal outcomes when measured against the content standards of the long term life goals of the parties and the process standards of the Five-E’s. In plain talk, we can channel the parties into an amicable cooperative process, with less damage and better long term outcomes for all parties by applying the ten Twelve Game Theory Principles and the appropriate skills to implement them. The dangers in the current system can be easily summarized: inferential thinking professionals imposing legal positions on clients rather than allowing clients to reach points of equilibrium tricking people into focusing on short term legal outcomes rather than long term life goals, and the other “tricks” listed in Chapter Two. Cooperatively constructing good plans for each Single and Simple Game, and inductively building a payoff structure that helps people reach long term life goals, are more likely to meet the axioms of a good settlement. Having guides through the process, such as lawyers and Mediators, overcome the obstacles that the parties bring to the table, make it much more likely that there will be optimal outcomes. To this end, it is your author’s fondest hope that Goal Based Planning, applying the Game Theory Principles and Skills discussed in this chapter, will make the concept of a “messy divorce” passé, or at least the rare exception.