Micki McWade: Collaborative Divorce as a High-Conflict Strategy

It sounds impossible to collaborate with a controlling ex. Micki McWade's answer is counterintuitive: a controlling person often agrees to collaborative divorce precisely because they believe they can control it, and that belief is what gets them to the table.

Micki McWade is a collaborative divorce professional, a social worker specializing in mental health, a divorce coach, and an author with about twenty years in the field. She wrote Getting Up, Getting Over, Getting On, a twelve-step guide to divorce recovery, and has spent her career helping families get through separation with less damage.

In this episode, Micki explains the collaborative model, a team in which each spouse has their own attorney, plus a neutral mental health professional and a financial specialist, so the couple is supported on every front at once. She and Lisa dig into what she calls divorce management: keeping the goal, getting out, in front of you even when it means swallowing your pride. Micki is candid about a strategy that surprises people, validating a difficult ex's genuine good points to lower their defenses, and why the target of the abuse is usually the real expert on what disarms the other person.

She talks about why a controlling person behaves better in front of a collaborative team, how the mental health professional stays neutral while the person being coached does the real steering, and the vision that can help a controlling person let go of what they are losing. Micki closes with the case that still amazes her, a divorce that dragged on for three and a half years and then settled in two and a half days once the room was built to support the more fragile party.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• How the collaborative model supports you legally, financially, and emotionally at once
• Why a controlling person often comes to the table thinking they can control the process
• "Divorce management": keeping the goal to get out in front of you
• Why validating a difficult ex's genuine good points can lower their defenses
• Why the target of the abuse is usually the real expert on what disarms the other person
• How the mental health professional stays neutral while the person being coached steers
• Why collaboration resolves the large majority of cases, even hard ones

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What collaborative divorce is: the team model
3:00 Why it's hard to get a high-conflict person to the table
7:00 Divorce management: keep the goal to get out
11:00 Validating the ex's good points as leverage
15:00 Making them feel safe, and like they're winning
19:00 Performing for the collaborative "audience"
23:00 Coaching the client, and the neutral mental-health role
37:00 The participation agreement, and an 85% success rate
43:00 The "vision" that lets a controlling person let go
49:00 The 3.5-year divorce settled in two and a half days

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Micki McWade at The Divorce Coach: https://www.thedivorcecoach.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.