Amicable Divorce Ground Rules

This is for couples who are going through a divorce and want support in therapy while it happens. For most people this is a time overflowing with feeling — grief, fear, mistrust, anger, sadness — often several at once and rarely on the same day as your partner. Safety in the room does not happen on its own. It comes from agreeing, in advance, on a few clear ground rules.

Check the items you can genuinely agree to. Do not check anything you are unsure about — an unchecked box is useful information, not a failure. Bring whatever you left blank to your first session and talk it through there.

• [ ] The children are the top priority. We will set an example of caring for each other in front of them, and we will avoid parental alienation at all costs.
• [ ] We will be as amicable as humanly possible. No divorce is ever fully amicable or fully contested — but we will keep aiming for amicable.
• [ ] We will not bring anything discussed in therapy into a legal dispute. We will not request therapy notes or a therapist's comments for legal purposes, by subpoena or any other route. Therapy is a safe zone.
• [ ] We will each commit to our own individual therapy to help manage our emotions during this process.
• [ ] We will not date until the divorce is final, and we will not introduce the children to a romantic third party until it is final.
• [ ] We will coordinate what we say to other people about our relationship and about the divorce.
• [ ] We will use a mediator. Separate independent counsel alongside mediation is fine.
• [ ] We will not use co-parenting therapy to grieve, vent, or relitigate old grievances. We know this one is aspirational.
• [ ] We will act with integrity, even where mistrust exists between us.
• [ ] We will not have separate, private communications with our therapist unless the therapist approves it and everyone knows about it.

An unchecked box is the agenda: The boxes you checked are not the useful part of this page — they were probably already true. The ones you left blank are where the work is. Bring them in unedited, including the ones you left blank because you do not trust your partner to hold up their end. That is a thing to say out loud in the room, not a reason to stay quiet.

Go deeper

Ready for more? These lessons pick up where this worksheet leaves off.

• Your First Session, from The Neurodiverse Couples Repair Program. What actually happens in a first couples session at our center: the ground rules, how confidentiality works, and the three words that pause anything.
• Loss and Grief in the Relationship, from The Neurodiverse Couple. The grief no one calls grief — mourning the relationship you imagined.