Worcester MA Divorce Law Blog

It's hard to find someone sympathetic to disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong these days, but he has a champion in Huffington Post divorce blogger Barbara Goldberg. She's not defending his illegal blood doping or his serial lies to the entire world. Rather, Goldberg sees the scars of Armstrong's parents' divorce, and she speculates that was a major cause of his downfall.

There are four lessons to be learned from this former sports superstar, says Goldberg, and those lessons are embedded in things that divorced parents say and do to their children. The first is the corrosive effect of "powering through," pushing through life as hard and fast as possible. Armstrong's parents divorced when he was two and he never saw or heard from his biological father again. The past was past, his mother told him, and we don't look back. Goldberg says divorced parents do that when they ask their children to "power through" adversity with no regard for how the children really feel.

Yoga has its cleansing breaths. Religion has ritual washings. Divorce now has its own mental and emotional purification process, to remove the relationship's poisonous vestiges and purge the anger, bitterness and self-doubt that still lingers. This cure-for-what-ails-you is called Divorce Detox, a California-based company that "detoxes the harmful residues of a divorce." All it takes is some time, introspection, lots of homework, more than a few dollars, and a willingness to shake off the past.

This Southern California company says there are 25 "life challenges" that come with divorce, such as trouble sleeping, self-blame, and the fear of being alone. The counseling sessions, textbook and writing projects are designed to look deep within, pose a lot of uncomfortable questions, and point the way to the future. In some cases, it's literally "out with the old;" getting rid of old possessions is part of the therapy as is working through past pain and hurts from other relationships so they don't get carried forward. A fair amount of self-affirmation is also involved. Rule number one in the counseling sessions is, "Be kind to yourself."

Almost everyone who watches daytime TV has seen or heard of Thomas Beatie, the so-called "Pregnant Man." Beatie's marriage is dissolving, and he and his spouse are working on the custody of their three children, splitting up the marital assets and all the rest. In the middle of this sits a Maricopa County, Arizona Superior Court Judge who is stymied by all the legal challenges posed when a man who used to be a woman tries divorce his female wife.

Thomas was born Tracey, a woman, but back in 1997 Tracey began medical treatments to change herself physically from a woman to a man. After a series of operations, Tracey, now Thomas, was allowed to change his gender on his birth certificate from female to male. However, his reproductive organs were still female and with the help of a sperm donor, Thomas and his female wife produced three children. Thomas made the rounds on TV and in magazines as the "Pregnant Man," complete with beard and bulging belly. Nine years later, Thomas and his wife are splitting but there is a major catch. Arizona does not allow same-sex marriage and does not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. And Thomas is, in the eyes of the court, the birth mother of the three children.