When a divorce or separation occurs, despite the complicated emotions that accompany it, a family remains a family.
On this episode of Children First Family Law, Krista sits down with Dr. Premela Deck, a Boston-area family law attorney and forensic social worker with a Ph.D. in her field who is creating innovative solutions to integrate law and social work to help children and parents navigate conflict amid family law disputes. As an attorney, Dr. Deck is a family law litigator, mediator, parenting coordinator, and guardian ad litem. As a mental health professional, she primarily serves as a custody evaluator, parenting coach, and therapist for high-conflict families, couples, or individuals caught up in family situations. She also has a unique practice that allows for deep coparenting and therapeutic intervention to help improve outcomes for kids and parents going through divorce.
During their conversation, Krista and Dr. Deck explore the important work Dr. Deck is doing in her practice. She shares what her early work for the city of Boston taught her about mental health considerations in court settings, leading her into social work/law integration. You’ll hear the unwillingness professionals often have to work in forensic mental health and the difficulties faced when trying to limit therapeutic options to those covered by health insurance as they require a diagnosis that often is not possible or warranted.. Dr. Deck explains the difference in language attorneys and mental health professionals use and the importance of bridging that gap for families. You’ll hear about therapeutic jurisprudence and reforming the law based on understanding mental health, Dr. Deck’s unique practice of blending law and mental health resources, and the nationally available programs she uses to help with high-conflict co-parenting. Finally, Krista and Dr. Deck discuss building a foundation of respect between co-parents, the nuanced approach Dr. Deck recommends for parent-child contact problems, and the importance of handling conflict in a healthy way for the benefit of children.
Creating a healthy co-parenting dynamic is possible, but it requires work from both parties. Dr. Premela Deck lays out her unique methodology to help parents find common ground for the benefit of their children.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Dr. Premela Deck’s law and social work background and how she ultimately pulled the two disciplines together with her Ph.D. and now with her unique practice with options available across state lines
- The need for mental health considerations in family court, similar to what Dr. Deck saw in her early work condemning homes of hoarders
- Realizing these legal challenges need delicate care that considers the mental health of individuals, leading her into social work/law integration
- The serious challenge of so few mental health professionals going into the area of helping families embroiled in family court conflict
- The limitations of seeking only insurance-covered mental health options in family law dynamics
- Language differences between attorneys and mental health professionals and the need for a bridge between disciplines to help families
- The concept of therapeutic jurisprudence and reforming the law by understanding mental health
- Dr. Deck’s unique practice that blends law and mental health resources, including multi-faceted family therapy, group and private parent coaching, and co-parenting restructuring
- Nationally available programs offered by Dr. Deck to help with high-conflict coparenting
- The importance of a foundation of respect when parents begin this therapeutic work
- Taking a nuanced approach to parent-child contact problems and Dr. Deck’s steps for this process
- Dr. Deck’s model for this type of practice
- The risk to children when parents fight and have poor co-parenting dynamics
- Handling conflict in a healthy manner for the benefit of the children
- Grasping that there is a duality in cases and ensuring goals are working in tandem
- Dr. Deck’s postdoc program with a focus on family law dynamics, which is the only one of its kind in the country
Resources from this Episode
All states have different laws; be sure you are checking out your state laws specifically surrounding divorce. Krista is a licensed attorney in Colorado and Wyoming but is not providing through this podcast legal advice. Please be sure to seek independent legal counsel in your area for your specific situation.
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Family Restructuring Through Systematic Work with Dr. Premela Deck Podcast Transcript
Dr. Premela Deck 00:00
Times that’s a tough sell. And so then I’ll have to say to them, okay, fine, I get that you don’t want to co-parent, but you’re going to actually teach your kids how to deal with conflict here. So this is actually good parenting. One of our favorite sayings is you cannot be a good parent if you’re a lousy co parent. And I truly believe that because the children are made up of both parents usually, or they’ve been raised by both parents, usually, and so they have some behaviors or some tendencies from both parents. And if you’re saying to your child, I hate that parent, I hate that parent, you have kids who are like, Well, is it part of me that’s bad. And so if you can’t demonstrate and you can’t model for them respect for another adult that’s important to your child, that’s pretty lousy parenting.
Intro/Outro 00:41
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast, our host Krista Nash is an attorney, mediator, parenting coordinator and child advocate with a heart to facilitate conversations about how to help children flourish amidst the broken area of family law. As a child advocate in demand for her expertise throughout Colorado and as a speaker on these issues at a national level, Krista is passionate about facilitating and creatively finding solutions to approach family law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember, this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice as always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
Krista Nash 01:30
Today, on the podcast, we welcome Dr. Premala Deck, a Boston Area family law attorney and forensic social worker with a PhD in her field, who is creating innovative leading solutions to integrate Law and Social work to help children and parents navigate conflict in the myths of family law disputes as an attorney, Dr. Deck practices as a family law litigator, mediator, parenting coordinator and guardian ad litemas a mental health professional. Dr. Deck primarily serves as a custody evaluator, parenting coach and therapist for high conflict families, couples or individuals caught up in family law situations beyond that. And very interesting to our discussion on the podcast is that she has built a unique team to provide wrap-around holistic offerings to people, including classes and groups that are available to anyone, not just those in Boston, to help parents and children with co parenting dynamics and conflict. She brings to us her insights based on years of this innovative work and research on issues affecting families real time, during and after family breakdown with divorce, and provides real solutions to help families and kids flourish when these challenges are addressed well.
Welcome today to this episode of the podcast. I am thrilled today to have Premala DecK with us, who lives in Massachusetts and has some incredible things to share with all of us about the way that she has morphed her own career and practice as both a lawyer and a I think doctorate in social work, right? Is that? Right? Yes, PhD in Social Work, also has a Masters in social work in order to really try to help children flourish and help families get through this really broken area in a much better way. So welcome Premela, thanks for doing this with me today. So maybe just start by introducing yourself a little bit. I think you have such an interesting route to where you’ve landed. So give us a little insight. Did you become a lawyer first?
Dr. Premela Deck 03:27
Yeah, no, it’s great. I started a JD, MSW program. So it’s a combined program. There were two separate schools, but they took electives from each other. So rather than five years, it’s three years for law school and two usually for your masters, it was four years. And so I was learning, it felt really interesting. I would go to law school and I was learning the law, and then I would go to my school of social work and learning social work, but there was no bridge between the two, and that’s like a recurring theme for me throughout my career. And so I’ll probably touch upon that as we continue to speak. So I had these two schools and these two disciplines that were learning, but like never the two shall meet. And so it really wasn’t until I started doing internships that I started to think there’s more here. There’s something missing. And then I ultimately ended up going to my PhD. And I did my PhD at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and my PhD was on Law and Social Work collaboration, which was like how I framed it. But ultimately I learned that was forensic mental health, and so court involved mental health with sort of this baseline, is a really cool theory called therapeutic jurisprudence, which is just this interdisciplinary approach to legal issues with the goal of looking at the law and reforming law so that it has a positive impact on people who are in court, and that just feels like it defines who I am. All of my work is court involved, but I come at it with this legal background and this mental health background, and I’m trying to figure out for professionals and for clients and for myself, where do they overlap, and how do I make that a successful experience? For people who are in the court process.
Krista Nash 05:01
As I was preparing for this, I found an old podcast you did with somebody who sounded like she was somebody you did your training under right or supervis. You share the story about when you were a young person working for the city. Because I think sometimes people are going through divorce or family law conflict, and they’re like, Okay, when we’re getting divorced, we go through the court system, and the courts are just how we do it. I think the example you gave about the code violations or whatever it was, I think is super interesting. It might give a little different framework as we start. So share that, if you don’t mind.
Dr. Premela Deck 05:33
Yeah, so I started as a clerk for the city of Springfield in Massachusetts, and one of the jobs was I represented the city while I was a student. So I, like, worked with the attorneys who represented the city, and there were issues that were happening for code violations. And one code violation that came up, not too often, but often enough, were hoarding cases. So those were a problem for the city because it endangers other neighbors, right? So those homes, when they’re cluttered, there’s risk for disease, there’s risk for vermin, there’s house fire risks that can travel to other homes. So the city justifiably had a concern about those homes. So the process typically was to condemn those homes. And I had a very good supervisor, and she was like, okay, my job as the attorney, right? She, I’m just in a legal setting, is to condemn that building. But she was also like, this feels not great, because these people are not doing well, like hoarding is not a natural state for a lot of people. And so in this particular case that I think you’re referencing, we condemned a building for an 89 year old man, and we went back to check, you know, you condemn the building, you seal it off. And he was sleeping in his garage, or like his back porch someplace out there, and we realized that we needed a better process to condemn those buildings, where you still have to protect the other people of the city, but you also have to recognize that law was doing harm to that man. And so what can we do to connect that person to other resources? Now I practice family law, but the same sort of idea applies where sometimes our laws, they make sense, and they’re probably there for good reason, or some of them are there for good reason, but we also have to look at the effect on the overall person.
Krista Nash 07:11
Yeah and I love that, because I think it’s just an interesting example, because you think, Okay, let me think about an 89 year old man hoarding and his life And what got him there, and his mental health, and there’s so many dynamics to that. Does he have a family? Is he all alone? Is he ill? Do you know what’s happening with this guy? And yes, you’ve got to do your job. Your job is to condemn it. Because we can’t have fire risk, we can’t have Berman, we can’t have whatever. But at what cost, at what impact, and what else should we be thinking about? Right? That’s really kind of why I got into this too. Because I’m like, why would you want to do family law? It’s so messed up. It’s so broken. Lawyers all the time. Oh, you were a good law student. You could have, you know, done something else, and you’re doing this messy area of family law, I find the same thing. It’s like, well, there’s this very broken situation going on, and it’s children. I mean, it’s also the failure of adults to flourish, but it’s for me more I’m more motivated by the fact that the children are not flourishing, but humanity is not flourishing when you have this going on in this broken area, and we’ve got these systems where a lot of the players are like, Well, my job is this, yeah, my job is in this box, like, I’m going to go do this deposition in family law, because I’m allowed to, and I’m a lawyer, and I don’t have to think about, well, how that might overflow to the children, or to the dynamics between the parents, or I’m going to run off and litigate this. So I loved that example, because I think it helps you think about it in a way that feels very, very powerful when you think about this old man, and you know his situation, right?
Dr. Premela Deck 08:36
And I also think one of the reasons why we get into these boxes is because we feel like there’s an end goal that has to be achieved, and our job is to get to the end. So for that case, the job is to, like, condemn the building or make it safe. And when you think about it that way, it’s easy to almost bulldoze through all of these like checkpoints along the way. And the same thing with family law. So if people are thinking, okay, the job is to get these people divorced. We may move too quickly. We may, you know, get them through depositions too quickly. We may have temporary motion hearings that are, you know, too fast. I have people who come to me and the first work that they want to do in sort of my therapeutic lens is, how do we tell the children? And if you’re only looking at it from a legal lens, you might not even think about that step. So if we instead consider this as like a process. So the process is, how do we make this 89 year old man safe in his house, rather than, how do we condemn this building? Similarly, how do we help this family restructure, rather than, how do we divorce this family? Just by kind of shifting what the goal is, we can implement sort of checkpoints that help just the well being.
Krista Nash 09:44
Yeah and it can really help with the flourishing. Then there’s a lot of research out there. Now, I had Michael Saini on my podcast talking about the co-parenting dynamics, and yes, you know the longitudinal studies that people are doing now about how this impacts kids. And I just want to beg people when I’m in these cases. You know, please go, we have to address this more carefully, more thoughtfully. If you don’t put the right inputs in, we’re not likely to have the right outputs, right so maybe that bridges us over. I mean, you must have been a real trendsetter, not even a trendsetter. I mean, you might be one of the only ones doing this now, right? I mean, you and Dr. Sebastian, who’s the one who introduced me to you, also kind of bridging that, you know, in a different way, but she’s doing the, you know, substance use and psychology and mental health and law. So I think it’s so interesting to see. There’s probably not very many of you out there doing that. Are there? Do you know of many?
Dr. Premela Deck 10:34
I know one other group of mine, so I’m also a group practice, which is cool. So we have a forensic Mental Health Group. I know one other in Massachusetts. And other than that, it’s usually individual practitioners. Many of them are, I think that’s a conversation in and of itself. Many of them are much older. So even just thinking about, how do people come to this field, I think they either come because they are in their studies, training for this field, or they’ve been practitioners for like long enough that they suddenly have the like chutzpah to be able to say, like, all right, I’m going to go into the court setting, because for most people, particularly those who haven’t trained for this, engaging with attorneys, engaging with judges in the court system, is scary. So either you’ve been educated to do so, or you’ve been seasoned enough and exposed to it enough that now you’ve kind of making that career for you. So there’s a real gap for, like, middle career people who are doing this work.
Krista Nash 11:26
Yeah, I hear it all the time, you know, we tend to call it in Colorado, we’re not allowed to call it this anymore. But this reunification therapy idea, you know, to me, it’s just complex family system type therapy, right? Is the way I approach it. It’s like, we don’t have to call it reunification. Doesn’t have to be that kind of term. And there’s always something going on with everybody in the family in a way that we don’t need to call it just reunifying. It’s such a myopic way to look at it that it’s unifying two people. There’s usually so much more going on, but there’s so many people where therapists will say, I don’t do that. I won’t touch that. I’m not going to put myself in the middle of a high conflict divorce, because I don’t want to be grieved. And, you know, I don’t know how it is for you, but for us in Colorado, the therapist, it’s very difficult for them to go through this complaint process. You know, they’re not attorneys, so they’re afraid of it, right? I’m a little less concerned about my own somebody grieving me, because I’m an attorney, and because attorney regulation, counsel handles it differently than the therapeutic I think there’s sort of a presumption in the therapeutic community that there’s been something wrong. I don’t know. Tell me how that works, the grievance process, and what you’ve observed of people being hesitant to even go into this.
Dr. Premela Deck 12:31
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is not your normative type of therapy. It’s just not it’s not covered by insurance. So that, in and of itself, presents a barrier for people getting this type of treatment, and the reason why it’s not covered by insurance is because there’s no diagnosis. I mean, maybe you could say it’s adjustment disorder, but technically, adjustment disorder is only for a specific period of time, so you have people who have access to care issues because unless they can private pay or they find some slow, sort of sliding fee, that’s a problem. I just don’t think this is you don’t go to school and learn, okay. How are you going to help families readjusted? There’s just not a class on that. The other thing that really happens is attorneys speak a different language and truly like it’s Latin sometimes, right? Truly, yeah. So the reason why forensic mental health, in my opinion, is so fascinating is because you’re practicing your mental health degree in somebody else’s literal court, you’re playing in somebody else’s other arena. I mean, you do have to know mental health rules and regulations, whatever your profession is, whether it’s social work or psychology or what have you, but you also have to know the court’s rules, which are a whole other like, you need to know what is emotion, what is a judgment? How do you file a complaint, like all of those things? So you have to learn a whole other language and a whole other process, and that process is not taught in school, right? I did not go to the School of Social Work to learn about law. So unless they take those mental health professionals take on the onus of educating themselves about a whole other career, it’s a mighty ask for those people.
Krista Nash 14:01
So tell me about your own group practice that you have. I mean, it seems like you probably came out of that PhD program, worked for a while for others or something, and then realized there’s this demonstrable need for something else. Like tell me about that process of how you opened your own group and how you’re building that kind of resource in Massachusetts.
Dr. Premela Deck 14:20
Yeah. So I graduated with my PhD in North Carolina, and then I moved up to Massachusetts, which is where I’m from. And when I was in college, I clerked for a judge that was local. And so I emailed that judge, and I was like, What in the world do people do with the law degree and a mental health degree? She wrote back to me, and she said, I need you to come see this program. And so at William James College, which is in Massachusetts, they had a forensic program, and so they hired postdocs. It was two or three every year, and they learned how to write child custody evaluations under the tutelage of somebody who was more senior, and that was Robin Deutsch, and Christy H,arms Judge Christy Harms, so I joined that program, and it was great child custody. Evaluations, I learned a ton. I was also supervised by Dr. Jessica Greenwald O’Brien. I really loved that work, but again, that was one small portion of, like, the whole spectrum of forensic mental health services that were available. And child custody evaluations have a purpose, but often, at least in Massachusetts, they end with, you know, I recommend this family get therapy, or I recommend a parenting coordinator get involved. So then I realized, all right, well, there are three people in Massachusetts that do that work, so we have a miss here. So I started doing that work. I started learning how to do I also don’t call it reunification therapy. I fondly call it miffed M, F, T, and it stands for Multifaceted Family Therapy, and the idea being all of those people are involved, including professionals. So I started studying on how to do those family therapy cases, how to be a good parent coordinator. And then my solo practice just boomed because I was able to speak those two languages, the legal language and the mental health language, and to really bridge a gap between people who were grieving and some and that is what it is. There’s often a grief process, yes, but sometimes the conflict plays out because there’s, like an underlying mental health component that has to be addressed before we can do that legal work. So my practice started booming. I made my first hire, and then it kind of snowballed. I was, in all honesty, my business was a little bit reactive rather than intentional. It sort of developed in a more organic way. And I started hiring, and I hired some really incredible people, and really encouraged them to show me where they felt like there were needs. And then from that, new programs were starting to develop. So we were learning that before people could even do the parent coordination work or family therapy work, there was almost pre work that was needed. And so we developed, like the respect program, which is, how do you guys, just mean, regulate your emotions so that you can look at your co parent who you hate right now? And I get it, yeah. So like giving them their baseline skills. And so these programs just sort of developed organically, as we saw these people needing different services.
Krista Nash 17:06
Are you only working in Massachusetts right now? Or do you do some of your services cross state lines?
Dr. Premela Deck 17:12
Yeah so we have a lot of services that cross state lines. So family therapy can because we’re only licensed in Massachusetts, but a lot of family therapy issues can actually be addressed with some of our coaching programs. So we have a high-conflict parenting class that we run, and that’s run virtually, and that class is really incredible, where we have four to five co parenting pairs that take that class together, it’s two hours once a week, and they join with other co parenting pairs. And it’s really impactful to have like one mom say to another mom, I hear ya, but cut it out. And like you can hear that from a professional. You can hear it from your co parent, but when another parent in very similar circumstances to you, can kind of shake you a little bit. So we have that program. We have people from other states who participate in that program. We have some coaching programs, just some one on one.
Krista Nash 18:02
Going back before you leave, the thing about the co-parenting pair group. Tell me a little more about how that works, just because people might be interested in that. Is it over a month or two, or is it a few sessions? And do you pull them out and, you know, do you do different groupings where they’re not always all together in the same space?
Dr. Premela Deck 18:16
Yeah, no, that’s great. So it’s two hours for nine weeks, and they’re usually consecutive weeks. So if there’s like a holiday that we obviously skip, there’s about 20 minutes of homework each time. And the homework, it’s like real reflective questions, what are you doing to contribute to the problem? Or what would your co-parents say that you’re doing? How can you phrase an issue in a way that’s non blaming? But you do want to bring it up, so just trying to give them some of those skills, we do also have an optional add on where they can do private coaching. So really, the class is more it’s a class. It’s curriculum based. So we’re talking to them about skills, we’re talking to them about conflict resolution, but then we have an optional add on where they can work one on one with the coach during those nine weeks to actually solve some of their problems. So for example, they’ll learn all right, here’s how you bring up a problem statement to your co parent. Now, if you want to have your private session, why don’t we mediate that issue with you? Why don’t we talk through it with you, when we do that at a reduced cost? So a lot of people are finding that it’s a great way of jump starting a communication protocol. We call this class intensive CORE. And CORE stands for Co-Parenting Restructuring. So we’re trying to signal to them. You’re restructuring how you communicate with each other. You’re restructuring your family. You’re still going to be a family. But let us help you develop new systems.
Krista Nash 19:37
Do you have other offerings for the kids?
Dr. Premela Deck 19:41
The kids are hard because they have to be in Massachusetts, because usually we’re treating them. We’ve had a couple of cool groups. We have a split program where the kids just come and do like so we’ve done collages where they just talk about their families. We do child therapy. There’s no group work really like that for the children.
Krista Nash 19:58
Yeah, and when you say,split. That’s just what you call it. You’re not referring to like the Split documentaries. No, no. Do you know about those? No, you might like them in your program. I really should have on the show, there’s a documentarian who created a film called Split, and then there’s a Split Two. It was following around kids of divorce and in their own voices, talking about how hard this is and what it looks like foundations in it and things like that. And then the Split Two, I think, was 10 years later, where they were able to reflect on those same kids and what those kids had gone through. So you might look into that. Your people might find that great. Yeah, we in our judicial and attorney conferences, sometimes, I mean to me, it often feels like lip service, honestly, because when you get these people out of a room watching a Split film, they still act like the toxic attorneys often that they were before they watch the film. So I just want to go watch this. But sometimes don’t just even order people to go watch that film and bring back the certificate, you know, some kind of affidavit that they actually did watch it. And so it really is interesting. You might be able to use it. I think you can buy it for programs within and parents can certainly go purchase it and watch it. And something that helps the kids even, because it’s like the kids will say, Yeah, I have to take a shower at dad’s house, but I take a bath at mom’s house. You know, I’m not allowed to do X, Y and Z, you know, it’s about the jet lag, really, between families and the going back and forth. And, yes, just what they experience. And so it’s got this little innocence of when they’re younger, and then 10 years later, of, you know, yeah, it got better. It didn’t get better. It got worse, you know, whatever. So just kids voices. So I think it’s interesting, too, that you kind of came from a similar place where, I mean, when I see a lot of people who are passionate about this area now and trying to help kids and families flourish, there is this tendency where people have come out of this typical approach of the custody evaluations, right? Like I talked to Matthew Sullivan about how he stopped doing custody evaluations because it was not feeding him. And I asked him a question, you mean not feeding your soul, right? Not feeding your not actually, like not paying the bills, because you can make a lot of money doing them, right? And he said, Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. It wasn’t, you know, I found that they’re just at the end, at their core, they’re adversarial, right, right? Because people prep for them. I mean, there’s entire I was looking at somebody, you also need to introduce me to the Diffuse Divorce people. Yeah, I was looking at that.
Dr. Premela Deck 22:24
I would love to meet them, and maybe, yeah, that’s Dr Ben Garber. I’m happy to connect you.
Krista Nash 22:27
Yeah, I was thinking, Okay, this looks really interesting. But there, they’re like, how to prep for our parenting plan evaluation. Or, you know, custody evaluation is one of the things, because that’s one of the things that we all have to do. Is, because it’s in Colorado, it is the number one, at least, isn’t that the most effective, but it’s the number one most available way to go try to get eyes on kids in these cases right? Ee have a couple different levels. We’ve got the higher level that are, you know, take over a year, take nine months, and our psych evals and all the things. And then we’ve got the lower level that still is like, four months, five months, six months, and, you know, but is done by somebody that’s supposed to be a little bit more efficient. But you know, as attorneys, we prep our clients for that. You know, we’re like, get your evidence ready, get your videos ready, get your audios ready, you know, write your narrative. Prep for the interviews, prep for the home visits. Make sure you’re ready to say the things that are bad about the other parent, right? And inherently gonna then result in this report where, you know, I used to do those evaluations myself, and I would sit there, and at the end, I’m like, here’s my recommendations. I’ve given it my best shot. Goodbye. Don’t contact me. Literally, in my email, sending it to them, I’m done. Do not contact me. I can’t be helpful to you unless you need me to testify. Whereas this is why I’m so passionate about the best interest role, it’s so much better. I can bring I can sit with a person. I can say, let’s have a conversation. Let’s talk about how you love your child. Let’s get you the right therapy, and it’s so much less adversarial. So did you have that kind of similar experience? Like, okay, I’m doing this thing with the forensic program to write these child custody evals. And then what? Yeah, so why you started?
Dr. Premela Deck 24:00
Yeah, there’s two things I’d like to comment on. So the first was this Diffuse Divorce thing. And so Dr. Garber, he started this Diffuse Divorce it’s not the video that you’re talking about, the prepping for the custody evaluation process. It’s not how to prep for the custody evaluation process. He’s commenting on howt’s fascinating that we’re doing these child custody evaluations, we’re looking at these people for like a time snap in their life where it is super stressful, high anxiety. They have no idea what this process is. And are we expecting them to show up as their authentic selves? Is it actually fair to say this is who they are? And so his program, which I find pretty interesting, is to not prep them by saying these are the things you need, but instead prep them by saying, This is what a custody valuation is. So they’re hoping to bring down their anxiety so that they can be a little bit more true to themselves. It’s fascinating.
Krista Nash 24:55
Well, that’s really interesting too, in that it really does then. Thank you. First off, clarifying that, because that’s super important. And I didn’t even watch it. I just saw it was on there, so I appreciate it. It’s interesting clarifying that I want to go see it, but I think that it’s just proves the point, though, again, that the attorneys in these cases are teeing it up in this very stressful way. I don’t know any attorney who doesn’t who’s like, oh, you know, go look at Diffuse Divorce and realize how we need to take this down so you can be your most authentic self. I’ve never the attorney say that, but you’re right. So it’s like, we’re ready. We’re getting this person we gotta, you know, and then they go and they fight them, like, now we gotta get a work product review, because they’re wrong. And now we need to get secondary, you know, it’s all just like warfare, yeah? So I appreciate that they’re trying to at least take our solution we have and make it be more effective?
Dr. Premela Deck 25:42
It’s very interesting. And then I think to your, maybe your larger question, which was, Do I still do this work? I do think that there is a time and a place for child custody evaluations. I think they’re overused. And so what I’m using more is a consultant, and I’ll have attorneys that will call me and they’ll say, look at we have this problem. Will you come on, and it’s sort of like a child custody neutral. I talk to the attorneys, I talk to the parties, I may talk to the kids, I’ll talk to. I do what I would do in a child custody evaluation, but it’s slightly more interactive, and then I’m making sort of interim recommendations as they go. It’s more collaborative, it’s way less adversarial. It’s not reasonable to expect that they won’t have a difference of opinion, so they need to have somebody neutral to kind of help them solve those problems. That’s been very effective. It’s cost efficient because it’s just, I just bill at my hourly rate.
Krista Nash 26:34
Are you coming in as a mental health I mean, I know you’re both, but are you getting appointed by the court, or is this more kind of an ad hoc thing…
Dr. Premela Deck 26:41
They’re more of an ad hoc thing. In Massachusetts, we have something called Collaborative Law. Okay, so the idea is that, for example, if you were divorcing and you needed somebody, you might hire a financial accountant that you both agree with, who’s going to look at your stuff and offer some options very similar to that. So I get hired jointly by the parties, they’re saying, Hey, we’re stuck on this issue. Can you give us some options? And I’ll come and very rarely is there a case where there’s one answer, it just is always there. And so I can say, here are five or six options that may work for you and, more importantly, for your child. And if I can sit at the table with them and with the attorneys, it’s really common that we’ll take, you know, a couple from option five and a couple from option two and somehow cultivate something that keeps them out of court, and then I think what’s more important is then they’ve developed some respect in the process and some trust in me. So that’s six months down the line, or five years down the line, when we’re choosing colleges, they now have somebody else that they can come do that work with. And so we’re laying the foundation for these families to do this in a different way that’s not adversarial, despite the fact that they are at odds with each other.
Krista Nash 27:53
I find that really interesting, because what you’re talking about, though it’s structured differently. I mean, for us, Collaborative Law is not as an entity where I have a whole if people want to go back and listen to it, I have a podcast episode with Terry Harrington, who’s our Collaborative Law czaro, you know, it really has not taken off in Colorado. Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s like a term of art. You know, it’s where you get two attorneys and nobody’s going to go off the court and all these different things. I can see how it would work in there. Do you ever get hired in that way, though, when it isn’t a collaborative law case, but maybe it’s just two ways.
Dr. Premela Deck 28:26
It’s very rarely in the collaborative typically, people who are doing the collaborative world, they’re committing not to be adversarial. Yeah, yeah. So I’m just kind of drawing the parallel that usually in those worlds, they may hire a financial neutral. So here, all of my cases have two lawyers. They’re adversarial. They’re usually actively litigating, and the attorneys are good attorneys, and they’re saying, this is your family, and you guys are going to have to be at graduations together, at a wedding together. I get it, is there a way that we might be able to do this more cost-effective, quickly and in a way that’s less harmful?
Krista Nash 28:59
What I find interesting also about what you’re saying is that. So I started dabbling, doing the custody evaluations, being a Child Family Investigator in Colorado, because really the child legal representative, which is like our guardian ad litem for the domestic courts, our best interest attorney, was not really off the ground. People were not doing it that much. So it took a couple years for me to pivot into that and find it to be more effective. But lately, I’m getting so many families who they’re so hungry for solutions, like the way you’re talking about, you know, they’re like, Oh, we wish you some cases have gone on for years, for example, or and they’ll say to me, Oh, we wish we had brought you on years prior. We avoided so much pain, and, you know, conflict. And can we keep you on right? So, like they’ll keep me on transitioning into a parenting coordinator role, right? Because I can just very swiftly then, because I know them, I’ve seen their children, I can talk to their kids. There’s ways to just give them that, like little extra cushion of support that keeps them out of court, because they are going to continue to have little. Flare ups. It sounds like you do that as well, right? Yeah, people do that work too.,
Dr. Premela Deck 30:04
Yeah, what you were saying kind of reminded me of we in that high conflict parenting class with the couples. I had a couple once who had been actively litigating, truly, for like, 15 years, yeah, and in that class, and they had another couple who had a one year old, and this co parenting pair said that co parenting pair. We have been doing this for 15 years. We have spent $300,000 go our route, and how incredibly impactful that was to have another couple be like we have screwed up our kids. We have wasted our finances. And so if they are able to get in touch with a you or somebody else who’s able to say, let me just show you that there could be another way to do this. I’m not naive. There are times where we have to litigate, and even in my family therapy, cases where I’m working really hard to help repair relationships, there are times where I have to pause the therapy to say, you actually have to litigate that issue, and then come back to me. So there is a time and a place for litigation. I just think it’s overused.
Krista Nash 31:03
Yeah. So I’m sort of thinking also that maybe you can introduce me to some couples that want to have a platform, like 15 year, people who want to talk through, like, give me a couple of your couples from the divorce class, and I’ll have them on the show me, because I’m going those stories. I want people to be able to say, Oh, we wish we could do this differently, you know, I do have some of those, but some people are like, Oh, I’m afraid to talk about that. I don’t want to do that, you know. So I will just put a pin in that. If there’s anybody who think could be willing, I think that’s so important, because if more people could just come on and say, you know, I just had a guy on the show who was one of my former clients, and he’s talking about his own problems with sobriety, and if he hadn’t have done these things, he would have lost his child, and how grateful he is now that he’s on the other side of that, you know, and begging people please get real, you know, don’t keep going down this path. So I think that’s more powerful, even than us talking as professionals, about the stories of, you know, don’t do this and do this instead. So what would have brought people into your class 15 years later, into your group?
Dr. Premela Deck 32:04
Court order.So oftentimes judges are like, I’m seeing you every three months. Yeah, this is insane. And we actually had judges who would say, who would put gatekeeping orders, I refuse to see you absent-emergency until you complete that class.
Krista Nash 32:16
Wow, that’s great. Well, you need to span beyond Massachusetts, that’s for sure. So, because I can see lots of roles for this. So let’s talk for a minute. You’ve got your eyes on people so well, let’s talk a little about, you know, you called it the what is it? M, I, F, F, MIFF,. Because one of the really common problems, obviously, is this parent child contact problem, right? Like, give some insight into what you’re seeing in that a lot of parents come in and they think it’s one parent’s problem with their child, and that’s it, and that’s why it’s like this whole dynamic of whether it’s alienation or whether reunification therapy is appropriate. Sometimes we’ve got these claims of domestic violence, and you’ve got a child that is just like, absolutely refusing, and that kid sometimes they’re getting younger and younger these days, right? It’s not just the teenagers. What do you do when you get a situation like that? And what have you seen? I know it’s such a low level question to say, what works, but just generally…
Dr. Premela Deck 33:12
Yeah. So I think we take a very unique approach to these cases, and part of that is because of my dual background, so Multifaceted Family Therapy (MFFT). So we do MFFT, what we do is, for every MFFT case, we have two clinicians on them, and the first clinician is me. I’m the case coordinator, and the second is the family therapist. And the reason why we do that is because we’re recognizing that these are therapeutic problems, family systems issues, but again, they’re in a court setting, and it is very common that we have those two roles, those two paths, and they’re not going in the same direction. So my job as the case coordinator is to be able to speak both of those languages, so I will talk with the attorneys. If there’s a PC in place, maybe the judge to make sure that the legal goals are in congruence with the therapeutic goals. Because sometimes the family gets sent to us, it’s actually very common where one parent will say this is abuse, and another parent will say this is parental alienation. Well, I’m not here as a family therapist. If you’re coming to me to fix this problem, it’s not my job to determine what’s in the best interest of the children. So that’s actually an example where I would say that’s where the court needs to get involved first. I need to know what my goals are, because if I have one parent that’s saying this is abuse, they’re not going to be able to help me through this process. And there are times where it could be abuse and reunification is not appropriate. So that’s sort of my first screening process. So we heavily screen these cases. That includes an hour long interview with each parent, and then interviews with the attorneys. I meet with them jointly. I want to know, are these attorneys gonna be part of the problem or part of the solution? So there’s a way to advocate for your client when you represent the favorite parent, when you represent the non-favorite parent, while also advocating for sort of like, the healing of the family. So are you able to do that, or are you really just trying to litigate in another forum with me, kind of watching, so we’re screening those cases.
Krista Nash 35:12
Pause and ask:do you reject those cases if they increase? Because it’s really interesting, because I’ve started doing that, this is exactly what I was telling we were prepping. I’m like, I just got pointed on a case, and I’m very skeptical, based on what I’ve seen in the record. It’s such a damaged situation they’ve been litigating for years. Doesn’t look like the attorneys are particularly prone to healing solutions. And I just said to them, look like the parents are desperate for help. But every red flag of the adversarial nature of this is out. And I’m like, I’m just tired guys, like, you’re going to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars. You are looking for another forum to try to litigate this, and if you don’t want, like, I’m not doing it without the help of the mental health professional and this kind of approach. So it’s interesting, this is your approach, because I’m actually speaking at some of these national conferences upcoming with the psychologist and a judge who the three of us are. The title of it basically is like this triad that works for these cases, is the child legal representative, best interest attorney, the great mental health team or person, and the and a great judicial officer. And so in a weird way, we’re doing exactly what you’re saying, because I am taking that case point where I’m talking to the attorneys. I’m saying, we have to litigate this. I’m running something by the judge and saying, it sounds like you probably don’t wear your lawyer hat officially, you’re not like entering the case.
Dr. Premela Deck 36:32
I’m not entering the case. But what I am doing is there is probably a litigation point so often when I’m screening these cases, I can get them to agree to a couple initial goals. So for example, if a child has never, ever seen a parent, I can often get, like, in like two years, or like, it has no contact with the parent, I usually can get the parties all to agree to some initial step, including the attorneys. And that might be okay. Let’s establish a weekly phone call. Can we all agree that there’s going to be a weekly 15 minute phone call? And so then I will do these little benchmark check-ins. So we’ll say that’s our three month goal, and then in three months, I’m going to meet with the attorneys again, and that’s this accountability factor. I’m going to talk to the attorneys. What’s going on? Did that goal get reached? Why did it not get reached? Now that keeps happening, so we do these little three month breadcrumb goals. And pretty often we get to a point where either they’re done, like the parties are okay, so maybe a parent says, You know what, I’m actually okay with having a weekly dinner and, you know, one overnight a month, I’m okay we don’t eat this anymore. Or we get to a point where the other parent says, I’m not willing to do this further. This is where we’re stopping, and then they might have to litigate that. But sometimes people get very black and white. I’m either doing this or I’m not, but you sometimes can help the attorneys and the clients to create some progress here. And at some point I may have to tap out, or like, hold a band aid until a judicial officer comes in and says, This is the next step, but really important to this process is, as the therapist, you cannot be the decision maker, because that puts you in a really bad spot. And attorneys miss this. Sometimes they’ll say, you know, the child therapist will determine the contact, or the family therapist will determine the contact. And they can’t do that, because then they lose the buy-in of either the child or one of the parents. So you need that decision maker. So I’m not always screening out the cases when they’re adversarial. I am screening up the cases when we can’t agree on an initial goal. And I also would define one of the big issues here is, if you were to say to me, what’s your success rate? And that matters. So often, these cases come to me and they have completely opposite goals. One may be, I want 50/50, custody, and one’s like, I want, you know, two hours of supervised parenting time. Completely opposite goals to me. Success may not be that either win. Success may be that we land somewhere, that both of them say, good enough. And that’s success, rig