I am delighted to be featured in the November edition of the Bedfordshire Oracle. As a local business owner and someone who has dedicated my professional career to helping couples going through the trauma of divorce and separation working in the Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire area for the last 20 years it is great to be featured locally for my work.
I am privileged to be able to do the work I do and hugely grateful for the support of my local clients and colleagues.
Here is the article:
The collaborative approach to divorce
According to recent divorce statistics, 42% of marriages in England and Wales end in divorce. Using lawyers and going through the courts to get divorced are both financially and emotionally costly. There is another way.
My name is Clare Kitteridge and I run a mediation practice which supports couples gently through separation and divorce, offering the opportunity to talk together with an impartial professional and move forward in a calm, creative, constructive and cost effective way.
I used to work as a family lawyer and director of a local law firm, but I reached a stage in my career where I really wasn’t enjoying the work I was doing. I had been on a typical hamster wheel since I began practising law in 1999 of non-stop work and long hours. I realised that I needed to make changes as my love of an area of law I was so passionate about was fading.
The family justice system itself had also changed during those years and I was finding that clients were experiencing delays and outcomes could not be predicted, not to mention the emotional damage caused by the legal process. I chose to focus my expertise in mediation, a way of resolving family separation where clients are in control of the outcome and wish to find a way out of conflict.
I always had a vision from early on in my career. That vision was to create a bespoke, holistic, truly emotionally intelligent and personalised service where like-minded clients could come to work through the issues they faced and put their children at the heart of everything. So this vision came about in 2018 when I set up Clare Madeline Mediation, a professional yet personalised mediation service demonstrating that there is a better and more civilised way to divorce which aims to minimise the emotional damage.
One of the most important parts of my practice is meeting children separate to their parents to explore their wishes and feelings so that they too have a safe space to talk about how they are finding things. It is tough when I meet children and hear about how their parents conflict is impacting them. Like us, children need time to adjust and to be listened to and this is never more important than when the family is going through a divorce process.
I get such a lot from seeing the journey clients go on when they realise that there is a future, however difficult it is to contemplate at the time. Our society needs to embrace alternative, emotionally healthier ways to divorce and separate, really putting children at the heart. And the family law profession needs to move away from the old traditional ways of working which do not best serve clients. I am determined through my work to show that, despite the trauma of family separation which impacts all the family, there is a better way.
If you are looking for a long lasting solution and a cost effective separation, please do get in touch with me.
Clare
