Restructured a 43-Year Marriage Through Creative Mediation and Life Design

Susan Jeffers (00:00) What really attracted us to Theresa was the fact that she is thinking in a mediation standpoint as opposed to a divorce standpoint or a, "Oh, you've got to stay together at all costs." She really laid out a whole range of options from the status quo, which neither of us wanted to do - my husband or I - all the way to divorce, but also pointed out there's a lot of things we could do within our relationship to try to make things better and restructure and think creatively again. And so she really brings so many different tools to the process. Hi, I'm Susan Jeffers. I live in Evanston, Illinois, and I am currently retired; very happily. About three years my husband and I engaged Theresa to help us work on our relationship. Like many people who had been married for more than 40 years, things had gotten... not great at all. We weren't communicating, were having hard time thinking of things to talk about other than sort of the day to day. There was certainly no spark, our retirement, I said, "You know, I'm not gonna live this way. I only have X amount of years left. I want to be happier. We need to do something about this." Theresa, you know, is a great mediator and has great facility in helping us think of things differently. But she also recognizes that this is not just an intellectual exercise. It's really, really emotional. We're dealing with really difficult issues, having hard conversations. And she kept the environment so that it was always very respectful, and open, and ⁓ I was just really impressed with that. I had talked to divorce lawyers in the past, many years ago. And yeah, they just jumped to the solution of, "Ok, let's talk about property. Let's talk about kids - all that." She didn't. she wanted to say, "What can we do better?" And in our case, the final result was that we decided to stay together, but on very different terms than what we had come in with. So that was terrific. We'd been married 43 years, and we had grown up together. We were married when we were very young and got lucky that we lasted as long as we did. But my husband had severe health problems, and particularly the past 10 or 20 years, health problems had just been escalating and escalating. I was happy to you know, be the supporter and the caregiver, and do all of that. But at a certain point I... had it. I didn't feel appreciated. I didn't feel that he even understood what the heck I was doing behind the scenes to try to make his life easier so he didn't have to worry. It had been building up for so long, it was really good to finally be able to talk about that in respectful way where we knew that we weren't hurt each other, we were just trying to understand each other. And I really give Theresa a lot of credit for creating that sort of environment. I absolutely would recommend Theresa for anybody who's in the middle of a relationship that's having problems. But I tell you what, it's not just when you're having I really wish we had gone to her, you know, 10 - 15 years ago, and could have made things better for both of us that period of time as opposed to just sort of fretting. really is able to help... you think about your life differently, to empower you, to control your life. And in my case, sadly, my husband died not too long continue to work with Theresa because she's helping me think about this new life. And so she's been really helpful just in thinking about how to design my life so that I can be happy and fulfilled, and really focused on the things that are important to me. So yeah, I would definitely recommend to Theresa, she's just been a great asset and a great help to us.