You recently separated from your spouse, and you had to move out to stay in a hotel. Now you’re trying to regroup and figure out what to do. Should you get a divorce? Should you be researching attorneys? How are you going to protect your kids? Can your relationship be salvaged?
These questions and dozens more like them have been keeping you up at night and causing you no small amount of agitation and sadness. In today’s post and three to follow, we will help you understand how to deal with this “Hotel California” situation.
While the song lyrics glumly announce: “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” the reality is that your situation is going to get better. You will be able to move out of the hotel and either return to your home or come up with an effective, alternative living situation.
Here’s a good first step that will help you gain some control and sense of perspective. If you have your computer with you, open up a Word document and start to type out exactly what happened within the last few hours or days that led to your moving out. You don’t have to be disclosing, emotionally. Focus on precisely what was said, who did what, and when and how you finally left. The more information you can pour onto the page, the better. This “information dump” can help you strategize and make more clearheaded decisions later.
Of course, there is a caveat: you need to protect the information. If you write bad things about your spouse in a moment of heated anger, and your spouse later somehow reads this document, he or she could be even more furious.
We will talk more about what to do next in subsequent posts. For now, if you need immediate assistance with a Orange County, California divorce case, call the team at Dinnebier & Demmerle to arrange a consultation.