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"It seems to me that emotional resolution is just as important, if not more, than dispute resolution, for it is unresolved emotions that can seethe and fester and impact negatively on adults and children alike, sometimes for many years," says Anna Byas, who is finishing a doctoral thesis on post-separation parenting through Flinders University in South Australia. "Just because conflicted parents do not surface in the family law system, it doesn't mean that they are separating well, or that practices borne of unresolved angst or hostility are not affecting their children," she says. On the contrary, ideological principles that exhort parents to "put aside hurt and blame" are a prescription for failure or very limited success, she believes. "Legal rules and guidelines seem to have little power over how well or how quickly people adjust emotionally to separation, although sadly, what family law does seem to offer is tools and strategies for the playing out of poor emotional adjustment."

Her analysis, based on long interviews with 32 separated people, shows that the emotional pathways people find through the separation terrain – my "dark place" – depend on a number of factors:

• Who declares the end of the relationship.



• How well they process the separation and how much help they get with that.



• How persistent their strong emotions are.



• How well they are able to draw up new emotional boundaries.



• Whether their new situation is positive or negative.



• Whether they can contain their jealousy of children and of new lovers.



• What they feel their place is in family life after separation.

Co-parenting, the most difficult of options for estranged parents but the best option for children in almost all instances, is most successful when ex spouses can separate marriage issues from parental ones. Reaching this level of emotional detachment takes time, sometimes years.

Divorce research consistently shows that the main reason why marriages fail is because of communication problems (ahead of incompatibility and infidelity). If ever there was a need for good communication skills, it's when you're co-ordinating parenting from two locations. Forget the different sets of values. Just getting to netball training or a parent-teacher interview can be fraught, never mind sorting out who pays for what. Still, some people do it, and do it well. Many more, in fact, than we hear about.

Sean and his ex-wife Theresa, who broke up three years ago, share the care of their children, aged 10 and 8. These days, they're on such good terms that he has a key to her house (which was once their house) at Bowral in the Southern Highlands of NSW and lets himself in to see the children several times a week. At the end of last year, Sean was doing a massage course, and because Theresa had a sore back, he gave her a massage once a week. They've come a long way since the screaming matches that punctuated the last six months of their marriage.

Just that week, she'd filled out the divorce papers. "I sobbed and sobbed ... it was a sadness that something I felt was forever ..." She stops. Sean has told me, and Theresa confirms, that the trigger for their break-up was an affair he'd had when she was three months' pregnant with their first child. Although their relationship was deeply damaged by the affair, they'd gone on to have a second child. ("You do things at the time thinking that it's going to work out," he says.) They went to counselling, both after the affair and when they could see the writing on the wall four years ago. "I would have preferred to stay together, but you get to the point where it is just wishful thinking, and there is no point in pushing it uphill anymore," he says. It wasn't a jolly old separation. There was pain and a sense of betrayal, Theresa says. Sean has since got back together with the woman involved in that long-ago affair, and accepting her involvement with the children is difficult. "But I'm trying to rise above it," says Theresa.

They both say they would happily shake hands, wish each other well and never see each other again. "But we can't, so the next best thing is to work at getting on well," Theresa says.

Neither of them knew much about the process of separation and divorce. Both went to see lawyers separately, on the advice of their counsellor. Both told me the same story. In Theresa's words: "We both came back from the lawyers, and said it was unbelievable. I just found the process really abhorrent. I'm not some bloody saint, but I didn't want to take Sean for everything he had. If I have a roof over my head and food for the children, it's all I want. Life is really short ... We just want to raise two happy, well-adjusted, secure kids. That's my number-one priority, and Sean's."

Sean moved out. "I basically decided that it wasn't worth fighting over property, that it was better if she kept the house and I started again. The money that's deducted from my salary by the child support agency pays the mortgage. It's still in joint names. We have this arrangement that when the kids have finished primary school we'll sell the house and divide it up then." He rents a cheap house beneath a television transmitter, half an hour from Bowral. He says it has the best view in Australia. "You still do have residual resentments, but you're not adding to them," he says of the path they've chosen.

If something feels different about this couple, there's one piece of information you should know. Sean was ordained as a Buddhist monk at 19, and lived for four years in a Thai monastery. It may be drawing too long a bow, but I reckon you need some extra assistance – maybe not God, but someone godly, or spiritually inclined – to find your way to such an ending from such a beginning in the prevailing climate.

This is not to say that all lawyers are delinquent, as Bob is inclined to describe them. It is simply to acknowledge that the legal system is adversarial, and that lawyers are bound to maximise their client's advantage. "It's a fallacy to think that the adversarial process starts in court," Green says. "It starts so much before."

Bruce, a former teacher and commercial pilot, has been divorced twice and seen more of the inside of lawyers' offices than he cares to remember. He's sitting in the kitchen of the outer-suburban home he shares with his third wife and her child. "They set you up for this huge fight, and then they expect you to sit down and talk about shared parenting," he says. Absent from his life in a practical sense are his two daughters, one from each of his previous marriages. His first daughter, now a mother herself, grew up largely without him, but that was circumstantial more than the result of legal conflict. His second daughter, aged nine, lives with her mother in another city and visits him every six weeks. Reaching that point involved two years of legal battle. "Your hands are tied to a large extent," he says. "Once the legal fight starts, you can't elect not to play the game. If you don't go to court, you lose the game." He's convinced that mediation should be mandated.

Four out of five people who separate seek legal advice. While the principles of family law are that children's interests and well-being come first, lawyers aren't trained to resolve the complex emotional issues that cloud parents' minds and prevent them from doing that. Lawyers are trained to disengage people from their emotions, and get them to see reason.

Even an emotionally literate family lawyer like Robyn Sexton, who is committed to keeping the process civil and open, is up against it. She has dealt with some very dysfunctional people, as have all family lawyers. "I tend to look at the end point and say, where do you want to be. But a lot of people can't see it at all. It's just a fog to them, and I see it as my job to help them cut through it."

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