Sometimes, divorce happens to the marriages most earnestly started. People change, whether over the span of months, a few years or even a lot of years, and things occur which can severely impact a relationship.
Sometimes, the trigger for a divorce can be as simple as interests and goals diverging to the point of irrevocable emotional distance. While sad, those broken unions are the simplest to reckon with, inasmuch as the parties emerge from the proceedings in an initially uneasy truce, ready to face the challenges of cooperatively raising children. All too often, however, uglier traits of human misbehavior bring about the dissolution - substance abuse, emotional and verbal abuse, physical violence, financial defalcation, compulsive gambling, sexual addictions - which can make things very difficult to sort out given the raw emotion at the heart of so much of the conflict. Compounding this raw emotion is the fact that frequently, one spouse will have spent an inordinate amount of energy on "fixing" or "saving" the wayward spouse from their own worst instincts, leading to bitter rage on the part of the innocent, and sullen resentment on the part of the wayward, leading to a poisoned climate moving forward.
In our experience, the best way to move forward is for the client to recognize that they can only control themselves going forward, and they can't control the other party. Solutions can be crafted so as to make an environment relatively safe for children with regard to parenting time allocations, and to robustly monitor the circumstances surrounding time spent with them.