Should You Get A Family Therapist During Probate?

Do you have a good relationship with your family? How well would you and your family work together on a team?

These are issues that come up when a family member dies. Other members of the family must come together, arrange the funeral, probate the estate, work out issues with the deceased person’s property and assets, etc. 

When it comes to family and probate law, the simplicity of a legal issue is typically more likely to be determined by the relationships between the parties involved rather than the actual legal “gotchas” and “loopholes”. 

Law is not like Hollywood at all. It deals in reasonableness and fairness. One of the most important roles an attorney can play in a client relationship is providing an unbiased and reasonable perspective to their client on a certain issue that a client may feel especially passionate about. While passion is good, sometimes being too emotional can result in unrealistic expectations. 

In probate, most things are preordained. Meaning, if there’s a will or a trust, those instructions are unequivocally followed. If there’s no instructions like a will or trust, then we default to the state law for distributions (intestate). 

There really isn’t a ton of room for legal work-arounds. Yet so many probate laws states become highly contentious. But this isn’t because of the law or the legal issues at hand, it’s because of the relationships between family members. 

Working well with your family in the time of a tragedy can be difficult. And I don’t mean to be glib when I say that family therapy may be a helpful tool to bring you and your family together in the mourning process and in the probate process. 

Family therapy may not only be helpful to get you through probate, but at the end of it you may come out with a stronger and healthier relationship with your family in the long term. 

A lot of my clients have revealed serious trauma in their upbringing and serious issues between their siblings which went unaddressed for years. 

I think it’s important for people to address these issues at some point in their lives, and a death in the family may be a catalyst for that.