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===Emotions and dispute resolution alternatives===
In ''The Truth about Children and Divorce'', Dr. Emery describes three general categories of divorcing couples: the ''angry divorce'', the ''distant divorce'', and the ''cooperative divorce''. While these categories are not exactly exhaustive and are drawn from an American legal context, they are useful in discussing the impact of a highly emotional separation on the usefulness of negotiation, mediation, collaborative negotiation, arbitration and litigation.
====The "cooperative separation"====
Angry separations are the sort that lawyers most often wind up dealing with. The epic battles of people engaged in an angry separation can barely be described, and involve repeated trips to court, hiring expensive experts and trials that often last longer than ten days. The legal issues arising from their separation are rarely concluded in less than three years, and, when there are children, can run for six or more years! Making things worse, trials rarely provide a meaningful conclusion to the hostilities, as high-conflict people often find themselves back in court over and over again afterward.
Arbitration and litigation are the dispute resolution processes most likely to be used by people engaged in an angry separation. While the highly-structured, adversarial nature of litigation will be most appealing to people who are more interested in vengeance and vindication, there are a number of reasons why arbitration is well-suited to high-conflict disputes. First, arbitrators usually adopt a strong case management role and are heavily involved in pre-hearing processes to keep everything on track and limit disputes. Second, the flexibility of arbitration allows creative procedures to be developed to handle evidence, hear from experts and manage multiple expert opinions. Third, people can agree to hire their arbitrator for a term that extends beyond the end of the hearing, so that the same decision-maker will resolve new disagreements between the same parties on the same issues.
===Anger===