Before ChatGPT, Were Divorce Coaches the Human Prompt Box?
Artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life remarkably quickly, and divorce is no exception. People are using AI to draft emails to a spouse or co-parent, prepare questions for an attorney, organize information, think through difficult conversations and figure out what to say when conflict starts escalating.
The more I watch this happen, the more familiar some of it feels.
Because long before someone could copy a difficult email into ChatGPT and ask, "How should I respond to this?" clients were asking divorce coaches essentially the same question.
They would forward the email and ask what we thought. They would send the response they wanted to write and ask whether they should send it. They would describe the latest conflict with their spouse and ask what they should do next. And if we weren't careful, the divorce coach could very easily become a human version of the prompt box: insert conflict, process the information, generate a response and wait for the next problem to arrive.
That may sound like a strange observation coming from someone who has spent years training divorce coaches, but I think AI is giving our profession an opportunity to examine something important.
If divorce coaching is primarily about helping clients interpret difficult communications, organize information and come up with better responses, technology is becoming increasingly capable of doing those things.
But that isn't what skilled divorce coaching is.
And for anyone exploring divorce coaching as a profession, understanding that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
Helping With the Problem Isn't Necessarily Coaching the Client
When people first begin exploring divorce coaching, I think it can be easy to imagine the work as primarily helping someone solve the problems that arise during divorce.
A client doesn't know how to respond to an email, so you help them write it. They have mediation coming up, so you tell them what questions they should ask. They are struggling with a co-parenting issue, so you help them determine what they should do.
All of those things sound helpful, and sometimes they are.
But there is an important distinction between helping someone solve a problem and coaching someone through a problem in a way that develops their capacity to navigate the next one.
Take the difficult email.
Anyone who has worked with people in conflict knows what can happen when someone receives a message that immediately activates them. They are halfway through the first paragraph and already composing their response. By the time they reach the end, they are not simply responding to the issue in front of them anymore. They are responding to everything that came before it.
They want to correct the facts, defend themselves, explain the history and make sure the other person understands exactly why they are wrong.
A divorce coach can look at that communication and probably identify fairly quickly what needs to come out. We can help shorten it. We can suggest more neutral language. We can point out that the client doesn't need to respond to every accusation.
The client may leave with a much better email.
But what did they learn? That is the question that changes the work.
The Email Is the Opportunity, Not the Work
If I simply tell a client which parts of the email need a response, I have demonstrated my conflict competency.
I haven't necessarily developed theirs.
That is where skilled coaching requires us to resist the temptation to solve the problem too quickly, even when we know we probably could. Instead, we can help the client examine what is happening.
⍰ What actually requires a response here?
⍰ Which part of this message are you most focused on?
⍰ Why that part?
⍰ What are you assuming the other person meant?
⍰ What are you trying to accomplish with your response?
⍰ What do you desperately want the other person to understand?
And perhaps one of the most useful questions in divorce conflict: Do they actually need to understand that for this particular problem to be resolved?
Now we are doing something very different from editing an email. We are helping the client recognize what happens to them when they are in conflict. We are helping them distinguish between the issue that needs to be addressed and the emotional invitation to engage in everything else. We are helping them become more intentional about what they do next.
The email gives us the opportunity to develop those skills, but the email itself isn't really the work.
The client is.
AI Is Making the Difference Harder to Ignore
This distinction has always mattered in divorce coaching, but AI is making it much more visible because technology can already do a surprisingly good job with the output.
AI can take an angry six-paragraph response and make it shorter and more neutral. It can draft a BIFF-style message. It can summarize a lengthy email, generate questions for mediation, organize information and identify different ways someone might approach a conversation.
And it can do all of that immediately.
If the value of a divorce coach is primarily in producing those things for clients, then yes, AI creates an uncomfortable question about what the coach is there to do.
But I think that is the wrong competition.
Divorce coaches do not need to become better than AI at writing emails. We need to become exceptionally good at coaching people who are navigating conflict.
That requires a very different skill set.
Expertise Doesn't Mean Having All the Answers
This is one of the things I think people exploring divorce coaching sometimes misunderstand about the profession. They assume that becoming a good divorce coach means learning enough about divorce that they will know what clients should do.
Learn about the process. Learn about conflict. Learn about communication. Learn about mediation and negotiation. Develop enough expertise, and eventually you will be able to give clients really good answers.
But coaching expertise doesn't work quite that way.
Of course a divorce coach needs substantive knowledge. You cannot effectively support someone navigating divorce if you have no understanding of the environment in which they are making decisions. And if you are working with conflict, you need to understand conflict beyond simply knowing a few communication techniques.
But our expertise is not measured by how quickly we can tell someone what to do.
➡️ Sometimes expertise is recognizing the question underneath the question.
➡️ Sometimes it is hearing that the client keeps returning to one particular detail and becoming curious about why.
➡️ Sometimes it is noticing that the client says they want settlement while approaching every negotiation as an opportunity to prove they are right.
➡️ Sometimes it is helping someone recognize that they are trying to solve an emotional problem through a legal or financial outcome.
➡️ And sometimes it is knowing that you could give the client an answer in thirty seconds, but doing so would take away an opportunity for them to develop the ability to find that answer themselves.
That requires considerably more skill than simply being good at giving advice.
A Better Response Doesn't Necessarily Mean a Better Communicator
This is another place where AI can teach us something about divorce coaching.
Imagine a client receives a highly provocative email from a co-parent. They are furious and write the response you would expect someone to write when they are furious. They put it into AI, ask for a calm and professional version and receive three beautifully neutral sentences.
From a communication standpoint, that may be a significant improvement. The conflict may not escalate. The necessary information may be exchanged. Everyone may be better off because the original response never got sent.
There is value in that.
But from a conflict coaching perspective, I would still want to know what happened to the person.
⍰ Do they understand why the shorter response is more effective?
⍰ Can they identify what activated them in the original communication?
⍰ Do they recognize why they felt compelled to defend themselves?
⍰ Can they distinguish between an accusation and an issue requiring a decision?
⍰ Could they make the same communication choice if neither AI nor their divorce coach were available?
Because there is a difference between regulating the communication and helping a client learn to regulate themselves while communicating.
For divorce coaches, that difference is everything.
The Goal Is Not to Become Indispensable
There is another implication here for anyone considering divorce coaching as a profession. Good divorce coaching should ultimately increase a client's capacity, not their dependence on the divorce coach. That means our success cannot be measured by whether the client needs us to review every email, prepare them for every conversation or help make every difficult decision.
In fact, I would argue that we should become curious if that dependency continues indefinitely.
If a client still believes months later that they cannot respond to a routine co-parenting communication without sending it to the coach first, what have we actually been developing?
➡️ Have we helped the client understand how to identify what requires a response, or have we become the person who identifies it for them?
➡️ Have they learned how to recognize their own conflict patterns, or have we simply gotten very good at recognizing those patterns on their behalf?
➡️ Have they developed a framework for making difficult decisions, or have we become the framework?
That doesn't mean capable clients will never need support again. Divorce changes over time, new challenges emerge and complicated situations benefit from having a skilled professional help someone think them through. Independence doesn't mean never needing support. It means the support is building capacity rather than replacing it.
AI Can Actually Become Part of the Divorce Coaching
This is also why I don't think divorce coaches need to tell clients to stop using AI.
I think there is a much more interesting opportunity available to us. If a client has used AI to help draft a response, bring that into the coaching conversation.
Look at the original communication. Look at what the client wanted to write. Look at what AI suggested. Then get curious about the differences.
What did AI remove? Why do you think it removed that? What did it preserve? Which part of your original response was actually intended to resolve the problem, and which part was intended to make sure the other person knew they were wrong?
What was difficult about leaving that part out?
Now the technology itself has become material for coaching. We can also help clients become more thoughtful about the way they use it. There is a significant difference between asking AI, "Write my response," and asking, "Help me identify the issues in this communication that actually require a response."
There is a difference between asking, "Is my ex being unreasonable?" and asking, "What are several possible interpretations of this message that I may not have considered?"
There is a difference between asking AI what decision to make and asking it what additional information might be useful before making the decision. The technology hasn't changed. What has changed is the client's relationship to it.
They are using AI to support their thinking rather than asking it to think for them.
That is a distinction divorce coaches should understand because it mirrors the distinction in our own work.
What Does This Mean If You're Considering Divorce Coaching?
If you are exploring divorce coaching as a profession because you are good at helping people solve problems, that can certainly be a strength.
If people naturally come to you for advice, if you are a strong communicator, if you went through your own divorce and learned an enormous amount from the experience, all of those things may be part of what initially draws you to this work.
But none of them, by themselves, are what makes someone a skilled divorce coach.
Professional divorce coaching requires learning how to work with another person's thinking without taking it over. It requires understanding conflict well enough to recognize the dynamics operating underneath the presenting problem. It requires learning how to help someone prepare for negotiation without becoming their negotiator, support decision-making without making the decision, and challenge thinking without imposing your own perspective.
It requires knowing how to ask questions that create awareness rather than simply collecting information.
And perhaps most importantly, it requires becoming comfortable with not being the person with all the answers.
That is a very different professional identity from being an expert problem-solver.
And it is precisely why I think AI may ultimately be good for the divorce coaching profession.
Maybe Being the Human Prompt Box Was Never the Goal
So, before ChatGPT, were divorce coaches the human prompt box?
Sometimes, perhaps we were.
A client brought us the input. We processed it through our knowledge, experience and understanding of conflict. We helped produce the output, and there was often genuine value in doing that.
But that was never supposed to be the destination.
AI is going to continue getting better at generating language, organizing information, summarizing communications and producing possible answers. I don't think divorce coaches should spend much time worrying about how to compete with that.
Instead, I think it gives us an opportunity to become much clearer about what this profession actually requires.
If technology can draft the email, let it draft the email.
Then let's work with the person who has to decide whether to send it. Let's work with the client who understands intellectually that they don't have to answer every accusation but still finds it almost impossible not to. Let's work with the person who says they want to reach an agreement but becomes so focused on fairness that they cannot evaluate a reasonable tradeoff. Let's work with the parent who genuinely wants a different co-parenting relationship but keeps getting pulled back into the same conflict pattern. Let's prepare the client who will eventually have to sit in mediation, hear something they weren't expecting and make a thoughtful decision without being able to stop the conversation and ask either their coach or ChatGPT what they should do next.
That is the work.
And for anyone considering entering the field of divorce coaching, I think that is what makes this profession so much more interesting than simply helping people get through divorce.
You are not training to become the person with the best answers.
You are developing the skills to help another person become more capable of finding their own.
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