Kill ’em With Kindness; Only One Attorney Has All The Secrets To Success

Yeah, during the first phone call with Attorney Seaver, when I had to explain the situation that got us to where we were with DCF, you feel embarrassed, you feel that you’ve done something wrong, or you feel shame. And Attorney Seaver assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed about, that I wasn’t a bad mother or a bad person, and that ultimately you’re not defined by your mistakes, and everyone can make a mistake, it’s how we deal with it and what we learn from it from there and move on, is what really makes you as a person and ultimately will decide how things work out for you and your family, as far as it’s involved with a case with DCF.

I would say to parents that thing that, “I haven’t done anything wrong, I have nothing to hide. Why would I need an attorney?” Well, because I will tell you from our experience that when you go through the process of speaking with somebody from the DCF department, they are trained to ask you questions and say things to you that may provoke you to say something that could potentially hurt you or your family. Even if you think it’s something that couldn’t hurt you, it could, absolutely. And they are trained to look for those things and to say those things, and to try to catch you off guard. So you need someone that’s trained and been through the same process to know how to protect you.

I would say fairly early on, maybe the first week, my husband and I had a conversation together with Attorney Seaver and this was a personal conversation where he explained to us the importance of don’t point fingers at one another, that that is something that you might want to do, especially at a high stress time, and say, “Well this is your fault, and you did that, or you said that, and we’re here because of something you said or did.” That will get you nowhere at all. You need to be a united front, you need to be a team, and we got that conversation from Kevin early on, and he was right, that was a huge part of us being able to be successful and keeping our family together. And that we all felt prepared for the meeting and ultimately we were in the end.

And during our investigation process, there was more than a couple times when Attorney Seaver was right there to say… To protect us throughout the process, throughout the conversation, to make sure that we didn’t potentially say something that could keep us in the process with DCF that much longer.

So another very important aspect of handling your DCF case is that, just prior to the actual investigation interview process, where the investigator will be talking to you and to your children, the best thing you can do is to get all the paperwork together that she may need or ask for. And that was handled completely by Attorney Seaver and his team, where the day of the investigation came, the investigator had her paperwork file all set up, nice, neat, professional looking, all organized together, everything that she could ever ask for, had asked for, was given to her. And she was treated with respect and professionalism, and that is what she gave back to me and my family.

Some people might think that they don’t want to be kind to DCF because they’re infiltrating into their life and being invasive, that’s not the way they want to be treated back to them. It’s hard to probably ask and do some of the things that they have to do, but it’s a requirement of their job. So try not to take it quite so personally, as your gut may be asking you to do. And Kevin talks to you about that, that’s something that’s very important, and ultimately I think that helped us get through the process unscathed, by having everyone being treated with mutual respect and getting through the process as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Attorney Seaver told us about the importance of treating the investigator, during the interview process, with kindness, welcoming them into your home, which is not something that maybe you think is the right thing to do because you feel that you’re going to be scrutinized, but that ultimately you need to let them in, the DCF investigator in and welcome them to show them that you are a solid family and that you treat them with respect and kindness, and that they are really just doing their job. And it’s uncomfortable, but if you are able to make it feel as comfortable for them, then they will make it feel more comfortable for you. As long as everyone treats each other with respect, and kindness, it makes getting through the process that much better for everybody, from beginning to end.

Within just a couple of weeks, everything from start to finish was done. Getting the news that the case was closed was… Honestly, you feel this weight on your chest, because you just want to do all the right things, because when you have DCF in your life, you feel… I felt pretty badly about it. It was a lot of reflection on things that, you know, what’s most important to you?

I would highly recommend that you enlist the help of a qualified attorney such as Kevin Seaver. Without that, you are just taking the biggest risk with the things that matter most to you in your entire life. And that if you have the means to be able to do this, then I wouldn’t recommend any other way of going about it for sure.

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