Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Transforming High Conflict Co-Parenting: Raising Thriving Teens with Kevin Chafin
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On Truth Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving Hi Conflict. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm usually here with my co-host, bill Eddie, but he's away for the month and so it's just me. Just this month we are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute based in San Diego, California where we provide training, consultations, coaching, and a lot of educational programs, all to do with high conflict. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Kevin Chafin from Kansas City, Missouri. We're going to be talking about some really cool stuff regarding co-parenting, particularly when it comes to teenagers. So even if you're not a co-parent, maybe you're at intech Parenting, whatever. Probably good to listen in. Always good to learn about teenagers, right? And maybe teenagers that have too much power. So if you have questions, send them to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or through our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast. You also find all the show notes and links there as well. Speaker 1 (01:22): Today I'm really happy to introduce you, our listeners, to Kevin Chafe, who I've known for at least a decade through family law events. Kevin was one of the best. You've heard him on this podcast before, but one of the best co-parenting guys I could find in the world. Really funny story. So when Bill Eddie first wrote the book, Biff, the Quick Responses to Hostile Email Misinformation, all that, so Kevin found this book. He started requiring parents to read that book before they'd come to co-parenting sessions with him. So then when it came around to Bill writing a book for co-parents a BIS book, I thought, let's bring in a couple other people on this who are working with parents every day. So we had Annette Burns, who you heard on the last episode, and Kevin Chafin who is working and that's on the legal angle and Kevin comes at it from the counsel slate angle. Speaker 1 (02:28): So Kevin is the co-author of Smith for Co-Parent Communication and came with so much good stuff. Kevin and I also trained for the association in a family conciliation courts about a year ago, and I think it was one of my most fun trainings ever, and it's not easy to co-present with someone, so lots of fun. Kevin is a licensed professional counselor with more than 20 years experience with the family and domestic core systems and the Missouri Children's Division. He provides a lot of mediation and counseling services and has done so for more than 15 years. Is that still true? Speaker 2 (03:03): Yeah, except for I got older. I think I should have changed that to more than 20 years now. More Speaker 1 (03:07): Than 20 years, yeah. Yeah, that happens, right? So, alright, so what happened as Paul Harvey used to say the rest of the story, Speaker 2 (03:18): I was at the A FCC conference and someone introduced me to Bill's first book and read it and thought everybody, all my co-parenting clients, all my mediation clients have got to have this book. So I placed an order with one of the big resellers very quickly and bought all they had and they backorder me and before a week or two later, I've gotten rid of all my books and I need more books and I contact them and it's back ordered and it's back ordered and I said, now this won't do. So I flipped the book over and called Unhooked Media and said, how do I get more books? And you said, well, we'll send you a box. So you did. And then it was another box and another box, and I think pretty soon I was buying 2, 3, 4 boxes a year. Enough years of that. We meet at conferences, we get to know each other, and then December of 2019 I get a phone call, you were very gracious, told me there was going to be a new edition of the book come out and my memory serves. I said, well gosh, send me the first 50 off the line. And you said, oh, we haven't written it yet. My poor little brain is enough intuitive. Speaker 2 (04:30): And I really did start sending out all the signals that said, don't you dare say yes to this. Speaker 2 (04:37): My mouse said, I'll love to do it, so glad to help. And then I went and saw my therapist about all the stuff I have about writing and I should have done that when I was in first grade and just gotten over it. But this was a real impetus to face all my fears about writing and move on. So Annette Burns was a fantastic coauthor. She was so helpful to the writing process and conversation with her. I was able to move forward on many parts of it. She was a joy to work with. Phil and Megan have been terrific to partner with in this effort and it's been a huge help to the practice to have a co-parent specific book and any complaints I have about it are usually about the parts that I had to most work with, so then I really don't get to complain much. So it's perfect. Speaker 1 (05:29): And so yeah, I was so happy that you agreed to join in on that book and it's hard writing is hard for me getting in front of an audience. I could speak to 10,000 people, no problem, barely any nerves, but writing a book, there's something very for me, and I think a lot of people I've talked to, it's kind of soul bearing. Even if you're not bearing your soul, there's a vulnerability to it. So that's part of it and part of it is just knowing it's going to be out there forever. Right. Speaker 2 (06:00): Well, and I do have so much respect for the work that Bill has done in putting together the first book, how effective it was, how effective it is, and that it's grown onto the additional books is a testament to how it works with high conflict people and really it works with all of us. There's nobody that doesn't benefit from us getting focused on the problem we're trying to solve and then working a problem solving method and staying focused, not getting lost in a cloud of words, staying polite and civil regardless of how much tension there is in the process, and then being clear about what we've decided so we don't have to decide it a bunch of times. So it's such an honor to have been a part of it and to see that it is helpful to people. Speaker 1 (06:56): What do you do if people come to your sessions and they haven't read what first chapter or two of this before the session? Speaker 2 (07:02): What began with being court involved in that? Early in my life as a therapist, I worked with children who were in foster care or who had been adopted and then over time that developed into working with more of the parents of the children who were in foster care, maybe to help them get their children back or to help them go through the court process. Parents who had adopted children, that evolved into doing a fairly significant amount of co-parenting counseling, but I had begun as a mediator even before I became a therapist. So mediation and conflict resolution was very much at the foundation of what I was doing. Eventually the attorneys I was working with suggested that there's lots of mediators around, there's not a lot of folks doing co-parenting counseling. Would I do less mediation, more co-parenting counseling and sure I want to meet the need. Speaker 2 (08:00): And so at times co-parenting counseling has been as much as half of my therapy practice. I still continue to work with young people, not as many of them little bitty because I couldn't get onto the floor, but getting backed up is not as easily as it once was. Fantastic. And I think more importantly developmentally, if you're going to work with kids that haven't been through puberty, that way of your brain functioning is so much different than the way an adult brain functions. If you're not really living in it and really focusing on how little people think and think differently, then you can make some pretty big mistakes in therapy. And so I really focus my kid practice at 10 and above, and so that's a good portion, but most of those kids are either kids who are court involved themselves or who are in families where their parents have been court involved. So court involvement is 90% of my practice. So I've lived in the world of attorneys and judges and mediators, other therapists who do court involved work, been involved with the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts was, well I'm just finishing my term on the board of the Missouri chapter. Speaker 1 (09:23): You get a little experience in this world. Absolutely. So let's talk about those 10 and oakers, right, whether it's in the co-parenting world of family court divorce and all of that, or just any child court involved or not. So what do you see in working with kids? Let's start with the divorce aspect of it. You and I had a conversation recently about the overpowering over powerment. Is that the way we put it of teenagers in, I dunno if it's just divorce homes or is it all homes these days? What's your take on that Speaker 2 (10:06): Mega? We've done a poor job as a culture of helping parents understand their children, understand their own childhoods and then understand children. We don't equip parents to understand developmentally how parenting works, and so parents are, I think, constantly surprised by the needs of their children and what a family is there to provide. What we're asking as a culture, we ask our parents to do a thing to have their children ready to participate as adults by age 18, which is an awesome task, right? It's ome and we keep burdening them with new challenges at every turn. I don't think anybody could have anticipated just how many challenges would occur in 2008, 2009, with the advent of the cell phone and everything that has gone with that, right? Social media and the internet access and access to other people have to their children without their parents' knowledge. There was a time parents really did have this gatekeeper effect about which adults were going to interact with their kids and they could know all the coaches and teachers and everybody else and all the big influencers, the church, they took them through it to the books that the kids were going to read, whatever it was, they had a real sense of authority over those things. Speaker 1 (11:40): Yeah, yeah. I remember when my kids were right in that age group when the cell phones came about and go in one of my kids' rooms in the middle of the night and kind of in that beginning teen years and sound asleep, but the phone in the hand and it would vibrate and now the child's awake and not getting any very good sleep. But the most important thing, even more important than that I think was when I finally had that realization that I used to be able to keep people out of my house. I had little control when they're outside of my house. I don't know what's happening at school all the time. I didn't know what's happening in friends' homes with all that, but I knew what was happening in my house until the cell phone and now they didn't have to sneak in or out of the windows, they just came into the cell phone and that was such a mind shift for me and when I was growing up, things ended at the end of the school day unless my mom would let me use the phone that was attached to the wall and I got to talk to a friend for maybe 15 minutes, but that was it. Speaker 2 (12:53): Oh, trying to explain to the kids that I work with the days of having a phone that was tied to a spot in the wall that we had one line into the house and you could talk to a friend for five minutes or so, but then you needed to get off the phone because somebody else might need to make a call or receive a call. There's just no way to conceive of that. It's as unconceivable, I think for them as us to conceive of them growing up in a world where this is as present as trees, Speaker 2 (13:26): It's just part of their world. It functions as an extension of their memory. They don't have to remember something. It's there for them to just look up very quickly. And it has posed more questions faster than any of us who think about these kinds of things and try to be helpful, have begun to keep up with. And that's difficult because the thing that adults and particularly parents are to provide to children is a sense of security and that a lot of that sense of security comes from these other people. These adults know things. They know the stuff that I need to know. In fact, they know everything. Anything I learn, I learn from them. Every word I know I little bitty kids, they all learn it from this tight little group of adults around them before they can access a device. All love, nurture, support and language comes from this little group of people who provide me with security and food and safe place to be and security the world makes sense. Speaker 2 (14:46): And then when those two people can't get along enough to stay in the same household and their roaring with each other causes everything to come undoing, if they're just fighting in the household and it's always been that way, then that's just the way the world is because the world is whatever I've been experiencing. But when it finally results in them coming undone, often they don't pay attention and we don't pay attention to the thing that we need to provide is security, and we know and we will help. We get you ready for anything that's coming and we do. The amount of effort we take in getting ready, kids ready for kindergarten is amazing. We spend years teaching them colors and shapes and alphabet and numbers and how to sit in a chair and wait to be called on. And we have preschool before kindergarten, before school starts, before we take them to the building. Speaker 2 (15:51): We do an amazing amount of getting ready just to walk into kindergarten and we expect them to be able to emotionally regulate by kindergarten and they do right by and large. Now we give our little boys usually maybe another year only. That maturity we're looking for is really emotional regulation and most of them get it together by the time we really put them in kindergarten and they do fine for a few years and then as they get closer and closer to adolescence, the tension amongst the adults around them increases. We start worrying about what's coming because we've enjoyed them so much. They've been such just sweethearts to be around delights and by fourth and fifth grade, they are physically kind of with it. They're coordinated their sports events, they're mo by and large literate, they're articulate, they engage us, they like us. It's really a pleasant experience of them and then we begin to sweat. Speaker 2 (17:02): Do we begin to prepare them for the biggest transformational experience that will happen during conscious life? No, because I think short of birth and death, nothing is as transformative as puberty. We're going to go through four or five years of massive transformation on every scale. I read the article years and years ago where they study little kids, they put 'em to bed, measure them very carefully, they sleep, they wake up, they measure them very carefully, and they're a quarter of an inch bigger overnight. Can you imagine the amount of work that is going on inside a body to stretch at a quarter of an inch overnight? Wow. Right? The old darling comes out and you say, oh no, I asked you to put on your new jeans. These are my new jeans. No, we bought them where they would fit yet these are the new jeans. Oh, it's that sudden. It's that transformative and we do almost nothing to get kids ready for it because we are so frightened of it. It takes children from not having the power of creation to having the power of creation, which we mostly find terrifying. I don't want to talk about. Speaker 1 (18:23): Right. Speaker 2 (18:24): And when you couple that when a family breaks up at that point, because puberty is such a lack of security where they've known reach for a glass and your arm is going to be this far away from the glass, I can do this competently, and suddenly they're knocking things over on the table mostly because their body got out of control overnight and just, I don't know when my hand is going to get to that class anymore. Think of it. I'm just reaching for the class. They got there sooner. You knock it over. There's so much going on. Emotions that were very simple have become super complex emotions that we as adults gave them all the words for them, their little lipsticks out and we go, oh, you're sad. You poor to your, oh, I'm sad. There's a word for this. And they get to be adolescents and we say, what's going on with you? Speaker 2 (19:17): And they go, I dunno. And we think they're being petulant, but the truth is they don't know. They're having feelings they don't know words for and we're not saying, well do your best to describe it for me and I'll help you find the word that goes with it. There are words for all of these feelings. Well, actually there's not. English is limited in how many words we have for feelings, and so one of the things I do is keep a list of foreign words. There's a word in German for I believe it's this word for secondary embarrassment. Speaker 1 (19:52): Oh, interesting. Speaker 2 (19:53): Yeah, yeah. Something like Freudian shaman or something. Somebody will write this to us and say, yeah, you don't know how to say that. Speaker 1 (20:04): My sister lives in Germany and she always tells me about these extra words they have that we don't have. Yeah, should I? Is that right? I'll end an episode and she can talk. Speaker 2 (20:14): I recognize I'm embarrassed for people all the time, but I don't have a word for it. As I have been helping people learn this, I was investigating my own feeling and then I put a word to it and I eventually looked it up and realized, Ooh, that word doesn't go with that feeling. That's not the word for that. I've still not found it. I know the feeling. I have it rather often. No word for it. That's the experience of so much of puberty is I have this experience that I don't have language for. I don't know how to communicate what's going on. And the people that provided me with security by anticipating what was going to happen in my life and getting me ready, haven't done that, and all of a sudden they want me to decide decisions that I would think the adults would decide. Speaker 2 (21:12): They want me to give up my loyalty to one parent or the other. They want me to tell them, do I want a two to five or a week at a, I don't know if y'all figure this out, I just tell me what we're doing. They want me to understand what it is that's causing my parents to be these emotional wrecks all the time. And I had really figured out how to manage them emotionally so that I could get the things I want and the ways that I want it. Because anybody who thinks that our children don't emotionally manage us are not paying attention. They can look out the window, see us walking up the sidewalk, and they know whether they need to entertain us when we come through the door and kind of improve our mood before they ask for that new pair of shoes or whether they can just hit us up for that. Speaker 2 (22:09): As soon as we come through door, they know us. They can tell those little micro movements of our faces or something. Experts, they watch us, experts. They've been so careful at watching us, and then it doesn't work so much because things have come unwound and it's just a whole lot more work. And we need as adults to make this somewhat easier and to give them, well, first we need to give 'em better information about puberty and about what's going on in the legal process and in the process of the family system that was in one household, moving to a family system in two households and to develop better language about how to have that family system into households. We think that this is mom's house and dad's house and we're going to just go into our own kingdoms. But kids experience this as still one system and they still expect to be able to speak into mom's ears and it still comes out of dad's mouth, mom and dad. Speaker 2 (23:15): That's always happened before, and people have always just known and well wait, you still just know. So the security gets really unwound. It's not surprising then that we have that sense of parentification of children and that we start often I hear, well, I'll just ask my child. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean you're going to ask your child? We'll do whatever he or she wants. Well, my guess is you'll do whatever he or she wants if it aligns with what you want. But if they choose an opposition of what you're wanting, suddenly that's not of interest to you. So the demands for loyalty become really intense. Speaker 1 (24:04): Well, let's talk for a second about parentification. So you want to define that a little bit. The way I take it is in putting the child this teen into the role of a parent, yes, there Speaker 2 (24:16): Should be a natural flow from grandparents taking care of parents who take care of children. But often what we have is parents who become so emotionally needy that they look to their children to emotionally take care of them, and they replace that the spouse and the desire they had to have their spouse take care of them. Now I need my child to take care of me. Somebody needs to do Speaker 1 (24:43): This. I get my emotional needs met through my child, even if it's a young child. Speaker 2 (24:50): Oh yeah. I think as soon as they learn to walk and talk, right? We say, I love you to them, and then they say, I love you back, which they know. Give the feedback of tell parents what we think they need to hear, and parents then take care of us. Speaker 1 (25:06): So I remember, I dunno, 10 years or so ago, watching maybe a singing competition like the voice or something on television. You'd have a person get up there and sing and it was amazing. And then they interviewed them afterwards and the tears are flowing and maybe they just won to the next level or something. And I just wanted my kids to be proud of me, and it's always so shocking to me, and I thought the first one or two or three times, I heard it like, well, that's different. We always used to want our parents to be proud of us, and now it's somehow turned around. Then I realized it's become more of a thing and I hate all the time. Do you hear that? Speaker 2 (25:50): Yeah, yeah, exactly. This reversal of who's taking care of home Speaker 1 (26:00): And whose needs, Speaker 2 (26:01): And I want my kids to approve of me or I want my kids. And often what happens in these situations, I want to be able to earn my kids, not just affection, but it becomes a competition of if we're going to let them choose, then I've got to be in a campaign so that you'll choose me. Speaker 2 (26:21): I've got to be offering enough good stuff, whether it's emotional or you see it with grandparents, I'm going to give as many good gifts as the other grandparents do as instead of just being confident in your love and support and connection to somebody that this isn't a competition. There's enough attention and affection to go around. We can generate more work as a team together in that crisis or in that difficulty that happens after a breakup, and particularly with conflict, people who seem to have their emotional buckets have holes in them, and there's no amount that you can pour into them that's actually going to satisfy. Then the scramble can get very destructive. So we then begin to burden kids with decisions that are not theirs to make. Right. Many years ago now worked in a program where we helped young people ages 13, 14 to 18 sit on nonprofit boards of directors for youth serving agencies. Speaker 2 (27:34): So it's not that I am not committed to the empowerment of young people. I think they ought to have direct and what we were trying to improve was direct influence on the services they were receiving, make them relevant to those young people instead of to people my age, memory of our own childhood, and then we built services for what we remember our teenage years being. But let's find out kids who have a vocabulary very different than us. What are they needing in the world that they're living in and nurture and support them, and it was very effective. I found that young people step to that. When you have clear structures and expectations, they can step to that kind of decision making very well. But when you then begin to ask them, because we knew which how to, we had processes. We knew how to gather their participation. Speaker 2 (28:31): We also knew that when it came down to financial decisions, the law says they didn't get to vote until they were 18. They could not bear the financial burden of the organization that was beyond what the law would allow. So we didn't ask them to do that. We asked them for programming ideas, but not do we buy a new building when we've then overly empowered young people when we've given them the burden of taking care of their parents emotionally or making monumental decisions. Will you go to school or not go to school? Will you spend the night at one house or the other? That decision wasn't even often their parents to make that fell to a person in a black rope, right? The parents couldn't make that effectively together. They gave it up to an arbitrary, in our culture, we call a judge, and what we've said is, if you can't get to this decision ourselves in a way that you can find agreeable, when the judge makes it, it's binding. Speaker 2 (29:39): And then when we step back and say, well, maybe not. We'll ask our child to make the least equipped person, the least knowledgeable and equipped person in the process. So we're going to ask you and say, well, maybe we won't do what the judge said to do. Well, we'll just ask you what do you want to do? We'll just let you decide. You got frustrated. You want to come to my house instead? Oh, okay. Causes havoc. Just causes chaos because it shouldn't be surprising that then if they get frustrated that this house and things have kind of forgotten what a mess it was at the other house, we'll just go back and then we really are in a competition now. We fixed this problem. We took this to a judge who gave us guidelines, and if we simply followed them, at least we have security. Speaker 2 (30:27): We have a way to know what is going to happen, and that provides an enormous amount. We're not having to decide the decision four or five times in an evening based on whatever my emotional upset is. I know what's going to happen tonight. I'm going to do this thing and we going to have some sense of security. I think it's crucial. I think the clarity is so important in these situations to provide security. A book came out several years ago, it was a business book called The Five Things You Need to Know. I found it to be a brilliant book. No, it wasn't called. It was called The One Thing You Need to Know. And this was the sneaky part. It wasn't ever just one thing. It was always the five things you need to know. But of those five things, the one you need to know about that is, and when it finally got to leadership, it had the five things you need to know. But then the one thing that makes leadership work is clarity. Speaker 1 (31:30): That is so true. Speaker 2 (31:31): Clarity. You can lead people into doing things they might, should ought to do, but we need to help kids by having some parental clarity. Where am I going to spend the night tonight? Oh, well, what do you ought do? No. Where am I going to spend the night tonight? Tonight is my responsibility. You'll be here. Speaker 1 (31:52): Yes, lead, lead parents don't fight and don't leave it to the kids lead during your time. Speaker 2 (32:00): Should kids get to wear what they want to wear? Well, sure, sort of. We don't have a problem with kids wearing shoes to school. I've never been in a school building. I've never been in much of very many public buildings where people are just mos around the public space with their shoes off, get the folks houses. They kick their shoes and socks off as fast as they go. They're more comfortable without them, but there's not an option in public space about whether we're going to wear shoes or not. We don't ask, therefore, they just put their shoes and socks on. Go to school. Often it is because we ask, oh, you need to go to school today. Okay. Oh, I'd rather not. Oh wait, I'm sorry. Okay. Speaker 1 (32:49): Right. Speaker 2 (32:49): Why? Okay. I meant do you understand? Well, then please say, do you Speaker 1 (32:53): Understand? Don't understand. Speaker 2 (32:55): Don't ask. Okay. Time to go to school. Put your shoes on. We're out the door. Speaker 1 (33:01): How did we get there though, Kevin? I mean that's what my mom didn't ask us if it was okay ever. I found myself doing it. Speaker 2 (33:10): No, we developed a vocal tick of using okay to mean do you understand me? And we've gotten too much about asking questions when there's not a question. We have the custody decision to make. I have sole legal custody and instead of saying, here's the difficult decision that need to get made that I've made, and we need to move forward from that, we will do that part and say, well, do you have any input on that? I was like, no, no, no. You've had input three times when the decision is made, offer clarity. This is not a continu. We're not still in the decision making process. We've finished that. Here's the clarity. This is what we're doing. We're eating barbecue tonight. Speaker 1 (33:58): Yeah, so clarity, we're going to take a break and after that we're going to come back and talk about clarity. Then when, let's say one parent's on board, or let's say two parents are on board, but what do you do when only one parent's on board with the clarity? So let's take a break and we'll talk more about that when we come back. Speaker 1 (34:23): Alright, and we are back. So let's talk now. Continue talking about this matter of clarity, Kevin, if you have divorced parents and they've been co-parenting a while and they understand about how the children need security for a long time. It doesn't end at age 13. It needs to continue and they're doing a good job of it, providing that clarity. The parents are communicating. But what happens when you have one parent who seems to have sort of a high conflict personality and they're resisting, they're rejecting, they want, they're drawing their emotional happiness from the child and doing everything they can perhaps to sabotage the child's happiness in the other home. Just saying, what do you do? What happens, first of all, and what can that parent do? Speaker 2 (35:12): High conflict folks, we need to understand that rather than problem solving, they enter into trauma. And if you enter into the drama with them, we're not going to get decisions made. What we're going to get is trauma and upset and upset and trauma. And we can identify some of the things that generate the right bill did a great job of listing out four that we can quickly pick up. I mean probably we could list out a whole bunch more, but these are so obvious that if you've picked up on these four, all you need to know, and this isn't 1% of the population, this isn't even 10% of the population. This is as maybe as much as 2020 5% of the population are just in their personality. Their personality structure is set up for drama, not decision making. And if the other parent recognizes this and says, oh, well, we've still got decisions need to make, make, and because we created children together, I have an obligation to participate with you in this decision making, then we need some strategies for redirecting out of the drama and to the decision making, to the problem solving. Speaker 2 (36:32): And really everything we do all day long is problem solving. Problem solving isn't this kind of isolated thing that only happens once in a while. We do a little problem solving at night before we go to bed. What time do I need to get up? What method am I going to use to help me get up problem solving? What will be most effective at waking me up in the morning given the lack of sleep or the amount of sleep I'm going to have? And then we set that and we wake up and then we have to figure out what am I going to wear? What minutes do I have today? What's the weather like? What are my appointments? What are the tasks? What's clean? We go through very quickly a decision-making tree to get to a decision about what am I going to put on? Speaker 2 (37:17): And we do this so seamlessly through so many problems, and it's fairly easy if we're doing it alone, but if we've involved somebody else and I have to dress like other people and I have other constraints, might have a wardrobe I have to wear to go to a particular job, well, maybe that makes it easier. Maybe it makes it harder, but it involves other people in our decision making. When we have somebody that we may have some of our own issues with coworkers or we work in an adversarial system of decision-making where we're attorneys, so the people who support attorneys and we're going to have conflict as the nature of our work, then we need ways to pull back from the drama to recognize it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is drama. Somebody has slipped over into it. Any of us can slip over into it. Speaker 2 (38:11): Maybe we didn't sleep last night. And it's just easy for us to be at an emotional upset place and start blaming people. But there are people who are chronically in drama that we need to pick up on, oh wait, we're not making decisions together now. I'm just participating in trauma. I need to reduce how many words I'm feeding into this process. There it is. We're now arguing over which words we're using. I need to use way less of them. I need to get very focused on let's identify the problem. Let's offer a few possible solutions, help to get to one of them, gather all the information quickly as we can to make that decision, make a proposal. If we don't get to a proposal, then we can just swim around in it. But no, no, wait, let's just make any proposal. Let's get a proposal on the table so we got something to work from. We are in a culture, Megan, that is celebrating a lack of civility. Speaker 1 (39:13): Yes. Speaker 2 (39:14): Because it's entertaining Speaker 1 (39:17): And easy. Speaker 2 (39:18): It's ear catching. Yeah. Oh my. Have you heard about what? So-and-so did what they said. This time the drama is entertaining. It just doesn't help us serve problem. Speaker 1 (39:30): Right? There's no discipline. No discipline with that. Speaker 2 (39:33): None. And thank goodness there are people to call our attention to wait. We have actual problems to be solved and drama's not helping and acrimony doesn't help, but civility might. I grew up in a fairly isolated system that had its own language and ways of understanding the world. And when I then went out, got some early jobs and started interacting with the rest of the world more at the time, I realized I didn't know civility very well. I didn't know. I didn't know what an RSVP was, just hadn't bumped into that. I found Ms. Manners to be a wonderful resource, and many people may not know. Oh, absolutely. I went to the library, bought Ms. Manor Reddit, cover the combo. Speaker 1 (40:28): I love it. Speaker 2 (40:29): We used to take and offer our kids civility classes, right? There were educators who just were there to help children, adults learn the protocols of civility. And we don't do that to get along with people we're absolutely going to get along with. That's what saves us in conflict is that we know how to be polite, Speaker 1 (40:55): Right? We used to, Speaker 2 (40:57): Right? So not only do we need to use our words judiciously, provide all the necessary information we need to do this in civil and knowably civil ways that we can recognize the civility as it's happening. And as somebody who almost celebrates the use of language that might not be seen to be civil, one note needs to know how to move quickly to civility when it's necessary. And then when we make a decision, document it, write that thing down and then look it over a few times. Make sure that we're using the language in the same way. In my work at Mediator and co-parenting counselor, often people will refer to a weekend, oh, we're going to do that on the weekend. And I've learned to immediately ask, what's a weekend? Define that, define that. Oh, Saturday and Sunday detail. Do you include Friday evening in a weekend? Speaker 2 (42:03): Well, I guess we could, but for me, a weekend begins because of the work I've done at the eight o'clock on Friday morning, or when kids get to school and it ends on Monday morning when kids get to school or eight o'clock. It's a three day experience for me. That's when I say the word weekend. That's what I mean. Other folks mean six o'clock on Friday to six o'clock on Sunday. So we need very carefully to make sure that we're using words in the same way when we write them down so that the same behavior happens because of those words. So if we can do really those four things that we can engage, we can pull out of drama into decision making, get decisions made, and then get back out of the situation. And I think it's crucial that we teach this, learn this, practice this, and know when to practice it, that the adults should be doing this, giving our kids some, not freedom to just be kids, but to make age appropriate decisions. Speaker 2 (43:13): It is not that 18 year olds are magically able to make all age decisions. We just had to arbitrarily pick an age in our culture. And it's moved. And frankly, across the United States, there are two states. It's not age 18, Alabama and Nebraska is 1910, right? We've moved it around over the years. Sometimes it's been 21, gone back to 18, right? Sometimes it's not some places in the world, it's not 18, but we have to live in the world that we actually live in. Should it be 14? I dunno. But it is 18. And so we should not be telling kids that they have the authority and the responsibility to make decisions that they do not have responsibility for as a species. We have at time said adulthood was at 13 and that made sense. And now we moved it up and we said, please don't make families at 13. Please wait 18 or 25 and we're fine if you wait till 30. And then, then because the adults don't want to bear the repercussions, upset because adults don't want to bear the upset kids. Speaker 2 (44:31): They don't like a decision. They will just push that decision off on the kid and then let their kids deal with the upset that the adults have when they don't like the decision. We truly reverse the process. We need to help parents learn to tolerate their children's upset. If we send our children to their room so that they will change their behavior, we expect our children to be upset. That's why we're doing it. We want them to not like what they're experiencing, so they will change whatever the behavior is that we didn't like. That means we have to be able to tolerate upsets. Too often, we've gotten so soft about being willing to tolerate upset that will misconstrue upset as trauma now, Speaker 1 (45:31): Right? Speaker 2 (45:32): Somebody gets upset at a decision. How was traumatized? Well, I was upset. I didn't like it and I threw a fit. Well, it's okay to be emotionally upset. A lot of things are emotionally upsetting. There's supposed to be, Speaker 1 (45:47): It's how you learn already, your emotion, right? Speaker 2 (45:50): Yes. And sometimes they tell us when something is amiss and needs to be fixed, needs to be changed. Some of it's my behavior that needs to be changed or some of it's the culture or the people I'm hanging out with. We need to be able to engage and tolerate upsets. And mostly it should be that the adults can tolerate the upset of their children and say, that's okay. We'll write that out 10 minutes from now, this will wear itself out and will make good decisions and move on. It's okay to be upset Speaker 1 (46:23): Otherwise. It's such a slippery slope, Speaker 2 (46:26): Right? Yes. But you can be upset without throwing a fit. You can be upset without breaking things. You can be upset without screaming at people. How do we learn to tolerate upset in a responsible manner? We expect our kids to be able to do it by six years old when they go to kindergarten that well, it's not recess time. You don't get to go outside. In fact, we're not going to get to go outside today at all because it's raining toward and the wind's blowing. Yes, that is upsetting. I understand, but you do not get to throw chairs over. Well, of course we immediately understand that, except that we have adults all the time getting upset who think that that justifies really awful behavior. Speaker 2 (47:11): You expect your children to behave better than you. And so we need to change our expectations that adults become adults and then we don't burden our children with more responsibility that is actually there is handing our responsibility off to them. We do this at every level in our culture though, and I'll, this isn't unique to co-parenting. This isn't unique to families that have come apart. We want our school children to take on the issues of race in our country when the adults won't sit in and have good conversation. We want our children to take on global climate change when the adults won't do it. We have in so many ways, burdened our children with problem solving about big decisions that we as adults are simply not willing to face our own upset over and buckle down and begin to do problem solving over. Speaker 1 (48:23): It doesn't rocket science. It doesn't rocket science. And I think we just get so sucked into the drama or we don't know what to do when there is drama presented by someone else, say another parent. And I think that stops the problem solving. And we forget, I can be an anchor. I don't need to move around. I don't switch back and forth. I just know what's true. I know we need to keep problem solving. I'll keep making proposals and asking questions, Speaker 2 (48:53): Make proposals, try something, assess it. Maybe we need to improve it. Try again, try again, try again. Speaker 1 (49:00): Very good. Well, Kevin, this has been, I could listen to you all day. You have such a wealth of experience listening to parents and to young people and putting those pieces together. Before we go, is there one piece of advice you would give to parents? Speaker 2 (49:20): Listen, Speaker 1 (49:21): Listen, Speaker 2 (49:22): Listen. Don't burden your children with decisions that aren't theirs. And then listen to what problems they are trying to solve. Because beyond all of the, we're supposed to be the resources to them and listen to their problems they're trying to solve and let them solve them. Be resources to their problem solving. Speaker 1 (49:44): That's it. Be a parent, be an adult. You're the leader. Be a strong leader. All right. Well, thank you, Kevin. Speaker 2 (49:51): Thank you, Megan. It's been a joy to be with you today. Speaker 1 (49:54): I think we could do this a lot. We'll have you back. We'll be talking about a lot more things. I think we'll probably get some questions right from some of the parents on people listening. Speaker 1 (50:11): Listeners, thank you for always listening and the support that you give us, an encouragement that you give us here at High Conflict Institute, and it's all your fault podcast. So thank you for listening today. Next week, bill will be back and we'll be taking a lot of the questions that you've sent in over the last few months. Speaking of that, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. I forgot to mention that. I will put Kevin's link. I'll put your link in to the show notes, has all your contact information. We'll put the Biff for co-parent communication book link in there as well. You can get that anywhere around the world, including audio. So that's kind of cool. So until next time, keep practicing these skills. And if your parent read up on ship, take these words from Kevin's heart and just really think of them. Be kind to yourself. Don't forget to set limits, stay connected while we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. Speaker 3 (51:21): It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.