Latest / The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast / 10. Navigating High-Conflict Separation: The Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid (Part 2)

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10. Navigating High-Conflict Separation: The Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid (Part 2) · The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to today's episode.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Today's episode is part two of the top ten mistakes that I see people making when they are navigating high conflict, separation, divorce and co-parenting situations.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: The first five mistakes that I see people making were covered in part one of this episode.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Let's start off now with the remaining five.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: So number six over-consuming all the things in an attempt to diagnose or understand the abusive, controlling, high conflict behaviour of your ex.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I agree with learning a little bit more about behaviour patterns, personality traits, those sorts of things within the context of risk management and formulating a strategy.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: This is particularly important if you're going to be negotiating, for example, a financial settlement or parenting arrangements in the context of mediation or something along those lines.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: It can be worthwhile having a little bit of a profile and a deeper understanding of the behaviour of your ex-partner and what are the things that could be contributing to their behaviour patterns and to their overall personality.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: However, the mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they just go way down that rabbit hole far too much.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: They start consuming all the things about, for example, narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, and this is something that I've covered in past episodes and will probably come up again in future episodes, and that is a tendency to diagnose abusers with a personality disorder or other mental illness.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Now, the reality is that, just like the general population, most abusers do not have a personality disorder.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: They may have higher levels of narcissism than other people, but that in and of itself does not mean that they have a personality disorder.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: And going down that path of attempting to diagnose your ex really just takes up so much of your time and energy and, in my opinion, is ultimately not helpful, particularly if you're then going down that pathway of trying to determine, well, what sort of narcissist are they.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Are they a grandiose narcissist?
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Are they a covert narcissist?
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Maybe they've also got antisocial personality disorder thrown in for good measure, or some other cluster B personality disorder, or maybe bipolar.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: It's also become really common, and this will probably be another episode all on its own.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Replacing diagnosing someone with narcissistic personality disorder has actually turned into starting to diagnose abusive people with ADHD and blaming ADHD traits for their control on abuse.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: This is a pattern that I'm starting to see, and, again, people can make the mistake of going down the rabbit hole of attempting to diagnose someone with ADHD.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: It's a mistake.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: It's taking up way too much of your time and your brain power, and I understand it to a certain extent, because you really want to try and understand the behaviour of this person that you were in a relationship with and perhaps had children with, and it's really hard to comprehend why someone is behaving the way that they are behaving.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: It can be hard to make space for the thought that perhaps that person really is feeling that they are entitled to control you.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: They can be something that can be really really challenging to understand, but please remember that if you were able to fully understand their behaviour and why they were doing what they were doing, that would be a problem, because that would potentially mean that you were an abusive person or maybe that you have a personality disorder as well.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: The fact that you don't fully understand their behaviour and what's driving their behaviour is probably a good thing, and one of the reasons that my clients work with me is because I'm able to support them to unpack the behaviour and the personality of their ex-partner, but in a way that's helpful, in a way that is tied to risk management and mitigating that, and to also formulate a strategy, particularly when we're talking about mediation, hoping to come to some kind of agreement that doesn't involve the court process, or even once court proceedings have started.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: But just going down that rabbit hole and over-consuming all the things is usually not helpful.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: The same can be said for going down the rabbit hole and consuming all the things when it comes to parenting or anything else, and you may recognise that this is part of your personality, maybe.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: When you start feeling anxious about something, perhaps one of the ways that you soothe yourself is to try and understand all the things and to consume all the stuff.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: You only have so much time, and over-consumption is not a good use of your time and your energy and or any other resource.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Number seven is magical thinking, and by magical thinking I mean that you are continuing to engage with your ex-partner much the same way that you did when you were still in a relationship with them.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: This is very common when the relationship between you involved ongoing coercive control and other forms of abuse.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: It's common for the relationship dynamics to actually not change very much, even after separation, even after you're no longer living under the one roof, and part of the dynamic that can be persistent over time is you walking on eggshells, you acquiescing continually to the demands of your ex-partner, you continually giving in because that was how you kept yourself safe and if you have children, that's how you kept your children safe when you were in the relationship and when you were all living under the one roof and this has become a habit for you.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Your ex-partner likely expects compliance and when you comply, perhaps they calm down for a little while and that feels good.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: You know that feels good to our brains.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: We get a rush of good feeling, hormones and chemicals in our brain when somebody stops being abusive and starts being remotely reasonable and that reinforces that behaviour that we're doing.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: So we get that pattern in place because it's kept us safe and also because we like it when they're being nice to us.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: So we learn that giving in and that can also be called forning.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: We've got fight, flight, faint, freeze and forn and the forning part is giving in, acquiescing, agreeing to things that we really don't like.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: You know people pleasing behaviour, having little to no boundaries with our ex-partner, but it goes hand in hand with the magical thinking that we continue giving in to them, thinking that eventually they are going to calm down, eventually they are going to become a reasonable human being, a decent co-parent, and everyone's going to be able to create a new life and everything's going to be fine.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: And that's just not the case.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: What you're seeing in your ex-partner is the same behaviour that they had within the relationship and that's not likely to change, particularly if you're still responding in much the same way.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: And part of my role in working with clients is helping them to recognise the need for boundaries and supporting them to put those boundaries in place, even to the extent of helping them to word communication to their ex-partners as part of the implementation of those boundaries.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: So thinking that you being nice to your partner, that you wording a message in a particular way, that you giving in to requests to change the care arrangements or whatever the situation, is you thinking that by doing that, that he's eventually or she is going to eventually become nice, be nice to you, and that it's going to result ever in any kind of permanent change?
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: This is totally magical thinking.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: You know who this person is, they've shown you who they are.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Their enduring behaviour patterns are a reflection of their personality and that's not going to change.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: So for you to experience a different dynamic, for things to change for you and for your kids, you actually need to be the one to take action, and if this is something that you're struggling with, I really encourage you to seek support from a professional who has lived experience and who has the capacity to guide you with this process.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Number eight in the top 10 mistakes that I see people making while they're navigating a high conflict, separation and divorce and co-parenting situation is the tendency to communicate with their ex-partner way too much, and that often takes the form of continually defending themselves unnecessarily, particularly if you're just getting a barrage of false accusations.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Some false accusations need to be responded to strategically, and that's part of my role with my clients, but it's really important that you don't get bogged down in ongoing and endless justifications and defending your position endlessly.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Controlling people and abusive people, high conflict people and absolutely personality disordered people Love engaging with you about literally anything.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: They will make up anything and everything.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: They will bring up stuff from years ago just to engage with you, because they love conflict.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: They enjoy it.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: They love the conflict, the chaos, the confusion.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: They love the fact that you're chasing your tail trying to defend yourself or to explain a decision or to justify yourself.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: They love it.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: They'll keep it going endlessly.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: A new continuing to engage with this is a problem on a number of different levels.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: One it makes it really difficult for you to maintain firm boundaries and for you to not be continually sucked into the conflict when you're continuing to engage with them on this level.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: It keeps that dynamic that was present in the relationship.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: It keeps that dynamic going on.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: So them accusing you of something and you feeling like you have to justify and defend, and all of the things.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: This makes it really difficult for you to maintain focus on your side of the street.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: It makes it hard for you to move on in a positive, proactive way for you and your kids.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: It makes it hard for you to show up in your life as the best version of you and, if you've got children, it makes it almost impossible for you to be showing up as the best parent you can be, the parent that you want to be and that they need you to be.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: It's impossible for you to do that when you're constantly dealing with the communication and when you're responding to the communication in a really overly involved way with your ex.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Another reason that over-involvement in the communication is a bad thing is that from the outside looking in, it can be really really difficult to work out who is responsible for the conflict.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: This is one reason why it's so common for lawyers and court professionals to assume that both people are the problem, and that's because, when you look at the back and forth messages and when there's justifications and defences and then it's back and forth and back and forth From an outsider's perspective it really does look like both people are to blame.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: It looks like both people are engaging in and continuing the conflict, and the reality is that that is what's going on.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: When you're continually replying to your ex, when you're continually defending yourself or over-explaining because this is something that high conflict people oftentimes do as well they pretend that they don't understand, they pretend that they don't remember, they pretend that a conversation or an agreement never happened, because they want you to spend time having to re-explain something or to give your version of events.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: And from the outside, looking in, this really does just look like you participating in the conflict, and it looks like that because that's actually what it is.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: When you're engaging on that level, you are keeping the conflict going, and if this is something that you're struggling with, that I really suggest that you reach out for support, particularly if your situation is currently in the court system or you think that that's a possibility.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Not having really firm boundaries around communication can negatively impact your outcome, and this is another one of the ways that I support clients.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Number nine is putting the kids in the middle of the conflict.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: If we share children with a high conflict, controlling or abusive person, that's a really tough situation.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We need to be keeping our kids in the centre of our decision making without putting them in the middle of the conflict, and that can be very, very challenging, because controlling, abusive and high conflict people will often use the children in some way, shape or form after separation.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: They will often tell the children a whole heap of inappropriate things about you, about the situation.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: They will often try to convince them of things that aren't true.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: They will create a narrative that paints themselves as the victim and you as being the perpetrator.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: They will continually try to paint you in a negative light, and that's really difficult to navigate.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: But what we must never do as the protective parent is to put our kids in the middle of the conflict.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So what that means is we should never hold our children responsible for our own emotions.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Your children are going to say things to you that they've heard from the other parent.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: They will say things to you that are hurtful.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: They will say things to you that you cannot believe that they could possibly believe about you.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: They will say things to you that will leave you wondering why on earth they would repeat something that you would think they should know is hurtful.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: But please know that they are a victim in this situation.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: If they're being told negative things about you by their other parent, that's abusive, that's harmful to them, and they're not responsible for keeping you happy.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: They're not responsible for protecting your emotions.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: You're responsible for theirs.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: And learning how to navigate those situations when things come out of your kids' mouths and it hurts, that's a skill that you need to learn, and also you need to grow your capacity for tolerating that in a mature way.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: You need to grow your capacity for not making your children responsible for how you feel.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Part of not putting our kids in the middle also includes not involving our kids in the conflict by way of making them carry messages to and from the other parent.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: So please do not use your kids to pass on communication to the other parent.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: This can be really common, because the reality is, if you're separated from someone, who's high conflict, who's controlling, who's abusive.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: If they're continuing to abuse you post-separation.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Understandably, you don't want to communicate with that person.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: I've been there, I lived it.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: But it's not okay for us to be passing messages back to the other parent via the kids.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: And if the other parent persists in doing that, and if the kids are coming to you with messages supposedly from the other parent, it's really important that you don't send the response back via the children.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Rather, you can say thanks for letting me know.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: This is a parenting issue and I'm going to communicate directly with Dad in this example.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: I'm going to communicate directly with Dad about that.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, you don't need to worry about that or pass any more messages.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: So it's important to shut that down when you can, even if the other parent continually persists.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: It's also important that if your children start coming to you and they're resisting spending time with the other parent or even refusing to spend time with the other parent, it's very important that you don't put the responsibility back on to them to communicate that.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: So if you've experienced any form of control or abuse from your ex-partner, please know that your kids will have as well.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Without a shadow of a doubt, children cannot be expected to tell an abusive or controlling parent that they don't want to spend time with them.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Your children need to be able to view you as the safe and protective parent.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: They need to know that you are their last line of defence and if they come to you with that information, it's important that you support them with that and that you don't put it back on them to pass that message along Again.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: I know from first-hand experience how challenging that is and there are ways to best manage that situation that I won't go through in this episode.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: However, if this is a situation that you're navigating, I really do urge you to get in touch, because it is something that can be managed in a way that is much more supportive of your kids' best interests and wellbeing.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: And number 10 in our top 10 mistakes that people make when navigating a high conflict, separation, divorce and co-parenting situation is not asking for help.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Not asking for help and not seeking support or waiting a really long time before they do so.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: If you've experienced coercive control and other forms of abuse in a relationship, you need support either prior to separation or just after separation, because the likelihood that you're going to experience ongoing conflict is really high.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: And if you're concerned about your ability to advocate appropriately for yourself whether we're talking about obtaining a fair financial settlement or whether you share children with a high conflict abusive person it is so very important that you have high quality support and guidance throughout this process.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: A number of my clients have come to me after they've already been a fair way down the track, so they've already attended, perhaps, mediation.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: For some people, they're already in the court system and, whilst the support that I provide is still able to be very beneficial once you get down that track, unfortunately we can't go back in time and fix mistakes that were made earlier on in that process.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: So if you're navigating something that involves post-separation abuse, I really do encourage you to reach out sooner rather than later, because a major mistake that I see people make is that they just simply wait too long.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: They trust that everything's going to be okay, and sometimes that's not the case.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you've either done something in the past or you're doing something currently that is going to inadvertently hurt your outcome.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you might not be receiving the best quality legal representation or legal advice and again, whilst I don't give legal advice, I've worked with a lot of lawyers.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: I know a lot of lawyers and I obviously work with a lot of clients who are working with various lawyers, and so I have a fairly good understanding of what it is that you should be expecting from your lawyer when you're navigating a high conflict situation, particularly if it looks like your situation is heading towards court.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: One of the main reasons that I do the work that I do now is because when I was navigating my own high conflict separation, divorce and co-parenting situation, I felt really alone.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone else who understood exactly what it was that I was navigating, and I really had to struggle along and try and make sense of things myself for a long period of time and I made mistakes along that journey and whilst ultimately I was able to obtain a positive outcome, it took me far longer than what it would have if I'd had high quality support from someone with lived experience.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: So if you or someone you know is struggling at this point in time experiencing post separation abuse, or perhaps hasn't yet begun that process of separation, or maybe you're well down the road, it's never too late to get support, and I would also go so far as to say that it's never too early.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Of all the women that I work with.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: One of the most common things that I hear is that they wished that they had started working with me earlier.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: They wished that they'd found out that divorce coaching was a thing in Australia earlier, because they recognise how incredibly valuable that specialist support is.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me on this episode.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: If you're navigating post separation abuse, I see you, I hear you.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: You're doing a great job.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: I'll talk to you soon.