Latest / The Conscious Divorce / What’s Worth Fighting for in Divorce? Kids, Money, Boundaries & Safety
Transcript
- Justin Milrad: It's 4 40 on a Thursday. A woman I'll call Dana is standing in her kitchen in the clothes she wore to work, holding her phone. Her son is 12 feet away from the counter. Homework, one earbud in. The message says he didn't have his code again. Do you ever send him with anything? No question mark. Dana's been typing for six minutes now. What she's got is four paragraphs. It starts with the coat. By paragraph two, it's a ski trip in 2019. By paragraph four, it's every permission slip, every dentist appointment, every pair of cleats, every birthday gift for someone on his side of the family for 15 years. And she's right. I want to say that before anything else, because I'm not about to make fun of her. She really was the one who carried most of it. It really did cost her something. No one ever said thank you. But she's about to spend all of that on a coat, and her kid is twelve feet away. freeze it right there before she hits send because the kitchen is a significant part of this episode. Dana isn't confused about how she feels. Her feelings are accurate. She's confused about where to aim them. She's about to fire something enormous and completely earned at someone very small in a room where a 12-year-old is tracking her face while pretending to do math. Dana's not a client, by the way. She's a composite. I built her out of a pattern I've watched dozens of times, including in my own life. We're coming back to this kitchen at the end. Dana's gonna do something different. Not something heroic, just different. The one I get some version of every single week is how do I tell what's worth protecting from what I just want to win? One thing before we start. This episode is about coats and calendars and money and the ordinary friction of running two households. If what's happening in your home involves threats, intimidation, or someone controlling you through fear, that's a different category and it needs a different answer. I get to it later in the episode, and I promise I'm not going to tell you to pick your battles when the problem isn't the battle. So why does a coat turn into four paragraphs? Because in divorce, nothing is ever only itself. Every small thing shows up carrying something heavier. And the heavier thing is usually one of these. If I give in, they win. No one hands you a scoreboard when a marriage ends. So you build one out of whatever's lying around. Today, that's outerwear. If I stop arguing, then none of it counted. This is the big one. Conceding feels like agreeing. It feels like signing something that says the last 15 years we're fine. If I say yes once, I'll never get to say no again. Sometimes that's anxiety talking. Sometimes it's a person who's watched every inch turn into a mile, accurately predicting inch number nine. From inside a Thursday afternoon, you usually can't tell which. I've already spent too much to stop. Sunk cost. The $4,000 is gone. It's not coming back, and it's not a reason to spend $4,000 more. It feels like a reason. That's the trap. It sounds reasonable, but it came from them. Watch how many of your hard no's happened before you finish reading the message. Now there's a version of this conversation where I tell you your feelings are cognitive distortions and you should be more rational about your own divorce, and that version is useless. It's also a little insulting. Your suspicion might be completely earned. If you spend 15 years being told you were overreacting, and now the advice is to assume good faith, someone is asking you to switch off an instrument that has served you well. I'm not asking you to trust your ex. I'm asking you to know what you're spending and on what. Here's the image I want you carrying for the next 40 or so minutes. A smoke alarm. When a smoke alarm goes off, that's information. It isn't drama and it isn't an opinion. Something set it off. But the alarm can't tell you whether the house is burning or whether you left the toast in. And those two situations need completely different responses. One means get everyone out, the other means open a window. Your alarm going off is not the problem. Your alarm works. The problem is treating every alarm like a fire. And the other problem, the one no one warns you about, is spending so long telling yourself it's probably just toast that you don't smell the smoke. Anger points at something. It just never tells you what. One more thing, and this is the one people take the longest to hear. The legal process can divide a retirement account, it can set a schedule, it can order support. What it can't do ever under any circumstance is give you an apology. It can't make anyone admit what they did to you. If part of what you're fighting for is acknowledgement, you need to know that in advance because you're asking a system for a product it doesn't make. People spend an enormous amount of money learning that lesson the slow hard way. Let's talk about the three different kinds of hills. Every conflict you're carrying right now is one of three things. Once you can name which one, the right response usually stops being mysterious. I develop these three categories as a teaching tool, not as a legal test, not as a clinical assessment, just a way to stop treating everything the same. Preferences. A real difference in how the two of you do things, where no one is actually harmed. Bedtime is later over there. The food is different. Your daughter comes home in an outfit you'd never have picked. that's doing the work in this category is substantially. Preference is a difference that doesn't substantially threaten safety, money, functioning, or right. Patterns. Something's repeating, or something material is at stake. Lateness every Friday, reimbursements that never come, a parenting schedule that made sense when your kids were six and stopped making sense at 14. This category is the one people get wrong most often. So hear me on it. Patterns do not get emotions. Patterns get a process. And protection. Safety, abuse, coercion, serious neglect, real risk. This category doesn't get a well-crafted text message. It gets a professional and sometimes it gets 911. Now the part that really matters. The same event lands in different categories depending on context. One late pickup is an irritation. Late every Friday for four months until your supervisor starts noticing is a pattern with a paycheck attached. A missing coat is nothing. A kid who keeps coming back without enough clothing in January is not nothing. Different snacks at the other house, preference. Ignoring a documented serious allergy, protection. Meeting a new girlfriend sooner than you want is uncomfortable. A specific, credible concern about who is sleeping in that house is a different animal entirely. Forty dollars in dispute is noise. $2,000 of unreimbursed expense pulled out of a budget that doesn't have $2,000 is a real interest with a real number on it. So what moved the category? Repetition and consequence. That's it. Not the dollar amount, not how furious you are. Some of the most expensive fights I've watched happen over objects worth less than any weekend away. And some of the most consequential things I've watched people sign away, arrived in a boring email on a Tuesday, and never felt urgent at all. Two questions always land right here. If I let it go, does it teach them that they can keep doing it? Sometimes yes. That's the strongest argument against letting things go, and it deserves better than a slogan. So let me be precise. Letting go of a one-off teaches nobody anything. Letting go of a pattern silently, over and over, while getting angrier each time absolutely can set a new baseline. But look at what that means. The answer to a pattern is not a bigger argument. The answer to a pattern is a structure, a written proposal, a documented request, a modification. Arguing harder about instance number nine doesn't fix a pattern. It just makes the instance number nine louder. Second question, and this is one I get in almost every consultation: how do I know if I'm setting a boundary or trying to control them? Cleaner than people expect. A boundary governs you. It says what you will do. I answer scheduling messages once a day in the evening. You can keep that whether or not anyone cooperates. Control governs them in their house. You need to stop letting him watch that. You might be completely right about that show. You still have no mechanism, and you're about to spend real capital on an instruction you can't enforce. A boundary needs next steps. So you can take care of yourself. If your plan requires the other person to agree before it works, it's not a boundary, it's a request. Requests are fine, just know which you put in the message. And does any of this actually reach the kids? There's a 2020 meta-analysis and clinical psychology review that pulled 115 samples, close to 25,000 divorced families. It found associations between conflict, parenting, and how children adjust. The effects were generally small, and this is correlation work. So no one can tell you what happens to your specific child. it suggests is that whatever is going on between the adults tends to travel through the parenting to get to the kid, including through the ways the line between parent and child gets blurry, which is a very technical way of describing a 12-year-old at a kitchen counter, one earbud in watching his mother's face. Quick thing before we get into the money, and it takes 10 seconds. If those three categories were useful, follow the show wherever you're listening, because that's how the next episode finds you instead of you having to go look for it. And if someone you know is stuck in the middle of this, send this to them. Half the people I end up working with come from a friend who forwarded an episode and said almost nothing else. That's the whole ask. Now back to it. Second story. Marcus and Alina spent four months of a divorce on a walnut dining table. they bought it in year two from a guy who made it in his garage. And they paid it off over six months because they didn't have the money. Homework happened at that table. Elaine's father sat at it, the last Thanksgiving before he died. Replacement cost for something similar, maybe $1,100. Neither one of them was being ridiculous. I want that on the record because the lazy version of the story laughs at people for caring about furniture, and the lazy version is wrong. When the shared life goes, the objects are what's left holding the evidence. The table was physical proof that a particular decade happened. Of course, it isn't about the table, but look at the ledger. Some arithmetic and what I want to be clear, these are invented numbers for illustration, not an average and not a prediction. Say the fight adds six hours of professional time across both sides. Say you assume $350 an hour. $2,100 on an $1,100 table. And that's only the invoice. The ledger has other columns. Four months of attention. Every negotiation session that opened with the table didn't open with the parenting schedule. And the productive energy and negotiation runs out. Then there's whatever this does to a working relationship you'll be maintaining for at least another decade. So that's the second image. Conflict is a ledger and money is in one column of it. Now the turn, because this is exactly where the usual advice gets dangerous. Everything I just said is an argument for spending less on a table. It's not an argument for spending less on everything. In that same divorce, in the same four months, there are places where slowing down and paying for real advice is the cheapest thing you'll ever do. Financial information you don't actually have yet. Retirement accounts and debts. Whether you can afford the house after the decree, which is a completely different question from whether you can win the house, support. Any parenting provisions that govern the next eight years, and anything with a deadline or signature on it. California self-help court describes financial disclosure as a required step in divorce, and the reason is straightforward. Informed decisions about assets and obligations depend on it. I'm using California as a labeled example. Your state has its own rules, and your attorney will tell you what they are. Principle crosses every state line anyways. Decline to fight about a table and signing an agreement you don't understand are not the same acts of maturity. same source tells the people to get familiar with the law and their rights right before they decide anything because property, debt, and support all run on different rules. Not so you can argue better, so you know what you're handing over and when you hand something over. But I can't afford another legal fight. I hear that constantly, and the honest answer is that it's rarely a choice between fighting and not fighting. It's usually a choice between paying for information now and paying for consequences later. A consultation is not a fight. One hour with someone who can explain what a retirement division actually does to you is not litigation. Ask about limited scope representation. Ask what your legal aid office handles. Ask a mediator, what's inside the process and what isn't. And if you genuinely can't contest everything, that is precisely the argument for triage. Concentrating your resources isn't surrender, it's strategy. Five questions. Bring them to a lawyer, a mediator, a legal aid attorney, or the right financial professional for anything you're unsure about. what can this process realistically get me on this issue? What information am I still missing? What will this cost and what are my alternatives? If I let go, what exactly am I giving up? And what happens if we don't agree? The fourth one is the only one people skip. It's also the one that matters the most because if I gave it up to keep the peace and I gave it up knowing what it was worth, it produces an identical signature and completely different lives five years out. Last thing on process: settlement and litigation are both tools. Neither one is a moral achievement. Settling doesn't make you the bigger person. Going to court doesn't make you difficult. Anybody telling you one of them is always correct is selling you something. I did a whole episode on choosing the divorce attorney without losing a fortune, and it covers how fees actually pile up. It's linked below, but you can also search on the Conscious Divorce podcast. It also has a guide that can help you choose the right attorney. What I'm after today is a decision that comes before that one, which is deciding what deserves the fees in the first place. Co-parenting, recurring problems need a process, not a performance. The case closes. The conflict doesn't. This is where most of the daily damage happens because now you're not resolving a legal matter. You're operating from something with a business partner you would never have hired. Three scenes. These three fill my calendar. Scene one, the schedule change. I need to switch the weekend of the 19th. Something came up. What arrives half a second later. Here we go. My time is flexible and theirs isn't. That's four times now. What you don't actually know, what came up, whether it's four times or two times, plus you're still angry about it from last year. What your kid needs to know where he's sleeping, to have his stuff, and to not be asked about what he thinks about any of it. If it works for you, the nineteenth works. I'll plan on pick up Sunday at the usual time instead. Let me know if anything changes by Thursday. Done. No scorekeeping. No as always. No lessons attached to the end of it. If you want to track the frequency for a conversation later, track it in a document, not in a text message. If it doesn't work for you, I can't do the 19th, I can do the 26th, or I can do Friday the 17th through Sunday the 19th. If neither works, we keep the regular schedule. A clear no, two real alternatives, and a stated default. Nothing in there requires an argument to resolve. And if this is genuinely the fifth request since June, you've left preference territory. You're in a pattern and patterns get a process. We've had five scheduled changes since June. I'd like to agree on a standard, changes requested at least a week out, and we alternate who absorbs the disruption. Can we settle that by the end of the month or take it to the mediator? That's three of your six messages. Here's the fourth: when you need facts before you answer anything. Before I answer, I need two things: the dates you're proposing for the makeup time and confirmation of who's doing Tuesday pickups that week. Scene two, the money. Soccer registration was $340. Your half is $170. What arrives? She signed her up without asking me, and now I'm getting a bill. What's missing? What your agreement actually says about activity costs and who decides. I'd estimate half the fights in this category happened between two people who have not reread their own parenting plan since the day they signed it. What the kids need to play soccer and to never find out there was a problem. If you owe it, pay it and fix the process going forward. If you don't owe it or you're not sure, I'll take a look at the registration. Our agreement requires both of us to agree on activity costs before signing up. So going forward, please send me the cost before any registration. For this one, send me the receipt and I'll get you my half by Friday. You'll notice what's missing from that. Adjectives. Not because your feelings are illegitimate, because a message with adjectives in it gets a reply with adjectives in it. And you now own a thread instead of a resolution. If it happens again, the fix isn't better wording. The fix is a written expense process. What needs pre-approval, how receipts get sent, what the turnaround is, what happens when someone doesn't pay, what belongs in your agreement, or at minimum in writing between the two of you. Not in your head, where it will keep you up. Scene three, the routines. He says he didn't do any homework all weekend. Hardest one because it's where you're most likely to be right and at least likely to have any mechanism at all. That house runs differently. You cannot make it run like yours. So sort it. One weekend of no homework. That's different between households. Handle it on your side. pattern you can name through, like a grade that's dropped two letters since September, isn't a complaint about someone's parenting anymore. It's a factual conversation about a child's education, which both households already have a stake in. Miss Alvarez emailed about his missing assignments. I'd like us both to be on her email list and to agree that homework gets checked in both houses on Sunday night. Can we try that for a month? Message five, no, since you never. A neutral third party that teaches does the work of saying there's a problem. And it's a small experiment with an end date, which is much easier to say yes to than a permanent concession. Number six is the one people need most. Your ex sends four sentences. Three of them are about your character. One contains an actual logistics question. You answer the logistics question. Pickup is at five on Friday. I'll have her bag packed. You leave the other three alone, not because you're above it, and not as a technique for teaching anyone a lesson. You leave them because there is no version of that argument where you end up feeling better, and because the written record of your answering insults with pickup times quietly becomes worth something over a long enough period. Why do I always have to be the reasonable one? I hear it constantly, and I want to agree with you before I complicate it. It's unfair. You're doing more emotional labor than any other adult, and no one is applauding. But look at the actual menu. You're not choosing between being reasonable and getting fairness. You're choosing between being reasonable and adding a second unreasonable person to your kids' lives. That's the menu. It's a bad menu, but you still have to order off it. What if they ignore the agreement, anyways? Then stop using the agreement as a communication tool and start using it as a legal document. Dates, records, a conversation with your attorney about what enforcement actually looks like in your state, and a realistic picture of what your judge will. And won't act on. What it does doesn't mean holding backs of kids or holding back a payment to even things up. That damages your position and it damages your children. And in all the years I've been doing this, I've never once seen it produce the correction people are hoping for. On the kids themselves, they don't all need the same thing. A five year old needs predictability and a calm handoff. A 10-year-old started keeping score on fairness and will tell you whatever she thinks you want to hear. A 15-year-old has opinions, plans on Saturday, and a very good radar for being used. Which brings me to the distinction I care about most in this entire episode. There is an enormous difference between listening to your child and recruiting your child. Listening sounds like, what would make Sunday night easier for you? Recruiting sounds like, did your dad say anything about the money? One gives a kid a voice, the other hands the kid a job. The American Academy of Pediatrics is blunt on this. Keep children out of disputes. Don't use them as messengers. Don't let them become your emotional support. In practice, that means an adult sends that expense request and a child doesn't carry it. And when you need somebody to tell you you're handling this well, you call a friend, a therapist, or a coach, not your 14-year-old. your child can have a voice without carrying the verdict. And there is a real reason for hope here, as long as we're honest about what it does and doesn't show. There's a long-running randomized trial called the New Beginnings Program. 240 families, kids aged 9 to 12. at the 15-year follow-up, the group that went through the program had a lower rate of internalizing disorders than the control group. That was a structured multi-session program run by trained professionals. It is not evidence that one calm text message changes a child's life. What it does tell you is that what parents do after a divorce is not fixed. It's changeable, and the change can still be showing up 15 years later. if you want the tactical layer on all of this, how to word the hard ones, when to wait, how to stop getting dragged into the reactive exchange. I did an episode with Saul Kennedy, who built a co-parenting app after his own divorce. That's the how. Today is the part that comes first, which is whether this particular thing has earned a message at all. When you pick your battles is the wrong advice. Everything so far assumes a particular situation. Two people who are hurt and tired and sometimes unfair, but who are mostly operating in good faith. That's not everyone's situation, and I'm not gonna pretend otherwise. Some people aren't in conflict. They're in a pattern of control. Money that moves only as leverage. A standing threat to go back to court. Information cut off. Rules that apply to you and never the other way. Consequences when you say no. If that's your life, communicate better and pick your battles. Isn't just unhelpful. It can be harmful because it hands your responsibility for another adult's conduct and it can talk you out of getting help. Here's what I need you to understand. No amount of perfect wording on your end makes another person feel safe or cooperative. That's not about how any of this works. If your strategy depends on someone else eventually behaving reasonably, you don't have a strategy. You have hope. Justice Canada, and I'm naming that as a Canadian policy guidance rather than a US law, draws a distinction that's useful here. It cautions against cooperative parenting arrangements where there's ongoing violence or coercive control. And it's careful about parallel parenting too. Parallel parenting where the two households run with minimal contact and clearly split decisions can help in some high conflict situations. it is not an automatic safety solution after violence. And whether it fits requires an actual assessment by people qualified to make one. Don't let anyone, including me, hand you a parenting structure in place of a safety plan. Now, something people miss. Disengaging emotionally and acting protectively are not opposites. You can go quiet and get advice. You can stop arguing and start documenting. The calm is not the plan. The calm just makes room for the plan. Undocumentation, specifics because people get this wrong in both directions. Keep records that are factual, dated, and proportionate. What happened? When? Who was there? Save the actual messages. Store it somewhere secure and give it to your attorney, not your group chat, and not to the internet. What you don't wanna do, covert recording, which carries legal risk depending on where you live, following someone, provoking an incident so you can capture the reaction, and questioning your children to build a case, which harms the exact person you're trying to protect and cost your credibility with everyone whose opinion will matter later. Related and important. If your child is resisting, going to the other house, that's information and it deserves serious attention. It doesn't arrive with a label on it. A joint statement from the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges recommend examining multiple possible explanations for parent-child contact problems instead of assuming one. Family violence, parenting behavior in either home, the conflict itself. Where the kid is developmentally, something at school that has nothing to do with either of you. Please don't grab a label off the internet in either direction. Bring it to someone qualified to assess it. Two practical notes, and then I'll move on. If mediation is on the table and there's a history of violence, ask about safety procedures before you're in the room. California's court, again, as a labeled example, describes separate meetings in domestic violence cases, and they caution that what you disclose may not stay private from the other parent. That's a question to ask in advance, not to discover afterwards. And if this is your situation, local domestic violence services and a family law attorney in your state, the National Domestic Violence Hotline has practical guidance on supporting children and on safety planning. If you're in immediate danger, that's a 9-1-1 call, not a podcast decision. If addiction is part of your picture, I did a full episode on co-parenting with a recovering addict. Safety planning, warning signs, documentation, went escalate, also linked below. Four letters, 90 seconds, run it up before you respond to anything that has your pulse up. I call it the Hill check. And it's a reflection aid I built for clients. It isn't validated, it isn't a score, and it doesn't outrank urgency, deadline, or safety issues. You act first and reflect later. H, harm. What's the actual or foreseeable harm? And it is this isolated, repeated, or urgent? Note what I didn't ask. I didn't ask how angry you are. Different instrument, different reading. I, interest. What am I protecting here? Safety, stability, money, time, dignity, a kid's need to legal right, one word if you can manage it. Then the uncomfortable follow-up. Am I also asking this interaction for an apology? If you are, fine, you're human. Just pull that piece out and set it aside because it is never once being delivered by a text message about a code. L, long view. What happens if I act? If I wait, if I let it go? Is it cumulative? Can I undo it? Longtime listeners know I use a five-year filter on the big structural decisions. Same instinct. This is the filter shrunk down to the text message size. L, least escalation that still protects. What's the smallest response that actually handles a real issue? And I want to be careful with this last one because people hear least and think do nothing. Sometimes the smallest adequate response is saying nothing. Sometimes it's two lines, and sometimes it's calling a lawyer this afternoon. Least escalation doesn't mean least action. It means no wasted force. Three cases, watch how the same four questions produce three completely different answers. One. Your ex bought your eight-year-old the sneakers, you told her she'd have to wait for. harm, once, essentially zero. The interest, if you're honest, is dignity. You're the one who says no, and then they get to be the one who says yes, and that stings. Five years from now, nobody remembers these sneakers, including your daughter. So the smallest adequate response is nothing. You say nothing. You let her be thrilled about her new shoes. Release it and notice how much lighter your week feels when you stop carrying it around. Two, four months of Friday, pickups running 45 minutes late. You've been late to work three times. Real harm, repeated with your job attached to it. The interest is time and financial stability. And nothing about the last four months suggests this corrects itself. Smallest response that actually protects that. Not a fight, a process. A short written proposal, fixed exchange time, 15 minute raise period, agreed, alternate arrangements past that. If it doesn't change, it goes to the mediator or to your attorney has a modification issue. This is the one people under respond to. They complain about it for months and never once put a proposal in writing. Three, twice now. Your co-parent has shown up at an exchange in a condition that alarmed you. Your child mentioned it. This one skips the messaging entirely. Document what you saw factually both times. Call your attorney. Ask what your options are in your state. Don't confront anyone in a driveway. Don't interrogate your kid and don't post about it. Least escalation still means immediate professional involvement here, because when the issue is safety, the smallest adequate response is still a big one. One more question before we close this out, and I respect anyone who asks it. What if I'm the one escalating? Quick self-check. Over the last month, how many messages did you send that ran longer than four sentences? How many had always or never in them? How many did you write, delete, and rewrite more than twice? And how many went out after nine at night? The last one isn't a character flaw, it's biology. Nobody's judgment is at their best at eleven PM. Write it, sleep, read it in the morning. You'll delete about half of them and you'll not have lost a thing. Okay. If you're somewhere you can close your eyes, do that. If you're driving, just listen and come back to this later. Pick one conflict you're carrying right now. Not the biggest one, the one that's been running in the background all week. Ask, what would it cost you to be right about it? Money, time, attention, and the version of you your kids get on a Thursday afternoon. Now ask what you're actually protecting and whether what you are about to do protects it. That gap between what you're protecting and what your response would actually accomplish is where most of the damage in a divorce lives. It's also the single most fixable thing on the list. Here's what looks different. So Dana, the coat, four paragraphs, kid at the counter. Here's what different looks like. And I want to warn you in advance that it isn't inspiring. She deletes the four paragraphs. She types, I'll put a second coat in his bag. Phone face down on the counter. Then she opens a note on her laptop and writes one line with a date on it because this is the third time this month. And if it's a pattern, she wants the dates. And she decides that on Saturday, when no one is standing in a kitchen at 4:40, she'll send one message proposing that a coat and a pair of shoes just live at each house permanently. That's it. That's a whole change. A two-line reply, a dated note, and a separate plan for the recurring thing. Her ex doesn't apologize. Her ex doesn't change. Her ex may well send something unpleasant. On Saturday. None of that is required for this to work, which is exactly the point, because any plan that needs your ex to become a better person isn't a plan. Then she looks up and asks her son about the math. if you've already had the argument in front of your kids, and most of us have, here's a repair. It's short for a reason. Hey, you heard me on the phone with your dad yesterday and I was angry. That wasn't about you, and it's not something you should have had to listen to. I'm working on it. You don't have to do anything about it. You take responsibility, you don't explain the marriage, and you don't ask them to tell you that it's okay. The last part matters more than the apology does. I get one more question almost every week. Can I move on without forgiving them? Yes, forgiveness isn't a prerequisite and it doesn't have a deadline. What you need is a functional plan and your attention back. If forgiveness shows up later, it'll come on its own schedule and it'll be for you to determine, anyways. So one thing to do today: take one conflict you're carrying and put it in a category: preference, pattern, or protection. Just one. If it's a preference, drop it tonight and notice what frees up. If it's a pattern, write one short factual proposal this week. If it's protection, make the call today. And about that hill. The expression assumes that if you're in a war and the only question left is which piece of ground you're willing to die on. I'd rather you ask a different question because you're not defending territory. You're building something. So ask, what am I trying to protect and what would actually protecting it look like? Some hills you walk away from, and some you plant your feet on and don't move an inch. And standing there is the most protective thing you'll ever do for your children. The skill is telling them apart. Now you've got a way. And that's the episode. I'm Justin Millrad. I'm a certified divorce coach. I have an MBA from EMRY, a background in financial planning, and I spent five years as CEO of an outpatient mental health and addiction treatment program I co-founded. Here's a quick note before I let you go. This episode is educational and it's not legal, financial, medical, or mental health advice. I'm a certified divorce coach. I'm not an attorney, and I'm not a licensed therapist. Divorce law varies by state, and every situation is different. So please talk to a qualified attorney, financial professional, or licensed mental health provider about your circumstances. And if you're in immediate danger, contact local emergency services. If this was useful, the work behind it lives in a few places. U2.0, Divorce a Better Way Forward, is a framework of reclaim, reboot, and become. The U2.0 workbook is the exercises that go with it. And the co-parenting playbook, which I wrote with Jill Kaufman, goes much deeper into everything in the middle of this episode. All of it is available at www.reclaimandreboot.me. as well as on amazon.com. And if you're sitting with a decision you can't get clear on, book a free 30-minute consultation with me at www reclaim and reboot.me forward slash booking. We'll look at what you're actually facing, separate what matters from what's noise, and we'll leave you with a plan. No pitch, no pressure. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.