Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / The New Ways for Families Program
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to us all Your Fault on True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those with someone who may have a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host Bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:23): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:24): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California, where we focus on training, consulting, and educational programs and methods. All to do with high conflict. First, a couple of notes. If you have a question about a high conflict situation, please send it to podcast high conflict institute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast where you'll also find all the show notes and links. Please give us a rate of review and tell your friends, colleagues, or family about us, especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We are always grateful to you, our listeners. Speaker 2 (01:06): Hi everybody, this is Bill Eddie, and I'm appearing today without my co-host Megan Hunter because we are going to Scotland this week and she's already there. What I want to tell you about is briefly about what we're doing over there with our New Ways for Families Program and also tell you we're going to be going to a more, uh, varied schedule throughout the summer this year. So today will be the last regular weekly program and today will be an abbreviated program because I also need to head to the airport so I can get to Scotland for our program there. So first, let me tell you a little bit what we're doing, our New Ways for Families. Uh, method has been around since 2009. It's been slow and growing, but it is definitely growing, especially since the pandemic. It's a program designed for potentially high conflict parents in separation and divorce. Speaker 2 (02:20): And what we developed this, that was the second year of High Conflict Institute 2009. And what we developed is a method of teaching skills to potentially high conflict parents, whether or not they're high conflict. And the four big skills that we teach are managed emotions, flexible thinking, moderate behavior, and checking yourself. These, if you've been listening to the podcast, happen to be the opposite of the characteristics of high conflict personalities, which tend to have unmanaged emotions, all or nothing thinking extreme behaviors and a preoccupation with blaming others instead of looking at themselves and their own behavior. So what we're trying to do is calm the conflict in high conflict family court cases, and we've been actually having a fair amount of success. It's been studied small studies really up to now, but in Scotland they've been using one of our three models for teaching these skills. Speaker 2 (03:37): And that is the online class, which is 12 sessions, self-directed by parents plus three coaching sessions by a, a live coach either on virtual platform like Zoom or in person. And so they did a pilot project with about 50 uh, families, and it's been so successful that they're taking the program nationwide. And so that's what Megan and I will be in Scotland, uh, talking about, talking to people there and helping them launch that the program we will be meeting in their parliament building with some parliament members, uh, although it's not a parliament session, but we're very excited to be launching this in one of the smaller size countries because they're able to be more active and initiative taking little, little less complicated than in large countries such as the United States. However, we have had a fair amount of growth and interest in the United States. We've been in, I think, 12, uh, family court systems in the Orange County Family Court system, California. Speaker 2 (04:59): The judges have ordered over 6,000 parents to take our online class. And the results from that have been very encouraging. The feedback from parents that have gone through this is that it's improved their parenting relationship somewhat or a lot. I believe it's over 75% and that it's improved their parent-child relationship. Over 90% of parents say somewhat or a lot. So we really see a lot of potential with this skills training approach. Now I wanna mention a little more about the approach. So the skills that we teach, the four big skills of managed emotions, flexible thinking, moderate behavior, and checking yourself include three very specific skills that can make a huge difference in potentially high conflict cases. One of them is our Biff method of emails, brief, informative, friendly and firm. And for those listening who've been involved in family court cases as a professional or as a parent, you know that hostile emails are very common. Speaker 2 (06:20): And if you're a reasonable parent and you're trying to respond to an angry hostile email, you may wonder, do I have to get down in the mud and say nasty things back? Or is there a way to stay above that and to stay reasonable? And our Biff method helps people do that brief, informative, friendly, and firm. Typically a paragraph with straight information, no arguments, emotions, judgments, defenses, a friendly tone like thanks for telling me your concerns and firm and that it ends the hostile conversation. And we have a, uh, podcast on Biff that we did a while back. You can look that up if you're interested. And we also have three little Biff books. One is the basic Biff Quick Responses to High Conflict People. Then we have one Biff for co-parent communication. And then we have Biff at work because the workplace is also a place where the skills we teach have been found to be particularly useful. Speaker 2 (07:33): That's the, the skills that we're teaching, the the methods. There's that online class. Then there's the online class with coaching, and then there's the counseling method, which is particularly helpful for families that may be facing parental alienation or domestic violence or child abuse to help the family kind of work back together again to get on the same page. And the counseling method, we've gotten good feedback even in an alienation case where 15 year old girl hadn't seen her father for a year, but when each parent goes through the counseling, they each get six sessions learning the same big skills that we talk about. And then they have three parent child sessions. So the counseling method address can address alienation. And in this one case, the girl and her father reconciled in the first parent child meeting because they focused on skills not on the past. Speaker 2 (08:43): It's also been helpful with child abuse case where a child's been nervous about seeing the parent and can see the parent's growth in change and, and how they can work together might be supervised, maybe not. Anyway, so that's the three methods and the three specific skills I was telling you. The B email is taught in all those methods. We also teach calming yourself with encouraging statements. It's included in all of the methods. And lastly, we teach a system of making proposals in three steps. One person makes a proposal, like, you know, you pick up the child at school at three and bring them to the other parent's house or whatever it is, the other then ask questions about it. And high conflict people usually respond to proposals with a criticism. That's a stupid proposal. I can't believe you ever said that, or Why didn't you make that proposal a year ago? We could have saved $50,000. So the idea is that by going through these three steps, it calms the discussion and actually helps people be productive. And it helps potentially high conflict parents be the decision makers in their cases for most or all of the decisions. So those three specific skills, the Biff communication, the encouraging statements, the making proposals cover a wide number of issues that come up in high conflict situations. Speaker 2 (10:31): So that's the skills we teach, the three methods, counseling online, class online plus coaching. And we're very excited to be heading off to Scotland and making that, uh, a reality first country that will be nationwide with our methods. So I wanna wrap up by just saying we're going to be very busy this summer, and so we won't have a weekly podcast every week. We'll probably be every two or three weeks. So just stay in touch with us and as Megan says, try to find the missing piece, p e a c e. And the way to do that is by practicing these skills and helping others. Thanks so much for sticking with us with our podcast Best Wishes. Speaker 1 (11:32): 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 finds a show, show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing Speaker 3 (11:52): That. Our show.