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Recognising (the dynamics of) high conflict divorce

I recently found a fascinating article by Dr Kathy J. Marshack about high-conflict divorce. Although she primarily talks about high conflict divorce with a narcissist, I think her ideas are broadly applicable to other high-conflict personality types.

For me, what was interesting wasn’t so much the pointers on recognising a high-conflict divorce as such (I think most of us know when it’s happening to us!) but the insight it offers into the contribution the lower-conflict spouse makes to the conflict dynamic by playing “nice” and aspiring desperately to co-parent “properly” – even when their ex-spouse is simply not equipped to do so.

In effect, these lower-conflict Care Bear types fuel the fire in their own way by insisting on playing by an inappropriately win-win philosophy, and that’s something we seldom recognise.

Drawing attention to this dynamic is not about blaming the victim; instead, it’s about reminding us of the futility of continuing to remain attached to ineffective strategies even when they’re clearly not working.

If madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, maybe spouses who avoid getting or enforcing court orders and try again and again to reach consensus decisions with high-conflict exes are perpetrating their own version of crazy without even knowing it.

(That being said, I’m not for a moment suggesting that egalitarian ex-spouses attempt to emulate high-conflict tactics… Face it, as well as it being a negative and damaging approach, you’re simply not as good at anger, manipulation and confrontation as a naturally high conflict person!)

It seems to me that one of the major problems is when the egalitarian ex-spouse feels responsible for the rugged shape of the high-conflict co-parenting landscape. They feel like the level of conflict and lack of cooperation reflects badly on them, making them one of those parents who seem unable to “put the kids first”.

Lacking innate understanding of how high-conflict people work, they are sure that by continuing to set good examples of compromise and negotiation and applying the Golden Rule, their ex-spouse will eventually “see the light”, recognise the benefit to the kids and reform their ways. They try valiantly to be the perfect co-parent, perhaps trying to finally “earn” the approval and acknowledgement of their efforts that were never forthcoming during their marriage.

Or they are held hostage by fear of the kids being recruited and alienated by the other parent and become so ginger about not exacerbating the craziness or putting the kids in the middle that they end up a puppet to the whims and agendas of the high conflict parent.

There’s no easy answer, but the way forward is likely to require egalitarian types to have a radical rethink of how they deal with their high conflict ex-spouses, and insist strongly and firmly on appropriate boundaries and structure regarding communication, decision-making and interaction with the ex.

Instituting low-contact communication and adopting a parallel parenting instead of co-parenting model based on detailed parenting orders may offer other ways to mitigate the impact of your very own high-conflict ex-spouse.

Good luck.

From Recognising High Conflict Divorce:

“While controlling people are narcissistic and do not understand you, the other ingredient for a high conflict divorce is the narcissist’s counterpart, a person who works for equality in relationships. This type of person is often very nurturing and self-effacing, and has a strong sense of justice. Thus while the controlling person works toward a win-lose solution to problems, the nurturing or egalitarian person works for a win-win solution. According to Patricia Evans, this places the win-win person at a disadvantage. While the egalitarian person keeps empathizing with the controlling person in an effort to create a win-win solution, the controlling person views this behavior as weak and an opportunity to conquer.

Essentially the controlling person creates a power struggle with the unwitting egalitarian. This keeps the egalitarian “on the hook,” so to speak because they can’t seem to realize that they will never create a win-win solution with a controlling person. Sadly it appears to be true that narcissists marry egalitarians and create high conflict divorces all too often.”

Visit Recognising High Conflict Divorce for the rest of the article.

Warning signs for stepmothers

Ask a stepmother what advice she’d give to another woman deciding whether to get involved with a man with kids, and the cliché is that she’ll screech:

Run! Run like the wind!

I’ve been tempted to trot this one out couple of times, like when a close friend told me that her new guy had her stay at his house for three days without ever admitting to his full-custody thirteen-year-old daughter that they were dating. And that he referred to this same daughter as “My Special Princess”.

[pukes]

Mostly, though, I resist sounding the fire alarm in these situations. Despite the challenges of stepfamily life, I’m very happy with the Lovely Man, and the Boys certainly keep life interesting.

In any case, we all know what the honeymoon phase of a new relationship feels like; warnings, however justified and well-intended, tend to fall bounce right off the warnee – and generally, rebound to hit the warner schmack! in the face.

Six months in, the warnee may well realise that indeed, it’s not ideal that her partner douses his breakfast cereal in scotch each morning, or has a penchant for wearing garments made from the pelts of stray cats.

Six weeks in, though, when the lust – ahem! – love is still coursing unhindered by pesky reality, funny little details like that get dismissed as merely eccentric, and the warner is written off as simply small-minded/intolerant/jealous.

Nonetheless, here is my list of five things you might want to pay careful attention to as a new/potential stepmother.

Scrape off the love scales and look around.

Look again, harder.

If more than a couple of these are going down, consider keeping your exit strategy dust-free and in good order, because you might need it.

Or at least have a good stepfamily counsellor at the ready.

(Cue Jaws music…)

1. Many months – or more – into the new relationship, things are serious, you’re talking marriage/moving in, but he seems ultra-resistant to the idea of you meeting his kids.

Actually, he seems terrified. He may have made and broken a series of promises with excuses like:

We’ll just wait until the kids graduate kindergarten/high school/college/finally get all their wisdom teeth through/finish learning to fly.

You’ve got to wonder, is he afraid you’ll morph into a fairytale wicked stepmother? Does he feel like he doesn’t truly deserve to have a partner or be happy? What’s really happening here?

There’s no real consensus about the appropriate time to introduce a new partner, except that it probably shouldn’t be before you are seriously committed to each other and have spent enough months together to genuinely know what being committed to each other means, the bads as well as the goods.

For many men, though, there is so much fear of and for their kids rolled up in the “all-important” introduction that they leave the woman they say they want to build a life with feeling like a dirty little secret – for many months or even years. Not a good look.

2. On the other hand, be wary if he wants you to instantly meet the kids.

(Especially if there’s talk of babysitting! Does this guy want a wife/mother replacement or a partner?)

Flattering as it may seem, your trouble-on-two-legs sirens should be blaring if he talks in any way that implies you will be a “new Mummy” to his children, or make up to them for alleged poor mothering by his ex.

Why? Because anyone who thinks their child’s biological parent can be replaced so seamlessly is not only deluded, but almost certain to expect that you’ll love his kids “like your own”.

Holy Recipe for Misery and Disaster, Batman!

3. A related concern would be where you’ve met the kids, maybe even moved in and he wants you to take charge of discipline.

Orangutans at the local zoo could tell you this isn’t going to work, but it’s incredible how many women launch in, determined to shine the Holy Light of Reasonable Boundaries on an out-of-control, rule-free-zone stepfamily.

As Wednesday Martin says in Stepmonster, this is a nothing but a cop-out. In theory, he wants his kids to benefit from better discipline but only if he doesn’t have to be the bad guy. He’s sacrificing your chance of a good relationship with the kids to maintain his own parenting comfort zone.

And worst of all? When you try to implement the agreed consequences, he’ll almost certainly trot out the sensational climax of the Daddy Rocks Popularity Revue by over-ruling your efforts because you’re being “way too tough” on his little darlings.

4. Another valid basis for a freak-out is if you notice that when his ex says “jump!”, your bloke says “how high?” (or, even worse, “off what?”)

Sometimes it’s because he’s desperate to keep the peace; more often, I suspect, it’s because whatever his legal status, his emotional divorce is incomplete. Sure, he might be keen to start again, but he hasn’t really left his marriage behind – guilt, unprocessed sorrow and unacknowledged loss tangle together, tying him emotionally to his ex.

Not precisely what you signed up for, although it may not be the end of the world.

If it doesn’t wind up quickly, though, you risk blinking out of the love haze to find that your relationship is a hotbed of emotional adultery, with all the consequences that entails for intimacy, for trust, financially and in a million other ways.

5. Finally, if the man you’re seeing seems to want his kids’ or ex-wife’s seal of approval on his decision to date you, be very, VERY afraid.

For instance, if his teenage daughter boasts about having had power of veto over his past girlfriends, or a four-year-old seems to be calling the shots on how long you are “allowed” stay out at dinner….

Or if he tells you his ex has a “No skanks around the kids” policy (a verbatim quote from a separated mum I know – quelle horreur!) and insists on popping you into the hot seat to face twenty [thousand] questions from her on what was meant to be your fourth or even your fourteenth date….

Run! Run like the wind!

Ruuuuuuuunnn – while you still can!

What other warning signs should a new stepmother/woman dating a man with kids keep in mind?

Just asking

Does anyone else find it really, really difficult when your partner wants you to look through photos of his kids as babies that were taken when his first family was intact?

Mixed in are inevitably photos of the kids’ mum, posed with them and smiling, and I see them even though the Lovely Man doesn’t specifically show them to me.

Inevitable, too, are the accompanying stories beginning “This was when we had just had Boy A…” or “That was just after we had bought our house in X-ville.”

“Our” and “we” in these stories never means “him and me”, naturally.

The whole experience makes a sad little underline to my own childless outsider status.

Some days when the photos come out I can handle it, at least for a while. I don’t want the Lovely Man to feel that his Boys’ babyhoods are on lockdown and can’t be talked about or shown off.

Today, though, I’m not coping with it, and I think I need to find a way to tell him.

Does this kind of situation come up in your stepfamily, or am I being over-sensitive?

Cupcakery

On Thursday night I made four dozen cupcakes.

Boy C wanted to take treats to school to share with his whole class; while I didn’t have the energy to churn out enough cupcakes from our somewhat makeshift kitchen in the Boys’ City to feed all the kids in Boy A’s and Boy B’s classes as well, I sent them each off with enough cakey goodness for themselves and their teacher and four friends, and promised to bake for their classes next visit. They were fine with that.

Some of my most enduring memories of childhood are of my mother’s wonderful baking; there was very little money to spare in our house but always an abundance of biscuits, lamingtons and patty cakes. She even baked cakes to sell to local cafes using the tiny gas stove in the bus we lived in while my dad was building our house.

While I bake well myself, my focus has long been on producing fancypants grownup desserts rather than bulk kid-friendly treats. I made Nigella Lawson’s vanilla cupcakes (modded by pushing a square of milk chocolate into each one) for the Boys, and while they certainly elicited no complaints, they just didn’t have the moist, dense-but-light deliciousness of my own mum’s recipe.

I would love to think that my cooking could become part of the tapestry of the Boys’ childhood memories, similar to my remembrances of my grandmother’s Neenish tarts and my mother’s amazing cakes. Not in a “motherly” way, obviously, but Boy C greatly enjoys cooking with me and often thanks me for cooking “such yummy things” for them. I really hope we can hold on to cooking as a shared pleasure as he gets older.

Interestingly, I often notice that when I’ve had successes with dishes for the Boys, next visit it will transpire that their Mum has *coincidentally* cooked pancakes or chocolate self-saucing pudding or whatever it is a few times since then herself, and – of course – that hers is HEAPS better than mine, her recipe is the only “right” recipe and my (previously appreciated) way of cooking the dish is now suddenly “wrong”. And suddenly it can feel like I’ve got three little food police watching, critiquing and sometimes rejecting my meals….

I’m never competetive about the cooking thing, but I do work hard to find a niche where I can contribute to the Boys’ lives in ways they can accept, so it stings a bit when their Mum seems to be trying to undermine me on this level. Still, if that is what’s happening (and it may not be!), it can only be because she feels threatened in her role. Strange, because there’s no question in the Boys’ minds or in my mind as to whether I’m a rival mummy figure – it just isn’t that way at all, even with Boy C who has a close and affectionate relationship with me.

For instance, if we’re out and anyone mistakes us for a mum with her kids, the Boys are so quick to discount the idea that it can leave the hapless commenter looking a bit stunned. Recently we were all boarding a plane and the flight attendant on welcome duty made a comment about how much “my boys” look like me. My instant response was “No, they’re not mine, they’re my partner’s boys.” She was a little taken aback, so I added “Sorry, but if I hadn’t told you straightaway then they would have, and that could get noisy!”

So, since there’s no question that the Boys would ever see me as a mother, think of me as a mother or get mixed up about who is their mother, and I’m not in any danger of doing that either, plus I’ve tried to communicate these things to the Boys’ Mum by mentioning how proud they are of her and how loyally they speak about her to us, I wish I could just be left in peace to cook pancakes or meatballs or chocolate pudding for them without being undermined!

How do food and cooking work in your stepfamily?

Storm’s coming

You know how maestro piano players are sometimes described as playing a piece of music “stormily”?

The Lovely Man is in the study at the moment, and I can tell he is writing his email response to the Boys’ Mum’s most recent sound-and-light-show communication because his typing is noticeably stormy in volume, tone and rhythm.

It’s a bit sad that the amount of conflict she orchestrates means that I have learned to distinguish between an email being typed to her and an email being typed to any other random person FROM ANOTHER ROOM!

What are the storm warnings that stepfamily drama is brewing in your home?

So, who can relate?

I’ve had this incredibly honest and insightful essay from the StepTogether Message Board about (some) men’s struggle to set appropriate boundaries with their ex-wives open on my browser for a long while now.

A few of you will have come across it; most probably not. I’d guess that more than a few stepmothers will read it and be longing to show it to their husbands and partners… and others will be sighing in relief and gratitude that their days of living with this kind of stress are thankfully over (or best of all, never happened).

In any case, I’ve reproduced  here in full for the benefit of non-clicking types. There’s some fantastic stuff over at StepTogether; it’s a worthy resource and well rewards casual trawling.

MALE EMOTIONAL ADULTERY

By Mike (passem), a stepfather, separated father and contributor to the StepTogether Message Board

When the ex remarried she seemed to think that she was entitled to two husbands. There was the good husband who received all the “benefits”. There was also the bad husband who received all the blame. Needless to say, I was the latter. After having observed this rather bigamous state of affairs for a year or two I finally informed the ex that if she needed someone to scream at, revile and expend her considerable anger on, she’d better look closer to home because I was not available and hadn’t been since the divorce.

My mistake, for several years, was continuing to feel some responsibility for the ex, even though we had both remarried. It was very difficult to break a 25-year habit of always trying to fix things. That had been my assigned role all those years. It took awhile to realize that fixing things was no longer my responsibility except within the boundaries of my own marriage. When the ex’s husband was killed in a car accident a little over three years after they were married, I was ready to lend assistance and this time my wife called me on it. She correctly pointed out that it was no longer my place, was no longer my responsibility and most likely wouldn’t be appreciated anyway. As usual, she was quite correct.

Did I feel guilty about the divorce? Probably, even though I wasn’t the one who initiated the whole process. In typical male fashion I couldn’t reconcile not being a daily presence in the lives of my daughters. The ex figured that one out and tried to play on my feelings to extract more and more for me under the guise of it all being for my daughters. For awhile, it worked and I gave and gave. Then I realized that I was being manipulated and was also sending the wrong message to my children – that Dad was merely a convenient and deep pocket whose only value was that which could be preceded by a dollar sign. The bottom line was that the girls had two parents and I was not solely responsible for their well-being. Bye, bye guilt. Hello resolve. It was easy. It just took awhile to get there. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe and really think about the message you’re sending your children. That’s especially important when you’ve remarried. It’s your wife who deserves your undivided loyalty and support, not the ex.

Over the years, too many wives have voiced the legitimate complaint that their husband continues to dance to the tune of his ex’s manipulation. There are only two women to whom a husband owes the duties of loyalty and obedience, and even they have to deserve it. Those women are his wife, first, and his mother, second. To permit any other woman to exercise that degree of control and influence over him is emotional adultery and nothing less.

Gentleman, there’s a reason that you and the ex are no longer married. Whether you’re the one who left or, as is most often the case, she is, she is no longer your wife. She is no longer your partner. She is no longer your lover. She is the ex. If you have children together she will always be their mother but that is all the status she merits and deserves. She should be respected and valued for that, just as you should be respected and valued as their father.

In this venue, most, if not all, experience certain problems and frustrations connected with the ex. Why, then, would you bow and scrape before her, to the detriment of your children’s respect for you as a man and male role model, not to mention your wife’s? Most especially, why would you permit her to dictate to you on all matters pertaining to the children, including disrupting your own family life to be at her beck-and-call, to the frustration of your wife and the detriment of your marriage?

If this describes you, you are guilty of emotional adultery. You’re also giving in to emotional blackmail and are permitting your children to be used as wedge issues and bargaining chips. Isn’t it time to rear up on your hind legs, throw your head back and roar out your final independence from someone with whom you now have only indirect ties?

What your children truly deserve is happy and emotionally healthy parents, both of them, and steps as well. Your former marriage didn’t work. Accept it and concentrate on your current marriage. Put your wife and your marriage first and you’ll be giving your children the true gift you didn’t give them while with their mother. That gift is the living and loving example of a strong marriage in which respect and mutuality are foremost, where a united front is common and consistent and happiness and contentment are evident. This is the example your children will take with them into their own adult relationships. You can’t change or fix what went before, so concentrate on what you have now.

The biggest question and issue of all is this: Do your dealings with the ex cause a lack of harmony in your marriage? If the answer to that is “Yes!”, then what ARE you doing? Where do your loyalties lie and what are you going to do to take back control of your life from someone who no longer belongs in the middle of it?

Oh, yeah. If you did answer “yes” you’d better be coming home with flowers and taking your wife out for a very romantic dinner because, Buddy, you need to start courting her all over again. This time, don’t stop, ever!

This essay was written by Mike (passem), a stepfather and contributor to the StepTogether Message Board.

Lovely to meet you…

And if you believe that you’d swallow anything.

So, I met the Boys’ Mum yesterday.

It was fine, in a way. Uncomfortable? You bet. I had to grip my cup tightly to stop my hands from shaking. She was obviously nervous too.

On many levels she made an effort, and acknowledged that I do a lot for the Boys, which was… acknowledging, I guess.

But I still left feeling slightly manipulated.

Because it became clear to me that the whole ordeal wasn’t much about meeting me at all.

It felt more about showing the Lovely Man how thoroughly, completely and utterly she had moved on, and maybe getting herself some “doing the co-parenting thing right” high ground.

She quickly took control of the conversation. What were my interests? How did I find living part-time in the Boys’ city? What was my work? How was I finding life with three kids? Where had I grown up?

Whoa, hold up with the cross-examination there!

Each answer from me was greeted by a kind of taken-aback blinking, as though I had chosen to respond in High Aramaic.

There was some nice stuff. We spoke about each of the Boys, I got my No-Threat Message across by describing how loyal Boy A is to her and talking about all the great things the Boys say about her, and in turn she said that Boy C had told her how much he enjoyed making his dreamcatcher with me.

I think she tried to be friendly, sort of. And I give us both kudos for making the effort.

But she was brittle as old china, recoiled from physical contact with me as though I was covered in scales and managed to end the meeting on an entirely nasty note, by describing how she had wanted to hit us with garden gnomes on an earlier occasion when we ran into her unexpectedly in her driveway while dropping off the children’s belongings.

Overall, the message I took was that it was a big deal for her to step down from her pedestal into the muck to meet me, and that we weren’t to think that just because she had decided to be gracious her opinion of us had changed.

Moved on? I don’t think so. There was too much anger showing through the cracks.

I don’t know what, if anything, I expected. I’m certainly not looking to her for a new friendship. I have actual friends for that. I don’t want to meet for coffee or invite her around for a drink, whatever the Lovely Man thinks. God forbid!

All I wanted was to clear the way for civil exchanges of the kids if required, or for occasional communications about practical matters. I wanted for the Lovely Man not to feel he needs to hide me at handover time.

(On that point, the Lovely Man felt so obviously constrained from showing me any affection whatsoever during the meeting. I can understand why, but even a reassuring pat on the knee would have helped. Maybe I’d developed temporary leprosy?)

Anyway, whatever my and her thoughts and feelings about it, it’s done, and we don’t have to do it again. So now hopefully something approaching normal life can commence.

Hopefully.

Yet another search string

A new and exciting search string showed up in my blog stats today:

ex-wife refuses “meet my new partner”

I’m guessing they found me via my series on The Mother Question.

Ironic, really, that this should show up today of all days.

Because today is the day that I’m finally meeting the Lovely Man’s ex-wife.

Wish me luck.

(Oh, yeah – and the reason this post has a pre-dawn publication timestamp? Is because I can’t sleep. Nervous, much?)

The Onslaught

By last October, Christmas 2009 was shaping up to be fairly horrific.

In the end, it was and it wasn’t, I suppose. Like most adventures in stepfamily life, there were good as well as bad bits; in fact the good outweighed the bad to an unexpected extent.

On the whole, though, the giant endeavour of managing the parental-alienation-studded negotiations in the lead-up to December, the descent of the Boys on our (small) home for the holidays and orchestrating the twenty-plus-guest Christmas Day itself was so traumatising that I wanted to get into bed afterwards and stay there until, oh say, Valentine’s Day.

But without one key ingredient it could have been So Much Worse…

Some backstory:

The boys arrived a couple of days before The Day – I told the Lovely Man that dealing with Handover Syndrome on Christmas Day itself was NOT on my list of fun ways to spend the celebration.

They were, quite frankly, pissed.

Despite signing off to this arrangement in a parenting plan only months earlier, their Mum didn’t want them to be with us, in our city, for Christmas.

So, naturally, they didn’t want to be with us, in our city, for Christmas.

They wanted to be with their real family. (Their words, and despite the Lovely Man’s mother and brother being in attendance, and one of his sisters visiting as well.)

And they certainly didn’t want to attend the family therapy sessions we’d organised in an attempt to change the disastrously ugly and conflict-ridden direction this holiday period was taking.

The Lovely Man and I went for the first session by ourselves, leaving my heavily pregnant sister to care for the boys. Not a popular move, although they behaved well enough for her.

I went in with fairly modest hopes – just getting a chance to release some of the roiling internal turmoil over the situation would have made it worth while.

Surprisingly, though, the session was a real turnaround moment for the Lovely Man and me.

I had read about emotion coaching in Ron L. Deal & Laura Petherbridge’s fantastic book  The Smart Stepmom, and had tried tentatively to put it into practice, but without the Lovely Man onboard it was hard to have confidence to use the techniques.

And while the concepts are simple enough, we benefitted a lot from doing some role playing with the psychologist and without the kids present.

Ugggh. Role playing.

It worked, though.

So for instance, I told the psychologist about an especially nasty and hostile interaction I’d had with Boy A on my last visit to their city.

I had asked for the boys’ input on choosing a new paint colour for the kitchen in our city. My intention was to involve them, to show interest in their tastes. I asked them which of a couple of mock-up photos showing different colours they preferred.

Boy A’s response was angry, and to me, shocking

He almost screamed:

Why are you wasting all this money on that stupid house? You should be sending that money to my Mummy so she can buy a house!

Whoa!

I was so stunned that I reacted, rather than responding.

I said:

That’s ridiculous, Boy A.

And, of course, there came an angry chorus in reply.

It is NOT ridiculous. You SHOULD SO be buying our Mum a house!

By then I had taken a moment to compose myself, so I said, more gently.

I don’t mean that it’s ridiculous that your Mum wants her own house. But that is something between your Mum and Dad. They are talking about it at the moment, and it has NOTHING to do with me.

Boy A:

Well, it’s our Dad’s money you’re spending.

Hmmph.

Having related all this, the psychologist said to us that the emotion coaching approach is to listen to the words and try to hear what the fear or discomfort is underneath.

So here, for instance, a better response would have been:

It sounds like you’re worried about where you’ll be living when you’re with Mum, Boy A. Is that right? Are you worried about having somewhere to live?

Or maybe:

Are you saying that you’re trying to keep things fair between your Mum and Dad, Boy A? That must feel like a lot of pressure on you, trying to be in charge of that.

So we went home, and tried it.

Incredibly, it seemed to work.

The snarky comments that took so much strained effort for me to ignore or defuse turned into a chance for Boy A to say what was on his mind.

In turn, I felt as though I had a tool to use when these troubling moments arose.

Things improved dramatically. I stopped locking myself in my room so much.

The dreaded Christmas Day itself, which over and over Boy A insisted was going to be miserable throughout, went much more smoothly than we could have imagined.

When the Boys were upset or troubled, we listened to them, helping them name their feelings rather than telling them what they should be feeling. We followed through on the things they had said would make the day easier for them, like organising an iChat for them with their Mum.

Incredibly, ALL the Boys had fun. They freely said they had fun. Even Boy A.

And the Christmas that had felt like a hole in my heart became a celebration again.

____________________

If you’re interested in learning about emotion coaching, I heartily recommend Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart Of Parenting by Dr John Gottman. Otherwise, there’s a brief downloadable overview of the techniques here. Specifically for stepmothers wanting to learn about emotion coaching and much more, I love The Smart Stepmom; although it has a strong Christian focus and I am resolutely secular in outlook it was still incredibly useful.