Joint Custody With a Jerk

07/03/2025

A question from a reader: “I have a 13 year old and share custody with my Ex. My question is, how do I enforce consequences when the 13 year old can just leave and go to my Ex’s house to get what they want?” Such a great question! The first rule of thumb with consequences is “Only give consequences you can follow through on.” So for example, if the consequence is to take away screen privileges and your teen can simply walk out to their other parent’s house and use screens there then that’s not going to be effective. The most obvious (and yet probably least feasible) solution is to get your Ex on board with whatever consequences you are imposing. Parenting in joint custody situations works best when the parents continue to operate as a team. In contentious divorces, however, cooperation is unlikely to work. So think about it this way: what consequence CAN you enforce? Screens are often the easiest, but not necessarily the most effective consequences. Each individual household is going to be different in terms of consequences that can be enforced. Generally, if you can think about consequences as the removal of privileges, that will likely give you some ideas to work with. However, if there are NO consequences that you can think of, then communication and dialogue is going to be your best bet. Next time, I’ll discuss what that kind of communication looks like and how it can be effective with teenagers especially.

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06/12/2025

I’m often asked how one can stop being reactive (ie going straight into fight, flight, freeze or fawn.) Unfortunately, there’s not one answer that fits everyone. As I’ve said in past posts, it’s helpful to recognize the situations that you’re likely to overreact to. Knowing in advance what your “triggers” are is extremely helpful. That being said, and neural pathways being what they are, the neural pathway can often override the thought process, causing you to explode before you have a chance to think about a different, calmer response. If I had to give a somewhat “universal” answer, it would be to disengage. Turn around. Walk away. Put the phone down. Drink some water. It never hurts to take some distance. It gives your autonomic nervous system time to re-regulate.

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05/23/2025

Some days, parenting feels less like a partnership and more like a one-person show. The invisible weight, the constant giving, the quiet moments of “Is it always going to be this hard?”

If you’ve ever felt alone in the chaos—you’re not. 💔

This gentle reminder and these 7 practical tips for 2025 are for the ones carrying more than their share, doing their best even when it doesn’t feel like enough.

Read more below. ⬇️
https://reachoutrecovery.com/?p=157807

05/22/2025

Recognizing when we have a feeling and naming it are the first steps to moving through it. Many psychologists and neuroscientists believe that primary emotions like fight, flight, freeze or fawn are the result of chemicals being released in the brain like cortisol and adrenaline. The chemicals only last in the body for about 90 seconds. Having said that, the repeated release of these chemicals can strengthen neural pathways in the brain. This means that, if you experience the fight (or flight, freeze or fawn) response over and over in relation to your ex, you are more likely to react to other situations and other people with that same response, even when it’s maladaptive.

For example, maybe your ex behaved passive aggressively. Maybe they would deliberately throw a roadblock up whenever you were trying to accomplish something. Perhaps they would casually mention that the car was almost out of gas right before you were scheduled to take the kids to school. In all likelihood, you would respond with anger (the fight response.) Over time, this response would get wired into your neuropathways as a response to being inconvenienced.

Therefore, you may find yourself responding to something as innocuous as your child spilling milk with anger because your brain has wired itself to respond with “fight” when something inconvenient happens. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to realize what emotion you are experiencing – and work on underreacting. Taking five deep breaths, for example, instead of exploding with expletives, can help re-wire your brain’s response.

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05/06/2025

While knowledge of fight, flight, freeze or fawn is an important step toward breaking out of negative cycles, it’s important to differentiate it from the grief process. There are several models of the grief process, with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s probably being the most well known. In it, she identifies 5 specific stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. More recently, psychologists have expanded the process to include shock and testing, with shock being an initial step and testing coming between depression and acceptance. Now here’s where we need to clarify. The stages of grief are not an escalator to a top floor. You do not start at shock, proceed to denial, then to anger, etc. They are an elevator. You can be in depression one day, shock the next, acceptance the third, then denial and so on and so forth. In upcoming weeks we’ll look at each individual stage. For now, work on differentiating the grief process from the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response.

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04/15/2025

Thoughts can be changed. Awareness of what the thought is happens to be the first step. Now, I’m not saying the second step is easy either, but it is a necessary part of having more positive feelings.

The second step is to re-frame our thoughts with curiosity or compassion. So, instead of thinking “God, what a jerk!” try curiosity, “I wonder why they’re acting like this.” Instead of thinking “They always are trying to sabotage my time with the kids,” reframe with compassion, “They must be really hurting to take it out on me and the kids like this.”

Now I know you’re thinking to yourself, “Why would I do that? That jerk doesn’t deserve my curiosity or compassion!” No doubt you’re right. But remember that getting caught in a negative cycle doesn’t hurt your ex. It only hurts you. So changing your thoughts is for YOUR benefit, not theirs.

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04/08/2025

So what happens when you recognize that your reaction is actually a survival instinct? That you are in fight, flight, freeze or fawn?

First, congratulate yourself for that recognition, it’s the beginning of breaking out of that cycle. Then, take a moment to figure out what thought you are having that is causing the feeling.

Many people believe that when something happens to us (an event) we have feelings about that event. But the truth is that there is an intermediate step here: what we THINK about the event.

When we can identify what we are thinking that has caused our feelings, there is an opportunity to break into the cycle and change it from negative to neutral or even positive. More on this next time!

04/01/2025

Have you ever wondered why you sometimes just feel “stuck” when talking to your ex? Why is it that you can’t think of what to say during a confrontation?

It’s actually a biological, survival instinct that gets engaged when you feel stress. It’s called “Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn.”

In this example of getting “stuck” it’s the “freeze” response that’s being triggered. Aggressively arguing would be an example of “fight”; hanging up the phone on your ex would be an example of “flight”; and offering to make more concessions to them than you can afford (either emotionally or financially) with the hope that they’ll just go away is an example of “fawn.”

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll unpack this further. For now, think about which of these instincts you are most likely to feel during stress or confrontation.

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03/18/2025

Study after study on divorce says that your child will turn out okay if you don’t ask them to choose between you and your ex and if you provide your child with a stable home life.

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03/07/2025

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02/25/2025

When you get angry at your ex, only about 10% of your anger can be attributed to the current situation. The other 90% comes from your past experiences with your ex, along with other significant people in your past. The current situation has simply triggered your past anger and allowed it to resurface. It’s been said that if you’re hysterical, the cause is probably historical.

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