Three Steps to Communicate Better as Coparents.

“We aren’t married anymore, why are we having the same arguments we had when we were married?”

One of the hardest tasks for separated parents is to redefine their relationship and to create new, more positive, communication patterns. Enlightened coparenting makes, what seems impossible, intuitive.

         Katherine and Niko have 2 young children, are recently divorced, trying to coparent, and need to learn how to stop fighting about parenting.  Their arguments had escalated when they came to see me for coparenting coaching. Over the course of 3 sessions we worked together through the 3 steps to communicate better as coparents.

The Story of Katherine and Niko

         Katherine and Niko had been together for 15 years and married for the last 12 years.  They have a 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter. The previous year, Katherine decided that she no longer wanted to be married to Niko. The last 3 years had been hard for Katherine. Katherine had cared for her mother who had lung cancer and her mother died a year ago. She left her job as a florist when their daughter was born. There were also a series of changes related to the fact that both children were now in school. Niko was supportive but his work was demanding and getting his work done and making sales was a priority. Thus, he was primarily unavailable on weekdays until after Katherine already put the children to sleep and on weekends he loved to kickback and catch up on sports. Katherine took care of the children, their schooling, and all of their extracurricular activities and was tired of bearing the bulk of the responsibility for the children and the household. Another issue for Katherine was that Niko liked the house to be maintained a certain rather precise way.

         Once the children were settled into a new school year, Katherine found a new job designing floral arrangements for weddings. After settling into her new position, Katherine announced that she wanted a divorce.  Niko was aghast, surprised, and hurt. He felt he had been by Katherine’s side and supported her taking care of her mother in their home and, had devoted himself to supporting the family financially.  Now that Katherine was working, he had hoped to work less and spend more time with the family. 

         Katherine procured a 3-bedroom apartment about a mile from their family home, moved out, and went about making that apartment into a home.  She and Niko agreed to a 50-50 parenting schedule and created a parenting plan which helped them to establish weekly routines for their children.

         It was not long after Katherine moved out, that she and Niko realized that they were having the same arguments and struggles about the children and about accommodating each other that they had when they were married. Over the last month the arguments became increasingly heated.  Katherine felt stressed, had a hard time eating more than a snack here and there, and was unable to fall asleep before 2 AM.  Her mind raced through the conversations regarding the children that she and Niko had and the arguments that he always seemed to win.  She was mad at herself for not being able to think of clever responses to Niko’s sarcasm until she lay in bed trying to fall asleep. 

         One day, Niko had the children, and Katherine, for the first time in months, went for a run.  She was able to lose herself in the sound of her steps and ran far longer than she had ever run in the past. When she returned to her apartment, she sat on the steps outside the building and determined that the coparenting situation was unsustainable. Katherine reached out to me for help and Katherine and Niko came to me for coparent coaching shortly thereafter.

Three Steps to Communicate Better as Coparents.

1. Identify the Cycles of Conflict

Until we identify the conflict cycles, we cannot begin the process of developing new communication patterns that facilitate healthy coparenting.

Take time to center yourself so that you can look at what is going on between you and the other co-parent more clearly.  Identifying cycles of conflict requires considerable mindfulness as these negative interaction scripts often operate seemingly automatically and have become ingrained in our communication over years of repeating them throughout the marriage.  Also, awareness of emotional conflict experiences is uncomfortable and may even be frightening. We can tell ourselves that the marriage experiences are in the past and we can keep them in the past by bringing our thoughts toward creating new forms of experiences in coparenting.  To motivate ourselves to take on this task we can become clear with ourselves on the reality that both parents will remain connected for life as coparents. Realizing this truth, we see the value of investing in the coparenting relationship.

         Katherine and Niko took turns sharing what they were experiencing and their thoughts regarding the way coparenting was unfolding. As they listened to each other, they realized they had two very different experiences of coparenting. That was okay, I assured them. While the experiences were perceived differently their interactions formed a kind of dance.

Katherine and Niko’s Dance of Anger

         Reactive behavior and emotion were part of the negative cycle that Katherine and Niko found themselves caught in. Katherine handled her frustration with Niko’s suggestions by talking over him. Niko strove to make sure that Katherine was not going to plow over him anymore.

         When coparenting began, Niko shared with Katherine all of the things he was learning by taking care of the children.  He had the sense that he needed to prove to her at every turn that he would not fail in his parental role. When she ignored, talked over, or argued with him at each turn when shared, he determined that he would need to cut off communication with Katherine about all things, including the children, except for communicating about pickup and drop-off times.   He wanted to avoid Katherine’s reproaches and her attitude of knowing all there was to know about parenting.  When he communicated with Katherine, he felt like he did not matter as a father and when he did things his own way, he gained a sense of value to the children.

         Katherine shared that she had taken on the bulk of the responsibility for the children and the household while they were married. She had two small children, a sick mother, and was without her old job. She had felt alone, isolated, lonely, and angry.  Getting in touch with the way that her past experience in the marriage influenced her patterns of communication today would offer insights. Based upon her experience in the marriage, Katherine felt she could not count on Niko.

         Niko was parenting on his own during his weeks and he continually asked Katherine questions (Did they eat breakfast before they came? What was he supposed to do for show and tell?).   Niko also regularly made parenting suggestions to Katherine.

         Hearing his questions, Katherine felt that if he wanted the children 50% of the time, that he needed to figure out on his own how to take care of them and whether they would be hungry or what to bring for show and tell. Further, Katherine found Niko’s parenting suggestions, after his having only a few months under his belt of taking care of them, to be self-absorbed and annoying. She attributed Niko’s suggestions to him having a continuing need to control.      Katherine did acknowledge that Niko was a very loving father who would keep the children safe. However, she felt Niko’s suggestions were not grounded in the reality of what it is like to care for 2 children for more than a few months.  She had years of experience, felt parenting came naturally to her, and that life would be a lot easier, and Niko would learn more, if he simply gave up his crusade and did things her way.  

         Niko made changes to his work schedule upon the separation to facilitate his parenting time and he was highly committed to his new role in care taking.  He too had felt lonely during the marriage. Now he began to feel a deepening appreciation for the children’s love and company.  It was a relief for Niko that he could make decisions for the children without having Katherine override them.  While married, Niko had sometimes felt like a trespasser or occasional baby-sitter in their home.  He felt he had no choice but to go along with Katherine’s routines, discipline, and decisions about activities and schools. Niko felt that Katherine was very clearly not interested in his input and was dismissive of him as a parent. 

 Katherine shared that she could parent fine on her own, as she felt she had for so many years. Niko became frustrated and shared that he felt that nothing he had to say about the family mattered.  The cycle showed its contours as Katherine shared that she wanted the children to have a good relationship with their father, but that she needed Niko to understand and value how much she had given to the family, and that she had sacrificed her own needs while Niko focused on his career. Katherine shared that when Niko assailed her with a litany of questions she wanted to scream because she figured it out on her own without asking a single other soul.  From both of their perspectives the anger with each other and the decision not to communicate about the children was not helping.  Their digging into their stances seemed to Katherine and Niko to escalate the situation.

 2. Realize The negative interaction cycle is the problem rather than each other.

Niko and Katherine were caught in and reframed the problem not as what Katherine does or what Niko does but as the self-reinforcing negative cycle that they were both caught in. For Katherine and Niko, this included the cycle’s impact on their coparenting and their individual well-being.  When Katherine shared with Niko her fears of being left to deal with their children on her own, he saw her actions as tied to her vulnerability rather than as meant to plow over him.  When Niko shared with Katherine his fear that he did not matter to her as a parent, she gained insight into the anger he experienced during their encounters. They came to see that they had each been stuck in their positions and that it was being stuck in the negative cycle of communication that was the problem.

 3. Apply ingredients to dissolve the cycle.

Katherine and Niko needed to renegotiate their relationship from spouse to coparenting. This meant that when dealing coparent to coparent they needed to trust the other and be trusted by the other as a parent.  Competition and the need for continuous validation was getting in the way of them arriving at an understanding that they were on the same team as parents. Their differences did not make either a less valuable part of raising the children. Niko needed to know that Katherine thought he was an integral and important part of their children’s lives. Katherine needed to know that she could count on Niko to be there after the initial newness and excitement of parenting alone wore off.  She needed to know that he was not going to go back to working the crazy hours he worked in the past and then expect her to care for their children alone.

Niko and Katherine recognized the negative cycle and that the roles that each played in it were affecting their coparenting relationship. Niko articulated his thoughts about his father role, that he wanted input in decisions about the children, and his concern that Katherine did not recognize the value of his parenting. Katherine identified that when the gripping urge to cut Niko off or talk over him would arise, she could use awareness of the feeling as a reminder to listen to Niko’s concerns more openly. They would need to have conversations over the course of their coparenting, which was also over the course of their lives, about coparenting with the goal of reducing the impact of the divorce on their children.

With Enlightened Coparenting, divorced or divorcing couples with children can create a new, positive coparenting relationship.

 Learn this and so much more in the ENLIGHTENED COPARENTING ™ Course. The course is coming soon.  Sign up to receive notice of when the course is launching.