The Co-Parents' Handbook: Raising Well-Adjusted, Resilient, and Resourceful Kids in a Two-Home Family from Little Ones to Young Adults

By Karen Bonnell

When it comes to a child's sense of family, what divorce breaks apart, solid co-parenting rebuilds.
With a tested "here's how" approach, The Co-Parents' Handbook helps parents confidently take on the challenges of raising children in two homes. Addressing parents' questions about the emotional impact of separation, conflict, grief and recovery, the authors skillfully provide a road map for all members of the family to safely navigate through separation/divorce and beyond. Parents discover through practical guidance how to move from angry/hurt partners to constructive, successful co-parents. The pages are chock-full of helpful strategies to resolve day-to-day issues in an easy-to use format. This book is here to answer questions, help parents co-parent and ensure kids thrive!

We will show you ways to:

• Successfully work through difficult feelings while forming your “business of co-parenting relationship”
• Build a mutually respectful co-parenting relationship
• Keep your children front and center while protecting them from adult conflict and concerns
• Understand your children’s needs as they navigate the loss and change of divorce
• Help your children build resilience and competence in the face of family change
• Implement strategies and protocols for day-to-day living in a two-home family that work

In the last 30 years of pediatric practice, I've observed many parents dealing with the end of their marriage and its aftermath. This book is a great resource. It is practical, to-the-point, and insightful. I will definitely recommend it to families that I see who are going through separation or divorce. --Mark Greenfield, MD, Pediatrician, Seattle, WA

This is the most progressive, practical, and hopeful book for families in transition I have read in years. I will be offering a copy to every client who walks through my door. A definite "must read." --Felicia Malsby Soleil, JD, Family Law Attorney, Mediator, and Founder/Past President of Collaborative Professionals of Washington.

Karen & Kris have done a phenomenal job. The book addresses complex issues in a straight-forward, easy to understand language. They tackle high conflict emotion while assisting with the practical. Karen and Kris provide a compass, skills, everyday "here's how" tools to meet the day-to-day challenges of two-home family life. I will buy this book in bulk!--Nancy Cameron, Q.C., past president, International Academy of Collaborative Professionals

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Bonnell
• Release date: Feb 13, 2015

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Journey from Spouses to Co-Parents

DURING AND AFTER divorce/separation, adults often struggle with feelings—feelings that disrupt, confuse, frustrate—and often interfere with co-parenting effectively. We hope to provide guidance on how to manage feelings and shorten the duration of upset to help you recover your self and develop as a strong co-parent. Part of what makes this transition so hard is that although spouses divorce/separate, parents don’t. Parents emerge from divorce/separation in a new relationship, which we call co-parents...and your new job is the business of co-parenting with your former spouse.

What Keeps Us Connected?

The opposite of love is indifference—not hate. Hate is the other side of the love coin and can be an equally strong energetic connection of the heart to someone who has hurt us, betrayed us, wronged us. Hate and conflict grow out of frustrated love or a fight against the grief over losing something or someone truly important. These losses can include life-long dreams about how life would unfold, our sense of family, financial security, lifestyle, identity, relationships with children/extended family/community, etc.

By acknowledging how hateful feelings and conflict actually connect and involve us with another person, we open the door for more constructive responses—responses that will allow for disengagement, release, and freedom of choice. We come to realize that as much as we protest and claim we want little to do with this other person, we simultaneously engage with them at every turn. Recognizing this pattern, pausing, pulling away from the impulse to engage/strike back (no matter how RIGHT you may be!), provides the platform for steps and strategies that promote healthier, more constructive interaction—and a new business-of-co-parenting relationship. This can happen, believe it or not, even as we grieve losses and come to grips with a new reality.

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Divorce/separation is a crisis—a crisis of change: change in family, identity, roles, security and dreams for the future. However, even during this crisis, we are called to make important decisions. How we make decisions can be influenced significantly by the way we think and feel.

• Like any crisis, divorce/separation unleashes potential for opportunity and innovation. With loss and change come opportunities for rebuilding, strengthening, renewal and re-creation.

• Divorce/separation may also set into motion a lifetime of limitation and negativity—with a danger of trapping ourselves in bitterness, resentment, angry and rigid thoughts—thoughts that prevent us from growing and finding joy on the other side.

• We choose which way we go—consciously or unconsciously. And guess what?

• Your children are going through a crisis as well. They will need your help learning to manage their emotions and by leading the way you can model for your children not only how to grieve but also how to find possibility in the face of change.

The more equipped you are to work with and understand your own emotional experience, the more capable you’ll be at working with and helping your children understand theirs. Humans create meaning together—it’s in relationship that context and meaning emerge. Your children will look to you as parents to make meaning out of what is happening in their family and glean cues to what will happen in the future. Just as if you were on an airplane flight experiencing turbulence, you might look to the flight attendants to see if there was reason to be worried or reassured. You read facial expressions, listen for their words of direction and watch their actions as the plane navigates the bumpy air. Similarly, your children look to the two of you.

That doesn’t mean that you deny or fail to acknowledge there is something sad or difficult facing your family—children don’t want to be alone in their sadness or difficulty with the separation/divorce. But realize that to feel safe, your children also need to witness confidence, hope and resiliency. Sound like a big job? It is, but you can get there by taking some basic steps to reduce the interactions that trigger big emotions, separate partner-level thoughts and emotions from parenting children, and learn to care and support yourself from the inside out.

Key to Managing Your Emotions: Un-Coupling

You coupled. Divorce/separation requires that you un-couple. Before we go any further with jumping into emotions, let’s get clear about the complexity and levels of uncoupling. That way, you’ll know what skills you’ll need, ideas to help ground you, strategies for self-soothing along the path. You were married, committed, involved day-to-day, and wrapped together in dreams of the future. You slept next to each other, your breathing found a rhythm together, your biology intertwined. This may have extended across many months or many years. The journey from coupled to uncoupled includes some or all of the following:

• If you were legally married—legal uncoupling, or divorce completion

• If you were religiously/spiritually married—religious/spiritual uncoupling with or without actual ceremony

• Emotional connection—emotional uncoupling which often occurs over time through letting go

• Physical/physiologic connection—physical/physiologic responses to uncoupling which often requires physical separation and time to heal and settle your heart/nervous system

• Other possible connections: owning a business together—restructuring the business, extended family/community involvement—negotiating participation in shared groups and shared relationships, etc., resulting in unique and potentially complicating circumstances to resolve.

Untangling your adult/spousal relationship has many dimensions with the potential for far-reaching impact. And because you have children, you’re called to do this uncoupling while building a co-parenting relationship. This can present difficult challenges.

You’re called to break the spouse/intimate-partner bonds—the practices and patterns of coupling. You’ll need to re-configure many of the ways you’ve related to one-another—the shortcuts in decision-making developed out of efficiency, the recycling conflicts, the familiarity, pet-names and we-ness. We hope to support you in abandoning the old and rewriting your co-parenting process for the new. No small task, and often accompanied by a great deal of wrestle, loss, anger, grief and sadness.

Uncoupling takes time and you and your co-parent may be on a different timeline. For the spouse who chooses to leave, he/she may have been leaving the marriage mentally, emotionally, physically for two to five years before requesting a divorce/separation. This is disconcerting to understand; startling to realize. Consequently, the leaver is often in a very different emotional state than the person who is left. This discrepancy can be a huge source of pain—especially if the leaver moves forward and into a new relationship while the other parent is attempting to find his/her bearings.

Sensitivity to the emotional process of your co-parent in the early stages can go a long way in establishing a strong, positive co-parenting relationship for the long term. Recognizing the value of uncoupling and working together to uncouple benefits everyone—including your children. While the leaver often experiences relief and readiness to move on, the spouse who feels left and the children are generally much further behind in adjustment to the divorce/separation-related changes. When the leaver moves forward too quickly for the other’s emotional adjustment, particularly with respect to a new relationship, the former spouse and children often feel invisible or abandoned—and that what they had relied on as family yesterday has been deleted today. This dynamic can create enormous pain for those who feel left behind. Your co-parent is likely to feel on his/her own to do all the uncoupling alone, picking up the pieces of what often feels like a shattered family… which is actually a family in divorce/separation transition.

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You’re called to do this un-coupling while simultaneously interacting with your former spouse about and for the children. Done skillfully, you both provide an integrated sense of family for the kids, or done unskillfully, exaggerates the rift in the family. If we’re successful, you’ll learn to tease apart your feelings about this person as a former-spouse, from feelings about this person as the kids’ other parent. By separating your feelings for your former-spouse from your feelings about him/her as a parent, you have a much greater chance of maintaining an integrated sense of family for your kids.

Key to Un-Coupling: Separating Spouse Mind from Parent Mind

Imagine that your mind works like a radio. You can tune into different thought-stations that elicit certain moods, inspirations, or experiences. Imagine that you have a thought-station where you rethink, review, and remember all the things about your former spouse that are disappointing and hurtful. This station may be filled with lots of difficult emotion, may remind you of where you are in your divorce adjustment and grief process, and may take you away from focusing on your child. We might identify this station with getting lost in spouse mind thoughts. Now, imagine you have a thought-station where you notice the anticipation and excitement your child feels when he/she does something fun or learns something new with his/her other parent. On this station you hear reminders of how important both parents are to a child; you hear helpful tips on how to support your child’s other parent to be the best parent he/she can be; you follow important guidance on how to be a constructive co-parent—this is when you know you are tuning into parent mind. Learning the difference between these two thought stations allows you to begin to choose—to exert control over difficult thoughts and feelings that disrupt your parenting and delay your divorce/separation adjustment. You can learn to intentionally change the station and develop thought patterns that support your co-parenting relationship and children’s future.

Next, we invite you to notice which of your thoughts about your co-parent have to do with your former spouse (spouse mind) and which are about your children’s other parent (parent mind). For example, He/she’s the best advocate for Frannie; I’m so thankful he/she shows up at doctor appointments. Parent mind. Versus: I can never count on him/her—after the deception, the things he/she’s said to me... Spouse mind. Sometimes spouse and parent mind seem to blend together, I would never want my children to be a person who acts the way he/she has acted toward me or with other adults. Whoa. Which is it?

If we look at our thoughts through our children’s eyes, we find important guidance about what’s former spouse-related thinking, and what’s parent thinking. Children don’t know (or actually care) about our adult relationship behavior or issues. They care about whether they’ll be loved, cared for, and remain connected to both parents free of distress, guilt or conflict. When you express thoughts that intentionally or unintentionally have the consequence of disrupting your children’s sense of safety, love and caring with their other parent, or involves them in adult-related issues—you’re likely in spouse mind.

Now, notice the kinds of feelings that follow upset spouse mind thoughts—not so comfortable, hard on your heart, hard on nervous system, and hard on your co-parent relationship. It’s perfectly fine for you to know your values and to have a critical eye on what you believe to be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in adult relationships. However, that’s not what your children need to see in their relationship with their mom/dad, nor what they need to hear from you about their other parent. Your efforts to reduce turmoil, settle the conflict, separate adult matters from children’s experience/relationships directly focus on what’s best for kids.

Even if you’re right about some aspect of what your former spouse is or isn’t doing, negative thoughts, harsh judgments, and conflicting feelings don’t help kids. In their own time, children will come to their own understanding and conclusions about relationships, family, and imperfect parents. You can teach values without damaging your children’s relationship with their other parent. Children at a certain point in their development need to begin to see their parents in a more realistic light—the good and the not-so-good. It’s an important tool for them to pick and choose what kinds of traits or behaviors that they wish to use to create their own unique sense of self. Our children are not only born of their biology, but also learn from our personal strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, and failures.

Nurture a positive parent mind and learn to limit the negative spouse mind to diminish painful and uncomfortable feelings. Acknowledge the difference between thoughts and feelings that come from spouse mind versus parent mind. Notice how they either build positive, even hopeful thoughts and feelings, or negative, sometimes catastrophic thoughts with related feelings. Regardless of your emotional turmoil over the divorce/separation, your children need another parent who loves them, cares for them, feeds, nurtures, disciplines, teaches, and responds to them. They benefit from two parents who already function as great parents or parents that can rise to the occasion, share information, develop skills and learn from one another. Hopefully you’ll acknowledge those strengths or appreciate your co-parent’s attempts, support his/her learning/success. And from parent mind, share in your children’s joy!

••••••••

Tim was so excited to see his Dad—and the smiles they shared with each other were amazing.

Mom is good at many things; she sure created an awesome costume—Jill looked beautiful and proud.

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Parents sometimes equate positive parent mind with accepting a former partner’s choices, behaviors, or decisions. To be positive toward him/her in any way is to let him/her off the hook, to excuse him/her, to just roll over as if what happened doesn’t matter. Positive parent mind is something you build for your child. If your former partner benefits in some way, it doesn’t matter. This is something you do for your kiddos and for your own future. Your anger and judgement won’t change your former partner—there’s no amount of punishing thoughts that will change the outcome. Making the journey through loss, hurt and pain in order to co-parent with your former partner for your children’s sake is the goal.

But what if I can’t manage my emotions gracefully or can’t hold on to a parent mind right now? Or worse, I simply can’t bear the sight of him/her? It may take time, it may take some creative thinking to find ways to find more peace within yourself and between you and your co-parent. You may need to limit your interactions with him/her and take care of yourself first. There’s no shame in not being able to do this gracefully—be honest with yourself, know your limits, acknowledge what you need, and continue to move forward. Keep reading. We have some ideas to help.

Key to Healing: Avoid or Manage Triggers, Rage, and Meltdowns

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I’m so angry about what he’s/she’s done to us, I can hardly stand to see his/her name come up in my inbox or hear his/her voice on the phone. My heart races, I get short of breath, I think terrible things to call him/her. Transitions are nearly impossible as I can’t stand to look at them—they’re all smiles while I’m left like roadkill on the side of their life choices. After I drop the kids off, I have no idea what to do with myself.

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Does any of this sound familiar? Co-parenting with someone who still provokes or triggers strong emotion can be challenging, and also re-wounding. Employing constructive strategies to protect your healing heart, soothe your raging thoughts, and relax your exhausted body (who’s sleeping?) will help you weather these early weeks and months of adjusting post-divorce/separation with increasing resilience and self-care.

Protect your healing heart. Limit your contact with your former spouse in ways that allow for supportive co-parenting without unnecessary contact. Communicate what’s going on with the children, be respectfully cordial and business-like and resist the urge to engage about other tangential subjects. This may mean backing off on emails to once or twice a week with simple updates on how the children did during their residential time. Perhaps you want a separate co-parenting email address so your daily email is not affected by incoming mail from your former spouse. Recognize and honor your need for some separation to heal before progressing forward into a friendly co-parenting relationship. With time, it’s very likely that you’ll achieve a cordial, easier relationship with your kids other parent. Forced friendliness too soon results in prolonged healing and in scar tissue from repeated emotional fall-aparts.

Soothe your unsettled emotions. Oh dear, we are creatures of habit! When that hamster gets going on the hamster-wheel-in-our-brains, thoughts go a-spinning. One thought can lead to a cascade of memories that pile on a heaping bunch of hurt, anger, upset and unproductive, emotionally draining, not-particularly helpful reminders that you’re divorced/separated. For example, use distraction: watch a good, funny movie; turn on your favorite upbeat music; go for a walk, lift weights, do some work, call a friend and talk about something else! There’s a time and a place to process your feelings, and a trusted friend, counselor or post-divorce/separation support group can be a lifeline. Quieting the hamster, soothing your emotions, is an important job, done gently, with understanding, support, and a healthy dose of distraction is often needed.

Pacing and restless energy are part of the grief reaction. If you find you can’t sit still, pacing around the island in the kitchen, or wandering through the mall aimlessly, understand that this is part of your grief reaction. Some experts see this as searching behavior—searching for what’s been lost. Within reason, no harm is done by allowing yourself to walk and reduce the anxious energy. Return to the list above for other options for self-care and healthy distraction.

Go on an anti-rage campaign and commit yourself to disrupt, interrupt, and change your thinking as often as you can when the raging thoughts come roaring in. You are the architect of your future; let that include a meditation to breathe in peace and breathe out calm. Even if that’s only a moment here and moment there, over time and with practice, those moments will link together and you’ll find yourself on the other side of this crisis, feeling better.

Relax your exhausted body. Sleep is important—our bodies actually regenerate in our sleep, and that includes our emotional bodies. The longer disruptive sleep goes on (weeks into months), the more prolonged our recovery. Get help sooner than later. Read up on healthy sleep habits (http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/need-sleep) and include the suggested steps as you can.

• Shutdown technology an hour before bed. As distracting and enticing as Facebook may be, it’s very likely to be an energy gain rather than helpful preparation for sleep. Similarly, save your exercise for during the day or early in the evening. Read uplifting and inspirational messages before bed. Gentle background music can help soothe ‘the hamster’ and distract your mind as you fall asleep. Remember to let the meat hang on the bones in the moments that you’re laying awake—practice relaxation, allow your body to feel fully supported by the mattress, let go of as much tension as possible while waiting for sleep to return.

• Your healthcare provider is an excellent person to connect with if your sleep remains disrupted and you realize you’re running on adrenaline, running short on patience, running scared of an uncertain future. It’s likely that for a brief period of time, you’ll benefit from something (like counseling or medication or meditation) that can in a healthy, non-addictive way, help you break the sleep disruption and return to renewing sleep. With adequate rest you’re more likely to have the resilience to parent lovingly, and plan for a positive future. (On that note, this is a particularly important time to avoid alcohol, which often makes matters worse .)

• Focus on FUNCTIONING, not perfection. Learn to ask for help. Maybe you are one of those people who up until now prided themselves on exceeding expectations and giving help instead of receiving. Learn to readjust your expectations, accept accomplishing only what is of utmost importance, and accept less than perfection for a time. Give yourself space to feel and become aware when you have reached your limit. For a while, your max point or your limit may be significantly less than you ever imagined—and this is completely understandable. Give yourself permission to take a break, find time for yourself or lean on your friends, family and other supports.

We hear from children how they feel the brokenness: hurt, anger, distress. You can’t be someone you’re not, and creating more discomfort by acting as if is not good for kids. Kids see right through us!

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Milly, age 9: I don’t like it that I have to get out of the car all by myself when I go to Mom’s but Dad says he doesn’t want to see her.

Daddy might respond this way: I know this is really hard for you to run up to the front porch by yourself—I’m gonna sit right here and blow kisses at your back. And pretty soon, Daddy will feel better enough and we’ll both walk up to the porch. Have fun with Mommy!

••••••••

Reassure children that you will take care of your feelings and their feelings, that you will be OK with a little more time. Let them know clearly that you’re there to parent, support and love them through this difficult time no matter what—and things will get better.

Grief isn’t a Straight Path: Anger, Tears, and Acceptance

We can’t tell you there’s a right way or a wrong way to grieve and adjust to divorce/separation, but we can tell you it’s a process that involves layers of emotion. We can also tell you, that by understanding what you’re going through, by digging down deep to find your grit in the face of adversity, by moving toward self-care and acceptance, you can shorten the length of time and impact of the distress for you and your children. Let’s take a look at what might be involved in grieving.

Shock and disbelief: For some, the first wave of emotion can actually be an absence of emotion. This is the period of time when you don’t miss a beat and carry on with daily life and simply add in the details of divorce/separation or divorce/separation adjustment. You may wonder to yourself, why is this so hard for other people?

Cooperation or bargaining? Then we sometimes see a period of congeniality and a cooperative spirit surrounding the divorce/separation. When this is born of a genuine, mutual agreement regarding the ending of the relationship, and a true desire to make things as amicable as possible, then the two adults and their children are extremely lucky. But all too often, this honeymoon period is a desperate, hopeful time of bargaining in a sincere attempt to reverse the outcome—a plea to the spouse who is leaving to change his/her mind, to wake-up, to come back home, and resume again as a couple.

Anger and rage, common in divorce/separation, can continue well into post-divorce/separation adjustment. So much change, so much loss, and often a feeling of helplessness to stop what’s out of your control. It’s a very normal reaction to struggle and fight against these unwelcome truths. Along with anger—and often underneath anger—we find sadness and grief.

Sadness may feel slower and deeper than anger and it has an energy all its own. Unlike the energizing emotion of anger, which comes with an adrenaline rush, sadness lays heavy on our hearts, drains energy out through our toes and color out of the day, and replaces our normal sense of self with feelings of vulnerability, loneliness, and loss. Then there are the tears, difficulty concentrating, anxiety about the future, and sleeping more than normal, which makes day-to-day activities increasingly difficult to accomplish. You may feel like a shell of a person, going through the