I’ll actually set a timer on my phone for at least 15 minutes so that I have time to breathe, calm down, and then send a response that’s not angry in tone. You need to get yourself into a mental place where you say something like this to yourself, “My ex is mentally ill, and although I will continue to find compassion for them, I understand that I must expect them to remain exactly the same forever. Your job is to learn to hold your boundaries so you can keep your mental health intact (and even improve). I found the advice at the end, to parents affected by parental alienation, particularly helpful in finding a way forward for myself now, through what has been a most difficult time that spanned a large part of my life and still affects us now even though he's died a couple of years ago (mercifully). Children are very susceptible to adult emotions and can easily pick up their negative feelings towards their other parents.

No matter how your ex feels about a certain situation, you’re still going to need to acknowledge it in some way. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Whether you are attempting to co-parent with a healthy ex-partner, or parallel parent with a toxic one, your experience will undoubtedly be stressful. In addition, you'll learn how to protect your children from painful loyalty conflicts between you and your ex-spouse.As much as you would like to cut ties with your ex and parent on your own without them, it is generally not healthy to cut off communication with your ex (so long as they are a healthy and safe person to be around) and your children. Divorce is extremely tough, but that isn’t to say that co-parenting after divorce is easy, especially if you’re co-parenting with a toxic ex. Like a guerilla manual, the book arms co-parents with tools for coping with a variety of scenarios, including when the ex is sending poisonous messages, interfering with contact and communication, 'erasing and replacing, ' encouraging the child to betray confidences and trust, or undermining the co-parent's authority. Our focus is on fostering a healthy co-parenting dynamic that protects your children from the negative effects of toxic behavior. While it’s clear that the easiest way to deal with a toxic co-parent in these situations would be to minimize any communication, and sometimes to cut them off completely, you may wish to find that balance of just enough communication to provide your child with a stable environment for their development.

Genuinely helpful, this guide tackles a sensitive problem and shows how to diffuse it with accepted and proven psychotherapeutic practices. Focus on the present and the future and work towards creating a healthy relationship for the benefit of your children. While you should try to minimize any communication with your toxic ex, make sure to keep each other in the loop regarding your child.This precautionary measure can prevent conflicts from escalating in front of the children and provide a neutral party to verify the proceedings. Worth reading if your facing coparenting or attempting to coparent with a Narcissist, BPD or other kind of sociopath. Whenever you’re co-parenting, the best interests of the children always have to come first and foremost. When conflicts arise, shift the focus to how decisions and actions can positively impact the children.

When you’re co-parenting with a toxic ex, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with their emotional tactics. This is what will ultimately allow you to manage the process of co-parenting with your ex, regardless of how toxic they may act.Learning how to co-parent with a toxic ex can be draining and depressing, but it’s something that unfortunately you’ll have to learn to deal with. This guide helps co-parents recognize and understand the signs and symptoms of loyalty struggles and their insidious effects, while offering remedies based in positive and mindful parenting to help fashion a safe and loving environment. If co-parenting with a toxic ex reaches a point where you genuinely feel worried about your safety or the safety of your children, do not hesitate to take the proper legal action.