The folks from the Pennsylvania Supervised Visitation Task Force have put together a very helpful video on supervised parenting time. While the team at High Conflict Central knows that you hate having your time supervised and hate it even more when you have to pay fees related to your co-parent being supervised, we hope you can understand that issues have been raised about the safety and/or well-being of your child. As we often say, you have the orders you have, not the orders you’d like to have.
Hopefully, this video explains some things about supervised parenting time and sets your mind at ease a little if you are being supervised. Also, if you do not understand what exactly led to you being ordered into supervised time, feel free to contact us. We can talk you through your situation and help you see things from best interest of a child/child development perspective.
Stay Strong and do not give up hope!
Thank you Pennsylvania Supervised parenting time task force via Video
High Conflict Central hears the most from parents when it comes to finding or working with a parenting consultant or parent coordinator. These people are so hard to understand, even lawyers and judges can have trouble with the role. We will admit that we struggled to understand their decisions and behaviors until our fearless leader, Susan Carpenter, made things more clear.
We have never met anyone who understands Parenting Consultants as much as Susan Carpenter does. Never. Of course many highly experienced PCs understand their role, but some of the newbies may not. Either way, they don’t share what is going on with you. Why? They figure your lawyer will. Unfortunately, on the flip side, lawyers think your PC will. Well, this leads to where nobody will. Lucky for you, we will. Susan will, too.
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to navigate something in complete darkness. Why do that when we can shed light on everything. Susan Carpenter also wrote a book for you. So you can know. Check that out, too. Susan is our leader for a reason.
High Conflict central’s mission is to help parents navigate through nasty divorces and escape family court as much as possible. We do this through:
Minnesota passed small tweaks to the best interest factors back in 2015. Since that time, an ad hoc group met to write a new parenting time guide. The new guide replaces the 1999 guide which basically assumed that one parent would be the custodial parent and the other parent have visitation. Times have changed and now both parents are encouraged to be involved in the life of their child.
To read the new parenting time guidelines in Minnesota, visit this link on the Minnesota Judicial Branch website.
Just so you know, our own lead coach, Susan Carpenter, was involved in the ad hoc group writing the guide. She was instrumental in getting parallel parenting time included as an option for high conflict parents!
Children need their parents. This is particularly true during times of transition, such as divorce. The most challenging thing about going through divorce is to manage your own pain so that you can be the support your child needs. Divorce is a critical time for a family. Emotions are high. Sometimes parent conflict is extremely high to the point of insanity. If you are feeling so much stress and upset, just imagine what your children are feeling. They need their parents to reassure them that everything will be alright, but if you are not sure of that, it is hard to make them believe the words you tell them.
Many parents seek out help from lawyers or mediators to get through the divorce process. Some will even turn to a therapist. Those are good professionals to turn to, but the problem is that you may hear different things from each different player. A therapist is going to validate your feelings while a lawyer is going to tell you your feelings don’t matter. Everything will feel like it is tied to money when it is supposed to be about your children’s best interests.
Have you ever thought about seeking help from a coach-mentor? High Conflict Central has been involved with parents in conflict, especially parents going through divorce or post decree issues. We not only have a collective 21 years of experience in the process divorced parents have to go through, but also have experienced the pain. A requirement for our coach-mentors is that they have been through similar things to what you are going through. We can understand what you are talking about and help you understand the upside down and backwards experience of what it is like to go through family court in a way that your lawyer or therapist will never be able to do. We also understand the reason behind Family Court and what seems like insanity in their thinking and we want to help you understand, too. There is nothing that feels more like eternal darkness than trying to navigate a system that you are not prepared to navigate and do not understand.
High Conflict Central tries to be the link to connect all the pieces for you. While you may not want to spend money on coaching when you have high legal bills and concerns about your future, our clients will tell you that coaching helped decrease their lawyer bills and the number of interactions with court professionals like judges or parenting consultants. It will also help you feel supported and in the strongest possible position to help your child. Contact us to learn more about coaching services at High Conflict Central, a trademark of Susan Carpenter Coaching and Consulting.
WordPress congratulated me today on a decade of blogging. I knew it was around this time I sat down to write my first blog on the subject of parental alienation, it was a Mother’s Day memorial for all the mothers without their children, it was for my mother who for a very long time had […]
A conflict, by definition, must involve two or more sides (unless it is within you). Therefore if parental alienation is about high conflict divorce it must mean that both of you are fighting. Or does it? One of the biggest myths that I encounter […]
As a Life and Divorce coach, I am sometimes misunderstood and misjudged. Over the years that I went through a high conflict divorce, I brought myself out of a deep dark place and into a life of joy and happiness. I have successfully shown many others how to do the same and focus on finding their way beyond what has happened in the past and to the life of their dreams I’ve been able to help many people, but not everyone. Some people want to stay stuck. If an individual wants to stay stuck in something bad, there is nothing I can do. There is also nothing a psychologist, lawyer, or judge can do either. They may try, but ultimately they will have to leave you behind and move onto helping the people who are willing to do the work that will get them where they want to be.
I work mostly with people in the Family Court System. These are parents who find themselves in a high conflict divorce situation, getting beaten to a pulp (legally) by the confounding judge, who is unable to understand what the heck it is that drives them to do the things they do.
I understand domestic violence. I understand parental alienation (which is not the same as Parental Alienation Syndrome). I understand Domestic Violence Organizations. I understand Father’s Rights Groups. I understand the parent who lives under a microscope for years in family court proceeding after family court proceeding. I understand the legal community. I understand the psychologists. I understand a lot of what happens in Family Court. I understand how people got into the mess they have gotten themselves into. Understanding all these things does not mean that focusing on them will make anything better. In fact, putting a focus on what is wrong in Family Court can be a huge waste of time and hurt you in achieving your custody and parenting time goals.
There have been times when I have either lost a client or lost a client’s respect and trust when I have had to tell them that they and their attorney are putting too much emphasis on domestic violence in their family court case. I have also angered parents when I’ve had to tell them the parental alienation syndrome argument won’t get them far. An honest statement like that mistaken to mean that I don’t believe parental alienation happens. I know it happens. I have even experienced it for myself. It happened to my youngest son and I, at the hands of a manipulative father, but my son and I are closer than ever now because I always trusted him to know truth and to figure out what was happening. I did what I could, left alone what I could not do, and put my energy into waiting for my son to be ready to restore our relationship. I had faith that I had raised him in a way in which he would see truth, and now, we are closer than ever. He does know the truth and bears some scars.
It was a long journey from my naive beginnings in family court. I went from being blind sided by the nastiness of Family Court to getting to where I am today.
More than believing in parental alienation, I believe that co-dependence, childhood trauma and unhealthy relationship patterns are likely the underlying cause of on-going family court nightmares. A good psychologist should tell you that as long as there is one strong parent, your child can overcome the trauma, regardless of what your ex throws at you. I have seen this to be true. In my own case, I stopped being the victim of domestic violence and stopped adding to the drama. I wanted a better life for my children and myself. That meant that I would have to pull myself up by my bootstraps, get healthy, and work with the professionals in the Family Court System at their level. They were not going to listen to me if I only spoke to them when I was at the point of hysterics. I was never heard when I screamed and swore at them, and you won’t get far with that either.
They were also not going to allow me to educate them. These were educated professionals and in their eyes, I was the one who was uninformed. If I was so smart, how come I couldn’t put an end to this conflict for my family? Why did they have to make decisions about my children? They could not understand and I was not able to make them understand. I found them to be obstacles in the way of me being able to move on with my life. They were also, definitely, hindering my children’s development, but they would not have ever wanted to hear that. Over the years I came to realize, that they were not the answer to the problems and they should not be my focus. Instead, my focus needed to be on myself, and my children. That is when I began to turn that ship around, and in doing so, I freed myself and my children of those professionals forever. No more obstacles. No more hindrances.
This is what I help my clients as well. Please don’t think that means that this can happen overnight. It is a process. I help my clients through that process, but they determine the pace, I cannot. I connect with many clients through a free consult, but not every consult turns into a client. Some people think I am nuts and they never come back. They do not want to give up that crutch of family court. That is sad because most people come to me due to their frustration with how the Family Court is not helping the situation, but is instead, making it much, much worse, but when told that they may need to take the focus off of family court professionals and onto their healing and gaining skills, they don’t want to refocus their energy inward. It is a lot of work to explore what has happened to you, and it is painful and ugly to peel back the layers of who you are you, and so some people cannot stomach it.
Think about this for a minute. Maybe it will make sense to you and maybe it won’t. I can only put it out there and hope that you can make some sense out of it. When you are a victim of domestic violence and look to the family court to help you with it, that is your focus. If you keep your focus there, and run to and fro, in search of professionals who will understand, that is taking your time, energy and money away from having the life you want. You may think that you cannot have the life you want, but I am here to tell you, it is just not true. You are the one keeping your life and your children’s lives in the family court. Your ex may stay there, and he or she may use it against you, but if you really get yourself strong, stay confident in your truths, and put your focus outside of the court, you will see miracles happen. The people I see who beat this system at its own game, refocus on their life and their children and slowly shift their thoughts and energies away from their nasty ex and the confusing court people, are the ones who succeed in getting saving their children from an imprisoned life. The people who latch on to their domestic violence experience or try to expose parental alienation will find that they ramp up the conflict, get more deeply embedded in the Family Court System, and feel more and more stuck over time. I am not saying that domestic violence or parental alienation should be tolerated or ignored. I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is you cannot push those memes the entire time because there are only certain ways to successfully use those arguments in family court.
Not everything involved with the conflict is related to domestic abuse or parental alienation. Some things are communication issues and related to how you speak to or correspond with you ex. Some issues are related to those Mars-Venus, male-female issues, too. Some issues have to do with the stage of development your child is in, as well, and so you need to really consider what is driving the conflict for each particular issue that arises. You cannot blame everything on domestic violence or parental alienation because the professionals don’t always have any recourse, even if they do recognize those issues are present. You still have the court orders you have and their roles are limited as far as what action they can take. You are the driver of a family court battle, not them. You want to make sure you are focused on which direction you want to go and where the journey will lead. If you know your desired destination, you cannot go around in circles. That will not get you there. Instead, map out how you are going to get there and come hell or high water, keep traveling in that direction and don’t stop until you get there!
This post may anger some people and intrigue others. It’s hard to really explain it all in one blog post! If you are interested in finding out how to free yourself of the family court, as much as possible, please contact me through High Conflict Central. I’d love to consult with you to tell you more. There is nothing more rewarding for me than to see a client who grasps these concepts and takes their life and their children back!
Co-parenting, AKA cooperative parenting is an obsession with Family Court professionals. It may even meet the level of addiction with some of them. System-wide group think reigns over common sense and good judgment, especially when they don’t know there are other options available to parents.
Even the term co-parenting is not understood across the board. Some Family Court professionals consider co-parenting to mean a shortened version of cooperative parenting, while others use the term meaning, “jointly or “together”. Still, no matter how one looks at it, I wonder how anyone can do anything “together” or “jointly” if they are not doing so cooperatively. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
For example, if I want to paint the living room blue, but my spouse wants to paint the room red, we might have to find a compromise. We might say, “Fine. Let’s paint two walls blue and two walls red. If we could agree to do that and agree on which two walls each of us could paint as we desired, it might get done and we might both be able to live with it, but we’d have to be able to communicate rationally about that and see each other’s point of view and then come to an agreement about the particulars of how it is going to work. There would also have to be a basic level of trust that both people would follow through and not sabotage the other’s plan or destroy what the other person has been working on.
If two people could not decide between the colors red and blue or were unable to decide which two walls each person could paint (maybe there is some inequality to the open wall space available), they might decide to blend the colors. The problem with that is neither person would be achieving anything close to their original goal and they would both have to really like purple because that is what the result would be. It would take flexibility on the part of both people. It would also take respect for each other’s needs or wants and the same basic level of trust as in the first scenario. Even then, blending has different meanings to different people. Blending red and blue could mean making the room purple or it could mean one color with polka dots of the other, painting stripes of both colors equally (and again, what is equal to one may not be equal in the eyes of the other). No matter how the compromises happen, they still have to involve good communication, flexibility, trust, respect, understanding, balance, a sense of fairness, etc., etc. It is still going to involve some level of agreement to resolve the situation. Otherwise, you will end up in the same old room, with the same old paint and nothing will change.
That is the same problem with co-parenting. People can either do it or not do it. It may mean different things to different parents and it may even mean different things to different professionals. When parents cannot do it, they are accused of being “rigid” thinkers. It can be true that neither parent wants to change or wants to change their perspective, but it is often really a matter of differing perspectives. My perspective on it is this, we have alternatives to co-parenting. When professionals will not allow those different ideas to come into play, they are the ones with “rigid” thinking. What difference should it make to them as long as it decreases the conflict for the children? That is really why the professionals are in place anyway, to decrease the conflict.
High conflict Central accepts a simple fact and that is many people cannot co-parent. Even in happily married households, parents are doing things other than co-parenting. We don’t rule out the possibility that people have the ability to get there if they are both willing to accept the situation and are willing to change and make a better life for their children, but we don’t start at co-parenting unless it is already happening. We actually start at where you are. What has happened to you? How has it affected you? How has it impacted your children? What is the history between the parents? What is the level of trust? What is the level of respect? Where is each parent at in their healing process? Where are you at with your parenting skills as a single, divorced parent? How much do you know about what is happening to you in Family Court and why it is happening? That is where we start because all of those things need resolution before you can be ready, willing and able to co-parent. We also know that even if you get there, co-parenting only works when both parents are ready, willing and able, and can approach the situation with good faith. If one or both parents has a strong desire to keep hurting the other, co-parenting will not happen because trust can never be built under those conditions.
Parents who can co-parent, do co-parent. They do so without a court order or any of the watchdog professionals that get appointed to make parents play nice in the sandbox. High conflict parents should not be asked to start with co-parenting. There are other ways to help the children.
Because these are the types of relationships present in high conflict divorce situations, it is my opinion that family court needs to get out of the business of forced co-parenting. When you have parents who only know conflicted parenting, the bar is set too high to expect them to get to co-parenting. It is too high a leap for their skill set! High conflict parents could be allowed to use the parallel parenting style, unless and until they are healed enough to raise the bar to co-parenting.
We know that conflicted parenting is the worst situation for children in the middle. We also know that co-parenting is the best style for children of divorce, but there seems to be an unwarranted reluctance on the part of court authorities to consider the benefits that parallel parenting can offer in high conflict cases. I really don’t understand the reluctance at all. Court professionals expect parents to jump from worst to best all in one shot:
CONFLICTED PARENTING >>>>CO-PARENTING
(WORST) (BEST)
That is quite a stretch for anyone, let alone, parents who may not have the communication and relationship skills necessary to make co-parenting work. If the professionals would give up some of their own rigid thinking, we could help parents go from here to here:
CONFLICTED PARENTING >>>> PARALLEL PARENTING
(WORST) (BETTER)
At least that would be a step in the right direction and give parents a chance to settle into their own lives with the children, learning to parent separately, and if they are so motivated, gain some important skills before they move into co-parenting. Some parents may have to stick with parallel parenting to keep the peace, but at least a parallel parenting style would move them away from conflicted parenting and offer something better for their children. If parents did well moving from conflicted parenting to parallel parenting, they may gain the confidence to take it another step:
PARALLEL PARENTING >>>>CO-PARENTING
(BETTER THAN CONFLICTED) (BEST)
That is my hope for change in the system. I’d like to see professionals have the ability to accept change for the better even when it is not the ideal. They should seek improvement in steps, rather than demand big changes that parents aren’t always able to understand. In my opinion, at least we would get parents out of the conflicted style of parenting and everyone benefits from doing that!
For now, we have a system of professionals who don’t realize that their rigid thinking about co-parenting is just as bad as parents who refuse to change. They continue to push co-parenting against all common sense and good judgement.
If you find family court, the professionals rigid thinking and co-parenting to be a mind numbing endeavor, give us a call. We love to talk to high conflict parents and help them put a stop to the nonsense. We feel so much joy when we see you and your children experience a little peace after trauma. It isn’t as hard as you think, and we don’t care if your ex participates or not, as a matter of fact, we prefer to work with parents one on one. It is always a free consult, and we offer some free e-courses, as well. Contact us to learn more!
High Conflict Central was created by Susan Carpenter. She is a relationship coach, Author and Instructor with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. Her focus is on communication, relationships, family conflict and dynamics, and gender differences in communication, stress management, parenting and conflict. She is an expert on relationships involving high conflict divorce, domestic violence, adult children of alcoholics/dysfunction, adults who experienced trauma as a child. Susan is also the owner of Life’s Doors Mediation in Golden Valley, Minnesota, where she is a qualified rule 114 mediator, parenting consultant, parenting time expediter and parent coach. She wrote the book, “The Parenting Coordinator and Consultant Survival Guide” to help parents understand that process to utilize their PC more effectively. You can contact Susan at connect@highconflictcentral.com or by calling (800) 516-2446.
High Conflict Central was created by parents, for parents. Even though a couple of our coaches now work in different capacities in alternative dispute resolution processes, we all started out in your shoes and conquered the worst of high conflict divorce. Some of us even challenged bad custody evalutions and successfully motioned the court for sole physical and legal custody to free our children from a family court prison. We want to help you do the same.
High Conflict Central offers live and online training to help you learn to Manage Conflict, improve communication, work with and understand court authorities, such as Lawyers, Parenting Coordinator/Consultants, Guardian ad Litems and even Child Protection Workers, not to mention, learn ways to bring peace back to your home and keep your children out of the middle. Check out our free e-courses!
To see everything High Conflict Central has to offer divorced parents and victims of domestic violence, including divorced parent mentors, visit our website. We are here for divorced parents, and we will do whatever we can to ensure that you remain a strong parent who is involved in your children’s lives! Your children need you.
Our Number One Goal:
To teach you to be the strongest, most engaged parent you can be at this time when children need you the most, and, if necessary, to compensate for what is lacking in the other household. To shift the focus away from what is beyond your control and focus, instead, on what is.
Goal Number Two:
To help you acquire skills to live life to the fullest, regardless of the behavior of anyone else and successfully work with court authorities to achieve your goals.
Goal Number Three:
Finally, our goal is to ensure that children have the love and guidance from at least one parent to keep them out of the middle of conflict and teach them healthy relationship skills so that family cycles of abuse and dysfunction do not repeat.
When your ex is acting the fool, just get outta their way! Professionals will never see what is going on when you tell them. Let them see for themselves! In our latest video, Susan will explain more about getting out of the way and allowing your ex to act a fool. Remember, just because they may be acting the fool doesn’t mean that you have to do it, too. In fact, your chance for successfully navigating family court greatly increase when you do not let your ex rattle you. Check it out!
High Conflict Central 