Chapter 1 — What High Conflict Actually Is

Every separated parent fights some. The first year is loud for almost everyone. What makes a family high-conflict isn’t the volume of the first year. It’s that the fighting doesn’t burn down, and that the children become what it’s about.

The markers

Professionals don’t agree on a single definition, and some researchers argue the term is too broad to be very useful. But in practice, the families who get called high-conflict tend to share a cluster of features:

• The conflict lasts. It’s still intense two, three, five years after separation.
• It’s about the children, or uses them. Schedules, schools, doctors, activities, haircuts, and holidays become the ground the war is fought on.
• Small things become large. A five-minute late exchange becomes a three-day email chain and a call to the lawyer.
• It keeps returning to court. Motions, contempt filings, modification requests, emergency hearings, often over things other families settle with a text.
• There’s no repair. Disagreements don’t get resolved; they get stored and brought back later.
• Third parties get pulled in: grandparents, new partners, teachers, coaches, therapists, police, child protective services.
• At least one parent describes the other as a danger or a villain, with total conviction, and can’t name anything good about them.

If several of these describe your family, especially years after the separation, keep reading. Estimates of how many separating families stay in this kind of conflict vary widely with the definition, from roughly one in ten to one in three.

Three shapes of conflict

In my work I see high conflict take roughly three shapes. They overlap, and families move between them, but the shape matters because the strategy differs.

One-sided. One parent drives most of the conflict. The other has mostly stopped fighting back. The messages are long on one side and short on the other. The court filings come from one direction. Kids in these families often describe one house as calm and the other as tense. This is the shape most fathers who pick up this book believe they’re in. Some of them are right.

Mutual. Both parents are fighting. Each one experiences himself or herself as responding to the other. Each one has a binder. The messages are long on both sides. Kids in these families describe both houses as tense, or describe being interrogated about the other house in both. This is the most common shape I see, and the hardest for either parent to recognize, because from inside it always feels one-sided.

Contained. The parents genuinely loathe each other, but they’ve mostly stopped fighting in front of the kids or through them. Communication is minimal and logistical. Court filings have stopped. It doesn’t look like peace, and nobody would call it co-parenting. But for the children, it’s often good enough. Contained conflict is the realistic goal of this book.

Why it doesn’t burn out

In most divorces the conflict fades because the reasons for it fade. The house gets sold, the schedule settles, new lives start, and there’s less and less to fight about.

In high-conflict families, something keeps feeding it. Common fuel:

• A schedule or plan vague enough that every week requires a negotiation.
• Unresolved grief or humiliation that comes out as anger. It’s easier to fight about Thanksgiving than to feel what it’s like that the marriage ended.
• A personality, on one side or both, that experiences disagreement as attack and can’t let an attack go unanswered.
• Allies on both sides who keep the story alive: a mother, a new partner, a group chat, a forum.
• A court process that rewards escalation, or at least doesn’t stop it.
• Kids old enough to be recruited, carrying messages and reporting back.
• And reaction. Every reply, every defense, every “that’s not true,” every carefully worded rebuttal is another log on the fire.

You can’t remove all of that. You can remove a surprising amount of it, and the parts you control are the ones this book is about.

What it does to the kids

Children can cope with two homes. They can cope with different rules, a new apartment, a stepparent, even a long drive. Research consistently links persistent, destructive conflict between parents, and children being caught in it, to worse adjustment for kids, though the studies have real limits and surprisingly few ask children directly.

Caught means: carrying messages, being asked about the other house, overhearing a parent on the phone with a lawyer, being told things about the other parent they can’t un-know, feeling that loving one parent is a betrayal of the other. Kids caught in the middle show it in different ways. Some act out. Some go quiet and perfect. Some get stomachaches every Sunday night. Some, as teenagers, pick a side and stop speaking to the other parent, and the family spends years untangling whether that was the child’s choice or the conflict’s.

The good news is that the same research suggests what protects them: a warm, steady relationship with at least one parent, and ideally both; being shielded from the conflict even when it continues; and parents who don’t put them in the middle. You can do all three regardless of what she does.

Where you are

Before you go further, write down honestly which of the three shapes you’re in. Then ask someone who knows both of you, and who’ll tell you the truth, which shape they’d say you’re in. If the answers differ, Chapter 3 is going to matter.