A Co-Parenting Relationship is Future Focused

One of the foundational premises of divorce coaching is that you must keep clients future focused. Otherwise, one or both divorcing spouses is often stuck telling and retelling (to themselves and anyone in their lives who will listen) the backward-looking story of the marriage and divorce.

This makes psychological sense as the end of marriage is traumatizing and moving past trauma is challenging. It can also be exacerbated by well-meaning friends and family who so often ask “what happened?”

Divorce coaching is not therapy. A divorce coach who was also a therapist best explained it me as follows: “therapy looks back, coaching looks forward.” So the coach is looking to change the focus from “what happened” to “what happens next?”

This future focus is one of the powerful tools that divorce coaching adds to our Integrated Divorce Method. It allows us, at the very beginning of the divorce process, to focus the clients forward, even if the mediation/legal/financial portion of the process is just beginning what will likely be a lengthy process of accounting for, valuing, and then splitting up marital resources between the divorcing spouses.

That immediate future focus allows for two critical things to start. First, the clients begin to break the habit of modeling their co-parenting decision-making on the blueprint of their now-ending romantic relationship. Second, the clients begin to build co-parenting equity instead of debt.

Remembering Rebecca’s coins in the co-parenting bank analogy, these earlier coins can immediately start earning compound interest. In a typical divorce process, these two critical steps either never happen or begin to crack open long after the divorce is formalized.

Framing co-parenting decision-making based upon an old romantic relationship looks like this: 

“I’m not going to agree to that otherwise reasonable co-parenting request because she’s just trying to control me like she always has.”

“I’m not going to be generous or flexible with my time when my co-parent legitimately needs it because they never respected my contributions during the marriage.”

But if you remove the backward-looking focus here, these statements become:

“Why wouldn’t I agree to that reasonable co-parenting request because we are building a new co-parenting team?”

“I’m going to be generous and flexible with my time when my co-parent needs it because I would expect and appreciate the same if the roles were reversed.”

Now we are immediately building co-parenting equity out of situations that, if framed with a backward focus on the old romantic relationship, are likely big fights that continue to damage both spouses and the future family. And if your perspective stays backward focused, of course those fights will continue. Because you are fighting about a dysfunctional relationship that doesn’t exist anymore and that you have chosen to end.

Redefining Family’s focus is on your future family.  Yours should be too.