Why Loving Parents Behave So Badly in a Divorce | Ep 546

Why do decent, loving parents behave so badly when they separate? Almost every separating couple with children starts in the same place, at a kitchen table, promising to put the children first, and they mean it completely. Within a few months, things start to happen that nobody planned.

After twenty years as a therapist, I show you why the war that follows usually isn't between two people at all. Separation takes away the container that held both of you together, just when every old wound is most afraid, and the conflict becomes a conflict between fragments. You'll hear what the children actually absorb, what I learned from my own messy divorce, why an explanation is not an excuse, the three things a coherent separation asks you to give up, and what to do when you're in the middle of it.

In this episode:
0:00 Why loving parents behave badly when they separate
1:34 Why it happens to people who love their children
2:48 Separation takes away the container
3:25 A war between fragments
5:08 What the children actually absorb
6:39 What I learned from my own divorce
8:03 An explanation is not an excuse
9:02 Revenge, righteousness and victory
9:36 What to do when you're in it
11:09 Where to start

If you want to see the pattern running underneath your own life, start with the Atlas. The Atlas names the pattern running your life in a single sitting. It takes about forty-five minutes and costs nothing. Begin at codexofthearchitect.com, or here: https://app.codexofthearchitect.com/get-started?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pod-546

Tell me in the comments something you said or did during a separation that you only realised later wasn't really you speaking.

How this page was made: the text is the episode's own show notes from The Architect Speaks, written by Michael Lauria.