If you are using your Saturday mornings to re-read your co-parent’s messages right now, you are where I was in 2018. My daughter was at yoga and art camp, and for those two hours I built spreadsheets of patterns, drafted responses, and prepped for whatever came next.
Then I started working with my co-parenting coach, Brook, and I started seeing my own life through a different lens. I began making micro shifts in my own behavior, even when the shifts seemed insignificant to me at the time.
One of those shifts was that I decided to give myself those Saturday mornings. I sat in a coffee shop with a notebook and a pen, and I just started writing. I had no expectation of what I was writing for. The pieces started to unfold on their own.
That was when I realized I wanted to create something that would support other parents who had been going through what I was going through.
Saturday morning became the thing I most looked forward to each week. The two hours flew by. It was all I could think about. It really happened without me even noticing that I had gone from spending my extra time on organizing my case to working on a passion project.
I knew I needed to learn everything I could about high conflict, and I consumed everything in that area. Doing something creative took me away from my anxiety. Martha Beck recently studied creativity and anxiety and found that you cannot be anxious and creative at the same time, and I lived it.
The more space I created, the more distance I got from the co-parenting stuff. I became more relaxed as a person and as a mom. I had more patience with my kids, and I connected with them on a deeper level.
I adopted my favorite simple yet powerful phrase, “so what,” whenever I felt myself getting triggered by a co-parenting situation or something my co-parent had said about me. I was too excited about what I was building to let myself get sucked back in.
Those Saturday mornings changed everything for me and for my kids, even though I had no idea what would flow from that notebook and pen.
I’m Michelle Mitchell, J.D., a former California litigator with more than twenty years of experience and the founder of High Conflict Resolutions, LLC. I’m a high-conflict co-parenting coach who works with parents nationwide through 1-to-1 coaching, the 6-Week High Conflict Co-Parenting Skills Intensive™, SAFE™ Ghostwriting, and the Solid Ground community. What flowed from the notebook became that work.
The life that shrinks when the conflict runs you
If you are in the middle of high-conflict co-parenting right now, you probably cannot see what has shrunk. That is the hard part.
The hobbies you used to make time for have dropped off. The friendships you used to tend have gone unanswered because you were drafting a response to a hostile message. The Saturday morning that could have been yours is now the morning you organize your custody binder. The novel on your nightstand has not moved. The question “what do I actually want for my own future” has gotten smaller, because the only question you have time for is “what am I going to do about what they did yesterday.”
That is not a character flaw, it is what high-conflict co-parenting does to a nervous system and a schedule.
The parents I coach often describe it as a slow narrowing. The hours they used to spend on their own interests get spent organizing their legal file instead. The friendships they used to tend get crowded out by the latest message to draft. Their own future keeps getting pushed to the back burner because something more urgent is always happening in the co-parenting dynamic.
What starts coming back when you make space
You are not going to change the other parent. The other parent is almost certainly not going to change, and you have been waiting on that long enough to know it.
You can change what you do with your own hours. That starts with a few micro shifts in your own behavior, and then protecting a sliver of time to do something that matters to you.
For me, the sliver was Saturday mornings and the micro shift was deciding to sit with the notebook instead of using the window to re-read the week’s messages.
What came back first was my ability to focus on something that was mine. From there, my patience with my kids returned. The ability to let a trigger pass without taking the bait came next, which eventually became the “so what” I rely on now. The deeper connection with my kids came as a side effect, because I had space to be present with them instead of distracted by the latest co-parenting situation.
The Martha Beck research is worth sitting with. Creativity and anxiety cannot occupy the same nervous system at the same time. When you are doing something creative, something you chose, something that is yours, the anxiety loop you have been living in cannot run. It gets interrupted by the thing you are making. The more space you create for that, the more distance you get from everything else.
Creative does not mean artistic. It means anything you choose to do for the pleasure of doing it. Writing, gardening, cooking a slow meal, learning a language, taking a walk without your phone, learning to kayak, planning a trip that is just for you. The particular thing matters less than the fact that you chose it, and it is yours.
You cannot do this transformation alone
The reason this transformation does not happen for most high-conflict co-parents by willpower alone is that they are trying to do it in isolation.
Your family and your friends love you, but they are tired of hearing about it. They say things like “can’t you just agree to swap weekends,” because the dynamic you are living in does not match their frame for what co-parenting looks like. Their advice fits a cooperative co-parenting relationship, which is not what you have.
A therapist can help. A coach can help. The piece neither of those does is give you other parents who are inside this specific experience, who can meet you where you actually are without having to be educated about why “just talk to him” does not work.
That is why I built Solid Ground. It is a private membership community for parents in high-conflict co-parenting and parallel parenting. The members are doing the same work on the same road. They are on the way, not arrived, which is actually the point. Watching other parents further ahead of you make the same micro shifts and get back pieces of their own lives is the proof that it is available to you too.
What the other side actually looks like
Your life is bigger than the conflict. The rest of it does not get rebuilt all at once. It comes back in pieces, over time, as you make small shifts in your own behavior and protect the space to do something that is yours.
The destination is you, back in your own life, with your attention returned to the things you care about and the people you love.
If you want to walk toward that destination with other parents who are doing the same thing, Solid Ground is where we are.
Frequently asked
Does Solid Ground promise my co-parent will change or that my co-parenting will become easy?
Who is Solid Ground for?
Is this the same as therapy?
How soon can I expect to feel different?
Related Resources
If the patterns in this post describe what you are living with, these are the places to go next:
- Solid Ground, our private membership community for parents in high-conflict co-parenting and parallel parenting.
- 1-to-1 Coaching, for working through your specific situation privately.
- The 6-Week High Conflict Co-Parenting Skills Intensive, our signature class on the 4-Move Change Model (Regulate, Disengage, Respond, ROOTS). Court-approved in five California counties, live via Zoom, nationwide participants.
- SAFE Ghostwriting, our co-parenting communication program for parents whose messages have become the bottleneck.
- Related reading: Parallel Parenting for High-Conflict Co-Parents and What to Say When Your Child Asks a Hard Question.
Not legal advice. The information on this page is general educational content about coaching for high-conflict co-parenting. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Michelle Mitchell, J.D., is a former California litigator with 20+ years of prior litigation experience, but she does not practice family law and does not provide legal advice through High Conflict Resolutions, LLC. For legal questions about your specific parenting plan, custody order, or restraining order, consult an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
Michelle Mitchell, J.D.
Former California litigator with 20+ years of prior litigation experience, and founder of High Conflict Resolutions, LLC. Certified New Ways for Families® Instructor with the High Conflict Institute, Certified HCDP™ Coach and Educator, AFCC-trained Parent Coordinator, and trained in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing®. Her practice includes high-conflict co-parenting coaching, structured communication via her SAFE Ghostwriting program, her 6-Week High Conflict Co-Parenting Skills Intensive (court-approved in five California Superior Courts: San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, and Marin), Litigation Coaching, and court and mediation preparation.