I explain the following out of a need to address what is commonly spoken about in family law-related parent support groups. I urge you to not invest too much in pop psychology and internet diagnosis of your co-parent (or yourself).
Mental Health and High Conflict Personalities
There is most frequently a mental health disorder associated with high-conflict people. In family law cases, it is widely reported that this is most often a disorder in what is known as “Cluster B” personality disorders.
Cluster B is one set of personality disorders that are diagnosed by a psychologist or psychiatrist. These include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder.
You may have your suspicions, but in most cases, it doesn’t help to speculate on another person’s mental health. And I believe that it’s not particularly beneficial to get bogged down in diagnosis here (unless you’re qualified to do so) simply because focusing on the disorder ultimately leads you to feel powerless.
In those times, your focus moves to getting them therapy or making them change, or worse – exposing them for who you think they are out of a sense of wanting to be shown to be the better parent.
Sadly, this is not likely to happen. People with Cluster B personality traits are reported as being unlikely to seek therapy or accept their responsibility in managing their behaviours.
Instead, the most productive is to learn about the behaviour the problem causes, rather than focus on the problem itself. This way you are more empowered to minimise the outfall and have some control over your responses in relation to how it impacts you.
I will be taking you through some of this in later lessons.
Unfortunately, you can not change someone else. I’m sorry that’s the case, but it just is. Sometimes (not often) something may change for them and they may eventually find a new path, however, you can’t rely upon this happening.
What you can do, however, is learn to be self-reliant and adopt responsibility for you own journey. You can learn to be adaptive to communication with them, lessening the likelihood of disputes or disagreements getting out of hand. And, of course, your life will be improved along the way and so will that of your children.
Narcissism and Co-parenting
I want to address narcissism because it’s frequently the elephant in the room. I often hear people saying they are struggling to co-parent with a narcissist. People who have had intimate relationships with someone who is high in narcissism usually want to desperately cut all ties. It’s understandable because they are certainly difficult.
However, unless there are significant family violence concerns, it is most likely that you will still have to co-parent, or parallel-parent, to some degree. And it’s tough. As you learned in the PAS course, it is best for children to have a meaningful and substantial relationship with each parent. So the focus of the Family Law Act is to facilitate that relationship, as long as there are no precluding safety concerns. So this usually means co-parenting regardless of your feelings about the other parent.
In these cases what you need to do is separate the issues and keep focused on the children and their right to a relationship with them.
The purpose of this course is to help you minimise the opportunities for disputes and to disrupt the patterns of behaviour which have led to high conflict. As I say repeatedly, you have a responsibility here to do your part in this. They are not going to change, so it’s beneficial to find ways in which to adapt so that it impacts you less.
I know it is tough. However, your co-parenting agreement or orders are about the children and they are the ones who should be least disrupted by your disputes.
PLEASE COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING QUIZ
OPTIONAL NOTES