Going through a high-conflict divorce can make it feel impossible to imagine a life where your phone isn’t constantly lighting up, your nervous system isn’t on high alert, and every day doesn’t bring another crisis. But this episode is proof that there can be an after.

Get the Guided Divorce Meditations to help you through these moments when you feel like you are going to lose your sh$t.

In this mini episode of How Not to Suck at Divorce, Andrea shares the real-life story of a man who spent nine years navigating a brutal high-conflict divorce involving emotional abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, court battles, documentation, and children caught in the middle. Today, his kids are thriving, he has rebuilt his life, and he is in a healthy new marriage.

More importantly, he shared what actually helped him survive.

Andrea breaks down the lessons from his story, including why you have to stop trying to make irrational behavior make sense, how to document your divorce without allowing it to consume your life, and why preparing for conflict is often more useful than desperately trying to prevent it.

They’re also powerful reminders for parents. Your children are watching how you move through difficult situations—not whether you “win” every argument. The way you regulate yourself, build a support system, set boundaries, and respond to chaos teaches them how to survive hard things, too.

And perhaps the biggest lesson: do not wait until your divorce is over to start rebuilding your life.

Create new routines. Make new traditions with your kids. Reconnect with people you love. Find something that belongs only to you. Divorce may be a marathon—but even marathons end.

For people dealing with an extremely difficult former spouse, traditional co-parenting may not always be realistic. Andrea also discusses parallel parenting, business-like communication, boundaries, and reducing opportunities for conflict when cooperative co-parenting simply isn’t possible.

If you are in the stage of divorce where you genuinely cannot picture your life feeling normal again, this episode is for you.

You don't have to believe everything will suddenly become perfect.

You just have to believe that this part will not last forever.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• How to stop wasting energy trying to understand a high-conflict ex
• Why you should document everything without living inside the documentation
• How to prepare for a high-conflict “avalanche”
• What your kids learn from watching you navigate divorce
• Why therapy and personal growth can matter more than a courtroom victory
• How to start rebuilding your life before your divorce is officially over
• When parallel parenting may work better than traditional co-parenting
• How boundaries and structured communication can reduce divorce conflict
• Why examining your own patterns can change what happens after divorce

Resources

Divorce Crash Course

If you’re overwhelmed by the divorce process and afraid of making expensive mistakes, our Divorce Crash Course was created to help you understand what’s coming and make smarter decisions along the way.

https://www.hownottosuckatdivorce.com/divorce-crash-course

OurFamilyWizard

Andrea also discusses how structured co-parenting communication can help reduce the feeling that you are constantly being bombarded by your ex, particularly in high-conflict situations.

We are the only podcast that can save you 20% on Our Family Wizard.

www.ourfamilywizard.com/notsuck20

And if this episode helped you, follow How Not to Suck at Divorce so the next episode finds you automatically.

This episode goes out to everybody who is in that stage of their divorce where you genuinely cannot imagine your life ever feeling normal again.

I have some good news for you today. I'm gonna try something new with these mini episodes. Every now and then we're gonna do a feel good inspirational story because why not? And you guys listen to this show because of my positivity, right? All right. Today I'm gonna share a story that is some evidence, some proof that even in really awful situations, there's an ending.

And things get better. This story I found on Reddit, somebody had shared. it's a guy who went through a what as he describes a really brutal high conflict divorce. So nine years ago, this guy was in hell.

The kids were caught in the middle of it. There was emotional abuse. There was a ton of manipulation. There was gaslighting. This guy was drowning in documentation, in court dates, in the fear of what was gonna happen with his kids. And he was also struggling.

With this place of I'm being told by everybody that the last thing that I should and can do is bad mouth the mother. Even though we all know that the mom is causing all of these problems and hurting the kids tremendously, I am stuck.

In this place where I can't say anything. I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't. And this guy was writing that every day when he would open his eyes, there was some kind of an emergency. Not just him thinking that there's an emergency, like there was actually some shit going down every day. And I am sure that there are many of you listening to this right now, and you're nodding your head because you know exactly what that's like.

And it's one of those situations where unless you know, you have no idea. Unless you really know what it's like to have true chaos, true stuff happening almost every single day. That is a special kind of exhaustion that eats you from the inside out. And friends, if you're nodding your head, I am right there with you. I have I have lived that and it is

Absolutely awful.

And then this guy writes then all of a sudden, it ended. Poof, it was over. Now, I personally have not experienced a moment like that where all of a sudden the light switches the other way and everything ends. But for this guy, it did. The chaos stopped. There were no more court dates.

Everything just calmed down. His kid started thriving. He got married again. He has a, as he describes, a very healthy relationship with his new wife. And then he wrote, and that alone is why I wanted to share this with you. Because when you're in year one or year two or year three of something horrific, you can't always picture what.

Year nine will look like. You can't picture peace when your entire nervous system is living in chaos. And then he wrote down some things that actually helped him get there. And this first one is actually my favorite. He wrote: Stop trying to make illogical behavior make sense.

He talked about how much time he was wasting trying to understand why his ex did certain things. Why did she say this? Why did she react the way that she did? And then eventually he realized that it did not have to make sense to him. And I think that that right there is one of the biggest traps in a high conflict divorce. You can start believing that if you just understand the logic, that you can fix the problem. But sometimes there's no logic.

Then what do you do? Then there's nothing to satisfy you. You can spend hours, you can spend days, and I have trying to decode somebody else's behavior, and it still ends up in the exact same place. I mean, this reminds me of you know, in our 20s when we would look at voicemails.

That a guy would leave a girlfriend. And we're like, what do you think he means? Did you notice how he sighed right there? Why do you think he sighed? Let's play it again. And it's we're, you know, that's crazy, right? But we do the same thing when we're going through a divorce. We try to read into every single snippy remark, every email, every message, whether it's a text message or something on our family wizard or whatever it is, because we are.

Desperate to try to make sense of something.

And at some point, the question has to stop being, why are they doing this? And the question needs to start becoming, all right, what do I need to do next?

Put the focus back on you and what you can do. The second thing that he wrote that he learned I really like. And the way that he phrased it was document everything, but don't live in it. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. We talk on this podcast all the time about the importance of documentation. We talk about timelines and how they save you money.

And how it's the best way to communicate with an attorney. I was just talking to somebody the other day about doing a timeline for a different type of legal matter. And then I was thinking about what this guy wrote. And basically what he's saying is, yeah, do the thing. Screenshot the text message, keep the email, document whatever and everything that your lawyer is telling you to document. But there's a difference between maintaining a record and then

making record keeping what you are living and breathing and analyzing, going back to that first point, everything that's in the documentation. You don't need, and you should not, be spending your entire night rereading that awful text. You don't need to also work on 17 different drafts so that you get something just right to send to your attorney. You don't need to be perfect here.

You don't need to relive every message that you even send your attorney. I mean, how many of us do that when we don't get a response back from our attorney? We then start analyzing what we wrote them. Well, is it is it clear that we want a response? Did we did we really stress that we're waiting on this? Let's reread it one more time. We've got to stop. We have to do the thing, document the thing, file the thing, send the email, and then we need to move on.

We have to go make dinner, fold laundry, go back to work, talk to your kids, watch something stupid on TV. Our life has to still happen while we are getting a divorce. This guy also talks about what he refers to as the avalanche. His point is that with a high conflict person,

There are moments when something triggers a huge reaction. And instead of spending all of your energy trying to prevent every possible explosion, he learned to prepare for it. Know who you're going to call when the avalanche occurs. have your attorney on the ready. If something happens and it needs to be documented with your attorney, know your process. Know that.

This might be a week when you need an extra therapy session. Maybe you even tell your tight little inner circle of people, like we talked about a few episodes ago, who is your divorce support team? If you know that you're up against an avalanche and your high conflict soon to be ex is going to blow, then maybe put them on alert and say, Hey, I'm anticipating this week being a total shit show.

Are you guys around on Thursday? Basically, what he's referring to here is be proactive and have a plan in place and know exactly what you're going to do to take care of yourself if and when something escalates. Because there's a difference, there's a big difference between living in fear of the next crisis and having a plan as to what you're going to do when that crisis.

comes to fruition.

Here's something else. And this is something that he said that I think every single parent out there needs to hear. Your kids are watching the way that you handle this. They're not watching, and they don't necessarily care whether you're winning an argument, and they don't want to know whether you are proving the other parent wrong. They're watching how you are navigating through something that's hard. They're watching how you regulate.

yourself. And when I say that they're watching it, and what I think he's meaning here too, is it's not like they even know, like consciously, like, there goes mommy regulating again. They're just absorbing everything. And everything that you're doing is going to show them this is how you do something. So if you

Slam your hands on the kitchen counter and say, I can't take this shit anymore. I just can't. I can't do it. I don't want to do it. I'm out of here. You're showing your kids that that's what you do. And listen, I am not perfect. I have definitely responded in ways that I wouldn't want my kids to respond. I'm not really a screamer. I'm more of like a

bottle it up and have a panic attack at three o'clock in the morning kind of girl. I don't want my kids to do that. So as I'm saying this right now, I am saying this with a really, really big dose of I know how hard this is.

And they're still watching us. So keep that in your mind. They're watching how we're talking about ourselves, they're watching how we're talking about the other parent, how we're setting boundaries, how we are responding to chaos.

I think the biggest takeaway here is that they're learning how to survive during a really difficult time.

That's just it. So, what do you do? How do you survive? Go goes back to what we just talked about. Show your kids that it's okay and it's necessary to have a team of people because that's what we want our kids to do. If our kids are in crisis when they're older, we want them to utilize their resources and their team. So we want them to go and speak to a mental health professional if things are really bad. We want them to make smart decisions.

and consult their attorney when it comes to legal matters.

we want them to have good friends whom they can f go to for support.

And what I found so interesting about what this guy wrote is that he said that it wasn't just about surviving the divorce. He needed to understand more about himself and he learned a lot about himself. He learned about his history of people pleasing and why he did so much people pleasing, his childhood conditioning.

the patterns that made him so vulnerable and wanting to stay in something so unhealthy. my God, it's like I could have written this myself. And he said that doing all of this work on himself mattered more in the end than any court victory. And I I love that.

All of the work that this guy did on himself and everything that he walked away with knowing about himself, that he can now take into the next relationship and use for the rest of his life, that was the win. That was more important than any victory in court. Because sometimes we spend our entire divorce process focused on the other person. And that part that actually changes our life is the work that we do on ourselves.

And then comes the central message of this whole guy's post. Build your new life now. Don't wait. Don't wait until the divorce decree is final. Don't wait until the custody schedule feels perfect. Don't wait until your ex calms down because they might not. Don't wait until every single I is dotted and T is crossed. Start building now. Get healthier routines. Make new traditions with your kids.

Find something that belongs to just you. Reconnect with people. Find a new hobby. Let yourself imagine a life beyond litigation.

And for those of us who are navigating really high conflict divorces, we know the unspoken truth that needs to be spoken more often, which is that the conflict doesn't always end with a divorce decree. It doesn't, it doesn't go away. This guy had a moment where things were poof better. We might not have that moment.

But what do we do? You still do all of these things. We need to do these things even harder, even more, because that's self-preservation. We might find that for a lot of us, co-parenting is not realistic. That's okay. Parallel parenting exists for a reason. You might need to have minimal contact.

You might need to have communication that is purely business. You might need to just speak in facts and not feelings. That is where biff comes in big time. That mitigates opportunities for conflict. I think that for a lot of us, we need to stop creating or or wanting this fantasy of cooperative co parenting with somebody who has shown us.

Over and over and over again that they are not capable of cooperative co-parenting. So instead, we need to build a structure that protects the kids and protects our sanity. It can be so brutal. What this guy went through is brutal. And whether or not you have a moment where things get better all of a sudden and the chaos just ends.

Or not, the chaos is going to lighten. you will not have an emergency every single day forever and ever and ever. You will have a period where the universe, God, TJ Maxx, whoever you pray to, will give you a break. That's just the way that it goes. I know some of you might.

be thinking to yourselves, well Andrea, when is that gonna happen? I don't know. But I can tell you, you will have a period. I I it's it's science. I don't know that it's science, but you will have a period where it gets a little bit better. And then it might get bad again.

You guys, life is actually good. Life is more good than it is bad. And this is the part that I really want you to hear.

His divorce does not look just like yours. I know that. And the these ideas that I'm reading to you from some stranger on Reddit is not going to magically fix your case. And yes, this guy went through nine years of hell. And that sounds like holy fucking shit. Nine years? I'm nine months in and I'm ready to go Thelma and Louise off this shit.

Nine years. That's a lot. But it ended for him. And what if by applying some of these things that this guy knew in retrospect, if you applied this now, how much better can things be? Because so much of the chaos that we live in, it is on us more than we think it is. There are things that we can do.

To mitigate our exposure to the chaos.

It's the way that we don't react so intensely every time our phone lights up. That's actually one of the reasons why I mentioned Our Family Wizard a minute ago. I really do appreciate that our Family Wizard recognizes that co-parents can suck. And sometimes you do need to have power to say, no, not today, Satan. Not right now, Brenda.

Not now, Chad. And you can time it where you only get messages from your co-parent at a particular time in the day, unless it's an absolute emergency. So that is something that you can do so that you're not constantly being bombarded with inflammatory stuff. And if you don't have our family wizard, then and you're getting text messages all the time.

It's on us how we choose to respond. It's on us how we flip the fuck out. if we get an email from our attorney that we don't like, or if our kids say something to us that hurts our feelings and we know that it's coming from the co-parent.

We have more control than we think we do. And what I love about this guy's post, I think most of all, is that he learned so much about himself. And that's what I think the big lesson is in this story. Yes, this guy went through hell and then I got better. Bravo. But he got really curious about how did I get here?

W is there something about me that I really need to look at? Because let's face it, we were half this marriage. I had to do the exact same thing. I had to look at my life and say, how the hell did I get here? What are some things that I need to look at and get really curious about and see if there's something that needs to be changed that's kind of uncomfy, but it's really necessary. And the sooner you'll do that, the happier and healthier you'll be.

And the happier and healthier that your kids can be, because again, they're watching and they're learning. And that's exactly what we want our kids to do. I hope that you enjoyed this episode that gave you maybe some inspiration, maybe something to think about.

Thank you so much for listening and supporting our show. Click that little follow button in the upper right hand corner of your screen. The follows, the subscriptions mean so much to us. Remember, we tell you this on every single episode that divorce is a marathon. It is not a sprint. But like I said a few minutes ago, marathons end. They do. They come to an ending. I don't know if it's gonna be like this guy where all of a sudden, my God, everything's better.

It'll slowly get better. Even if it's going to get bad again, you're going to have a moment where you can catch your breath. And if you can't, then keep listening to our show. That's why we're here. We're here to support you. We're here to give you action items so that you can make the smartest choices possible. We've got your back. I know that you can do this. I did this. If I can do it, you can do it.

All right, friends. We'll see you in a few days. And remember, you have got this and we've got you.