If a high-conflict divorce has left you unable to function, that is not a failure of character.
Months of being in a high-conflict divorce can disrupt your concentration, your work, and your confidence that you can handle things.
You can learn to respond differently, so that you suffer less.
The difference is whether you go through the process with your eyes open, or squeeze them closed and hope that enduring will be enough.
I’m Dr. Patricia Turner, a Registered Psychologist in Calgary, Alberta. I have written separately about what a high-conflict divorce looks like and why being reasonable does not stop it. This one is about what the process takes out of you, what it can hand back, and what the work of getting through it involves.
Twenty-Eight Months of a High-Conflict Divorce
Identifying details in the account that follows have been changed.
Sherry is a freelance editor. She told her husband to leave after discovering his second affair, and what followed took 28 months — a custody application from a man who had never been an involved parent, child support that stopped arriving, and emails from his lawyer twice a week, every week, for almost two years.
I had worked with her briefly when the first affair came to light. She came back when she discovered the second one, and we worked together from five weeks into the separation until the divorce was final.
What made her case different from others I have supported clients through was him. Nothing he did was accidental. He was calculating, he knew precisely where she was vulnerable, and he used what he knew. There was no reasonable version of him to appeal to, and no point at which appealing worked.
Putting On Your Professional Hat During a Divorce
Early on, I asked her to put on her professional hat. Sherry was an accomplished, intelligent woman, and none of that had gone anywhere — it had simply become unreachable. The hat was a way back to it. Not a performance of competence, but access to the person she had been at work every day for fifteen years. Her adult self, in a situation that was taking her adult self away from her.
It worked in fragments. She could hold it for a while, and then the fear would break through again. It worked in fragments. She could hold it for a while, and then the fear would break through again. He was relentless, and there were stretches when nothing held.
The hat gave her something else as well. A place to stand that the process could not reach. The divorce was pulling hard on everything she had ever believed about herself, and her professional self was somewhere outside all of it.
When Holding It Together Stops Working
Her concentration went, and her income went with it. She could not hold a manuscript in her head for more than a few minutes. She had panic attacks. On the way to a mediation session she crashed her car — exhausted, frightened, not attending to the road — and never arrived.
About twenty months in, she stopped participating in her own divorce. She told her lawyer she would accept whatever was decided. She could not be present for any more of it.
This was not a strategic decision to hand things to her lawyer. It was a collapse.
She kept coming to sessions, and she kept putting the hat back on. That is what the work is. Not a technique that fixes it, but something you keep coming back to while the process runs its course. The separation took 28 months. Her recovery took longer, because the damage does not stop when the abuse ends.
There was also this. He now had joint custody. She was not finished with him. She had to learn how to deal with him for the years of school events, handovers, and child-rearing decisions still ahead of her.
If you are holding it together one week and cannot open an email the next, you are not failing at something other people find easy. That is what this does, and it is what Sherry’s 28 months looked like from the inside.
What I could not do was stop any of this from happening. I could not make the emails stop, or protect her income, or keep her in the negotiation. What I could do was be there for the whole of it — so that when she could not hold the hat on, there was someone who had watched her hold it before, could remind her she had, and could help her square her shoulders before she went out again.
That is much of what the work is, in a process like this one. Not fixing anything. Simply holding the image of the person while they cannot access it themselves, and handing it back to them each time. Being alone inside this is what breaks people, and not being alone is what makes the difference.
Why You Did Not See It Coming
Many people going through a high conflict divorce ask themselves a version of the same question. How did I not see who this person was?
For some, the answer goes back a long way.
Children who grow up with an abusive parent cannot afford to see the abuse. Survival depends on staying close to the adults caring for you. A small child who saw the danger accurately and withdrew would not survive — if we are alone when we are small, we die. So the child does not see it. That is not a failure of perception. It is a protective adaptation, and it works.
The problem is that the adaptation does not switch off when you grow up. The blinders stay in place. They can leave you unable to recognize someone who resembles the person who hurt you, which means you allow that person to get close — and then, often, they hurt you in the same way you were hurt before. This is called a trauma re-enactment.
This is one of the more painful things to look at in therapy, and one of the most useful. It is also, for a great many people, the thing they would not give back.
How a Psychologist Helps During a High-Conflict Divorce
There are three parts to working with a psychologist in a high-conflict divorce. They are easier to separate on the page than in the room.
Going the Distance
The first job is getting through this with as little lasting damage as possible, and that requires pacing rather than endurance. An accurate timeline helps more than almost anything else. If you know this may take a couple of years, you stop treating month eight as a failure.
Support matters, and so does asking for it, which accomplished people are often bad at. This is a specific place where a psychologist earns their keep. Your friends and family will tire. They will be overwhelmed, and they will not always know how to help. There is also a great deal you will not want to tell them, because it is private and sometimes humiliating, and because you want support rather than judgment. You also need someone entirely in your court.
Managing Your Emotions
Most people also need a way of reading the correspondence that stops it from eating them alive, which is what it is designed to do. Why is this email being sent? To weaken you. To overwhelm you. To frighten you into conceding something. Once you can see that, you can build a philosophy to meet it. Part of the work is finding yours.
Your emotions need attention, and they will not get it in the negotiation. That is what the therapy hour is for. Cry. Say the thing you cannot say anywhere else. Get a set of experienced eyes on what is happening. Feel it, and then stand back up.
The aim is to keep your thinking brain switched on, because the other side is working to switch it off. Fear is not a side effect of what they are doing. It is the objective. Some claims are made not because there is a case behind them but because the process of defending against them is punishing enough that you may simply concede. They want you dysregulated. They want you to say, “Take what you want, just leave me alone.”
So when an email arrives on a Tuesday afternoon and your chest goes tight, the first thing to do is notice that it has. Then the question is whether this is how you want to respond. What is the adult response here? Can they have my money, or am I stronger than that?
You do not have to work that out alone, and you do not have to invent your way through it. A psychologist who has seen this before can often tell you what is coming next, which means you can plan for it rather than be knocked over by it.
Keeping Your Eyes Wide Open
Eyes Wide Open means not squeezing your eyes shut.
The instinct, when what you are seeing is unbearable, is to look away. To skim the email rather than read it. To not ask the question you already know the answer to. To decide you will deal with it later, when you are stronger. That instinct is understandable and it will cost you.
Eyes Wide Open means the opposite. Look at all of it, including what is happening to you and not only what is happening around you. Be present for what is in front of you rather than pulling back from it. Observe what there is to observe, take it in, and then hold it where you can see it — front and centre, not stored somewhere you do not have to visit.
With Sherry, this took the form of a single question asked repeatedly. She kept finding evidence of things her husband had hidden from her throughout the marriage, and each discovery landed on someone who had no capacity left to absorb it. She came to sessions shell-shocked. Each time, I asked her whether she would rather know what she was learning or not.
She always said she needed to know. She said it was brutal. She also said she could feel herself becoming stronger, even while everything else was harder.
Eyes Wide Open is a phrase I have used with clients for a decade. Sherry took it up, and it became the way she described what she was doing.
Once your eyes are open, they never close again. Keeping them open takes courage. It is also the reason people come out of this no longer carrying the blame they used to carry for someone else’s behaviour.
Where Sherry Is Now
Sherry is not the woman she was when this started, and she is not the woman she was six years before that either — the one who decided an affair had happened because she had not been a good enough wife.
She sees her former husband clearly now. She can describe what he did and why, without flinching and without it pulling her back in, and she does not blame herself for any of it. Her business is fully operational again. She has joint custody of her children, who are navigating a difficult situation. She is not frightened of her ex.
She is not certain the blinders are entirely gone, which is a realistic assessment. But she can see far more clearly than she could before she separated from him. She is sorry she met him. She is also wiser and healthier for having reached something she could not reach before.
She did not get here by managing the process well. She got here by looking at what was in front of her, over and over, when looking was the hardest thing available. Her brother backed her financially through the worst of it, which mattered a great deal. Keeping going took courage, and that is the reason she is doing well now.
If You Are Not Safe
Some of what I have described sits alongside behaviour that is dangerous rather than merely destructive. If you are afraid of your former partner physically, or if you are being threatened, that is a different situation from the one this article addresses and it needs different help. In an emergency, call 911. It is also a topic to raise with your lawyer.
Considering Next Steps
If you are in the middle of a high-conflict divorce designed to exhaust you, and you are finding it hard to stay steady under the pressure, the work described above is the type of work I do with clients.
It will not stop the emails or shorten the process. What it does is keep you from going through it alone, help you pace yourself for something that may take a couple of years, and remind you who you are when you have lost sight of that.
If you would like this kind of support, contact a psychologist in your area. If you are in Alberta, you are welcome to contact me.
Related Articles
- This is the companion piece to the one you have just read. It sets out what a high-conflict divorce looks like from the outside, why being reasonable does not stop it, and what to expect.
- The blinders described above have a longer history. This article examines why adults who were abused as children tolerate abuse later in life, and how early conditioning shapes what feels normal in adult relationships.
- This article looks at why people stay in relationships that are damaging them, and why the fear of being alone can hold someone in place longer than the relationship itself warrants.