Healthy Divorce, Healthy Families: Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Co-parenting

Divorce is a rupture - an ending that has the potential for conflict, pain, and fractured families. While separation is always a significant transition and a time of change, it does not have to mean the end of healthy family life. With the right support and approaches, parents can consciously and intentionally reshape their relationship into a cooperative partnership focused on the well-being of themselves and their children. Many of these approaches draw on psychotherapeutic traditions promoting psychological growth and maturity. In this article we look at some psychotherapeutic approaches that allow parents to model to their children a way of dealing with rupture that is grounded in respect and emotional maturity, rather than defensiveness, hostility and retaliation.

Healthy co-parenting

Co-parenting is the phrase we use to describe the process of shared responsibility for raising children between parents who are separated or divorced. Research into healthy co-parenting helped to establish various factors that are present in healthy co-parenting, leading to strong parent–child relationships, and a positive family emotional climate (Schoppe-Sullivan, 2023).

These factors include:

• High levels of mutual support
• Low levels of undermining
• Low levels of hostile conflict

Healthy co-parenting invites us to be collaborative, rather than undermining our ex. Not always easy when there's pain, betrayal and hurt in the mix. However, your efforts to remain calm, rational, objective, and focused on the best interests of your children will support you in your endeavours to healthily co-parent.

Psychotherapeutic approaches to co-parenting

So, what are psychotherapeutic approaches and how can they help with co-parenting for healthy families post-divorce? Put simply, psychotherapeutic approaches are strategies from psychotherapy that support people to resolve psychological problems by exploring thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Psychotherapeutic approaches can involve exploring our unconscious mind and motivations. Psychotherapeutic approaches can also foster emotional maturity, as well as challenging and changing unhelpful thinking patterns and behaviors. As the old adage says, "hurt people can hurt people". Psychotherapeutic approaches offer space to process hurt and develop ways to communicate and relate to others in psychologically mature ways, which in turn helps towards healthy co-parenting.

Let's explore 3 specific psychotherapeutic approaches that can help with healthy co-parenting.

Name it to tame it

Divorce can be painful. Collaborate co-parenting does not mean you need to ignore or swallow down any pain or trauma associated with the divorce – processing your pain this will be important for psychological health. Finding an outlet for this processing that doesn't undermine your children's connection with their parents is important for healthy co-parenting. Naming your emotions and acknowledging to yourself how you feel about what happens can be a powerful way to process hurt. This allows you to then offer yourself compassion. Neuroscientist Dan Siegal puts it simply with his phrase "name it to tame it". For many people, naming their emotions through journalling, talking to a supportive friend or accessing therapy helps them to process their own pain rather than acting it out with their ex.

Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation

Divorce has the potential to stir up deep emotions—anger, guilt, resentment—that can easily spill over into parenting. Mindfulness practices can help you to grow in awareness of how you are feeling and then create space to respond rather than react. As we've seen, healthy co-parenting involves mutual support and collaboration. Being mindful of our feelings and reactions supports us to stay calm and avoid being drawn into hostility. Research (Parent et al., 2016) shows that mindfulness training positively impacts co-parenting relationship quality.

Reframing the narrative from ex-partners to co-parents

Post-divorce family life calls for people to make the transition from spouses to independent individuals, who remain connected as parents. The narrative we tell ourselves about this process has the potential to impact how we feel and behave in this process. The words we use to think and talk about divorce can help to shift our mindset and behavior. If we think and speak about our ex solely through the lens of past hurts and betrayals, it can be challenging to find ways forwards and could jeopardize opportunities for shared responsibility.

Instead, consider reframing thoughts and talk relating to divorce to embrace the perspective that separation, when handled with intentional care, can create healthy families. Rather than co-parenting being a response to a failed marriage, it can be a place to model working through challenge through responsible communication. Whilst you can't change your ex-partner, you can change how you think and talk about the co-parenting relationship between you.

A final word on psychotherapeutic approaches to coparenting

My hope is that these ppsychotherapeutic approaches support you in your journey with coparenting, so you can be proactive in creating a co-parenting relationship in which children, and parents, thrive. Yes, divorce closes one chapter of a relationship, but it does not end the story of family. With the right therapeutic support, co-parenting can be not just possible, but positive and a pathway toward healing, cooperation, and healthier futures for both parents and children.

References:

Parent, J., McKee, L. G., Anton, M., Gonzalez, M., Jones, D. J., & Forehand, R. (2016). Mindfulness in Parenting and Coparenting. Mindfulness, 7(2), 504–513.

Schoppe-Sullivan, S J., Wang, J., Yang, J., Kim, M., Zhang, Y., & Yoon, S H. (2023). Patterns of coparenting and young children's social–emotional adjustment in low-income families. Child Development, 94, 874–888.

Siegel, D. J., & Payne Bryson, T. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child's developing mind.