Co-parenting with a Toxic Ex

February 17, 2014
Parenting expert Baker (Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome) and psychotherapist Fine have created a workbook specifically for divorced co-parents who sense they are losing the battle for their children’s love, loyalty, and respect. The book features tools, strategies, written exercises, and dialogues designed to help reduce the ex’s negative influence and “delay, if not prevent” a child from choosing one parent over another. This guide helps co-parents recognize and understand the signs and symptoms of loyalty struggles and their insidious effects, while offering remedies based in positive and mindful parenting to help fashion a safe and loving environment. The authors suggest the familiar protocol of positive parenting as a way to strengthen the parent-child bond, and, when coupled with mindfulness techniques for personal awareness, this protocol can help unhappy, stressed parents handle the animosity and negative influence of their ex. Like a guerilla manual, the book arms co-parents with tools for coping with a variety of scenarios, including when the ex is sending poisonous messages, interfering with contact and communication, “erasing and replacing,” encouraging the child to betray confidences and trust, or undermining the co-parent’s authority. Genuinely helpful, this guide tackles a sensitive problem and shows how to diffuse it with accepted and proven psychotherapeutic practices.