Co-parenting and triangles

-


I’ve been working with quite a few couples at the moment around the challenges of co-parenting. It’s caused me to reflect on the concept of triangles & how this pattern can be so complex in scenarios where parental separation has occurred.

A triangle is when a third party is pulled into a strained dyad in an attempt to manage & calm the stress within the dyad. So in co-parenting situations this is often a strained parent relationship, pulling a third (a child) in. Two examples I often see are:
  • a child witnessing parent conflict/tension & responding with symptoms of illness or big behaviours which can unite the parents temporarily as they focus on supporting the child.
  • a parent criticising the other parent to the child or pulling them into choosing a side, again temporarily relieving the parents stress as they feel validation or a sense of an ‘inside position’ with the child, putting the other parent on the ‘outer’.
What can happen for the child over time is a hyper sensitive awareness of what does & doesn’t calm their parents & a focus on providing that - rather than developing a clearer sense of their own developing thoughts, feelings & needs. This can lead to a sensitivity to the emotional needs of others in their adult relationships & a dependence on others for guidance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is telepathy ruining my relationship?

-
Image
I was asked recently what is the most common challenge I see couples facing in my practice and I found it surprisingly easy to answer... can you guess?  Telepathy. The dictionary describes it as "the supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses" . I'm not sure about you but I am yet to meet someone who can prove to me that they are indeed telepathic and able to read the minds of others. And yet, almost every couple that sits in front of me in therapy are behaving in ways that suggest they have the gift, and spoiler alert, it is not leading to enriching & satisfying relationships.  A fictitious example: Julia arrives home from work to her partner Rob. The house is a mess & Julia thinks to herself "Aargh, Rob is so lazy! He never helps out around the house, he knew I had a big meeting today couldn't he have at least tidied up a bit before I got home? He clearly doesn't care about how important my day was." Julia ...
Read more

Starting school/daycare - a lesson in growing pains.

-
Image
It's a new year and a lot of families are managing an array of big changes including kids starting daycare/preschool/school/high school or kids moving into a new year with new teachers, classrooms and peers.  Change is just one of those things that naturally tends to produce some degree of discomfort for most people (the unknown is not a popular place to be) and this becomes even more complex when a parent is a bystander of their child facing change - cue anxiety!  A lot of parents (myself included) already begin preparing their child for the change well before it's even taken place. In the circumstance of school changes, the lead up is often filled with social stories, orientation visits, play dates, books, meetings with teachers, new backpacks, lunch box prep and so on. These are not bad things, in fact they can be really helpful, but can you see how much energy is already being directed towards managing the change for the child? Before the school year has even begun our min...
Read more

When anxiety shows up uninvited – how to prevent it from taking control

-
Image
“Anxiety can be defined as the response of an organism to a threat, real or imagined. It is a process that, in some form, is present in all living things.” — Murray Bowen Everyone experiences varying degrees of anxiety at different points in their life. If you meet someone that says they haven’t, they may not be aware of how anxiety shows up for them. Bowen theorists tend to use terms such as tension and/or discomfort interchangeably with anxiety, I find that most people can relate to the experience of discomfort/tension but often do not attribute that to anxiety. In the end, what we label it doesn’t actually matter – what matters is an ability to observe it in ourselves and to become acquainted with how it shows up in our body, thoughts, behaviours and emotions - and further, what automatic patterns of behaviour we have developed in order to manage it. These behavioural strategies for managing the discomfort are often so automatic that we have no idea we’re doing them – a lot of them ...
Read more