The New Set of Tools

                “Ugh!” my client said, “He knows just what to say to push my buttons!”

                I read through the text message between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband. Reviewing the way she went off on him, I could not help but agree with her. That said, I winced because I knew all too well that those same messages, which made sense to me in the context of years of dysfunction, would not look good on a “cold read” that a commissioner deciding a family law case might have. She cussed. She name called. She brought up things from several years ago.

                “I’d like to reframe that a bit, if you don’t mind,” I told her, “Let’s start with the basic question: where is the button?”

                You could tell that she expected some sort of admonition for losing her cool. She did not expect me to ask a literal question about a figure of speech.

                “Like, what do you mean, ‘where is the button’?”

                “Just go with me for a second. If there was an actual button that we could press to get an angry reaction, the one he’s been pressing all these years, where would it be located?”

                “I guess it would be on me,” she said, starting to take hold of my reasoning.

                “I agree,” I told her, “and as a result, who controls access to that button?”

                “Me,” she said dejectedly, “But you’re oversimplifying it. It’s not like I can just run out of the room or not talk to him. We have young kids together. He always talks trash when it is about the kids, and I always respond because they are my kids. I can’t not care about it. You just telling me to stay calm sounds like cheap lawyer crap - We have to talk about the kids, so ‘don’t let him push your buttons’ sounds like a cop out. I mean, it sounds good, but how do you actually do it?”

                “That is a great question,” I told her, “and I have no freaking idea what the answer is.”

                “Am I supposed to be paying $450 an hour for this?”

                “Actually, yes. For this and what we’re about to do.”  

                From there, we did an investigation. I told her to take a week and look back at her text messages and think about her interactions. I told her to look at all that stuff and come back with the two or three things that were present every time she lost it, and report back to me.

                To her credit, she did it. In fact, she overdid it. She was an auditor by trade, so I was not terribly surprised by that. She looked over about six months of text messages and every in-person blow up since the divorce was filed three months prior. She handed me about forty pages of highlighted text messages printed out with notes. I could not help but smile.

                “How did the detective work go?”

                “I’ve got it boiled down to three things,” she said. She listed them out for me.

1.      I get mad every time he implies I am a bad mother.

2.      I get mad every time he implies that he is smarter than me.

3.      I get mad every time it seems like he’s telling me what to do, like I work for him.

I told her that was a great list. People do not usually have thousands of “hot buttons.” In my experience, they tend to have many two or three tops with their former partner.

I asked her to tell me more about each of those things. Man, did we learn a lot.

Any time the two of them had a disagreement, the first two items were his “go to.” You could literally see it within the first few minutes of almost any conflict. It was as predictable as the sunrise. He’d find a way to say or imply she was a terrible parent or an idiot. He would use them to escalate the situation and then accuse her of being an over-emotional woman and over-reacting.

I asked her bluntly if she thought she was a bad mother or that he was smarter than her.She said both things were not true. She meant it. I agreed with her whole-heartedly.

“If you know those things aren’t true,” I asked, “why do you respond to them so strongly?” To her great credit, she got really honest. “Like, intellectually, I know I’m a good mom and that he’s not smarter than me, but after all these years, he can make me feel like those things aren’t true.”

We wrote out a list of evidence that showed that neither of those things were true. I told her to keep it handy and look at it any time she needed to.

The third – treating her like an employee - was just a really nasty habit because he was used to being a project manager. He was used to casually giving orders. The reason that one stung so much is that he could not have ordered his way out of a paper bag if she had not been there, holding down the home-front, looking after the kids, and keeping him on task.

I could tell by her demeanor that just identifying the hot buttons was progress, but not good enough. When people grab ahold of you by your psychological wounds, the fact that you know what is happening usually isn’t enough to keep it from working.

From there, we got practical. Now that we knew the “hot buttons,” we could come up with some real-world strategies to try and avoid them from being pushed.

The first big one was actually really easy – limit parenting communication to text message only. This did a lot of things. First, it created a record for the court, but second and more importantly, she no longer had to respond in the moment. She could take time, and if she had a strong reaction, she could take note of that and make a point not to respond until she could see if it was connected to the “big three.” In subsequent check-ins, she reported to me that she got faster and faster at connecting his barbs to the big three, to the point where she could actually diffuse herself in real time.

That is one hell of an adaptation.

The second one was a bit tricky, but still totally do-able. She asked about what to do when he tried to start things during the child exchanges. I asked her how this type of thing usually worked and she gave me examples. The solution was actually a really easy one – I made a point to get language in the court order that the parties would only communicate about parenting and only in text unless it was an emergency. Her knowledge plus that court provision took away his major weapons. If he couldn’t get a rise out of her in text, his in-person attempts would put him in danger of being held in contempt.

Knowing a court order was not always going to be in place (and knowing some people do not give a damn about court orders), we did a bit of roleplay too. I gave her some ways to disengage without falling into the old habits. Believe it or not, it is not something that takes a long time. (But that is a separate post.) I gave her a copy of Bill Eddy’s invaluable book “B.I.F.F.” – a wonderful playbook for people who are dealing with verbal aggression and how not to take part in it.

Finally, I gave her a warning. If she implemented everything, she was about to be the subject of a major offensive campaign. He would do his best to turn up the button pushing campaign to “11.” I explained to her about how not letting him have that would dramatically change things. She could dictate the new script through which they interacted.

We spent the next several months doing exactly that. As predicted, there was a storm of attempts when his “holds” on her seemed to evaporate, but she weathered the storm. It paid dividends in the custody case. Her earlier explosive behavior was largely written off as an uneducated dysfunction and bad behavior at the outset of a divorce.

By the time we got a GAL report and were gearing up to fight about custody, we had months of “Version 2.0” under our belt, and she implemented the coaching beautifully. Anyone who read their text message could easily see that she was a skilled communicator and definite was not part of the problem.

What does this have to do with law?

Everything. Family law is fact-driven. Parent dynamics hugely important in custody disputes.

There is an old adage in poker that a good poker player plays their hand, but a great poker player plays the other player. I think the family law analogue is that a good family law lawyer navigates the law and the facts. A great family law lawyer trains their client and breaks old cycles – and in the process creates new and very useful facts if the case has to be fought out.

I’ve always thought that was one of the real beautiful aspects of family law practice. You help yourself, and in the process you incidentally help your kids and help your case. Her case has long since settled, but I do not doubt that the tools she learned (and then forged in the fire) are continuing to pay dividends for her and her family.

Not every case needs this type of “deep dive,” but if you’re in profound dysfunction, make sure you end up with a team of professionals who can analyze it with you and teach you how to put a stop to it.