Just the Facts, Ma’am
Documentation is a tactic frequently used in high conflict divorce. Recommended by divorce coaches everywhere, including myself, you write down basically all the infuriating, terrible, and stupid stuff your ex does. It’s a way to keep track of breaches of your court order, your kids’ well-being, and your rights as a parent. Having a parenting app with your kids’ other parent makes the habit of documentation easy. There’s a private “notes” section in all of them where you can type the facts of their violations and keep them all to yourself, time stamped and organized. But documenting doesn’t even have to be that special. It can be a cheap spiral-bound notebook, or a saved Google Doc, or whatever works for you. The point is to put all the bad stuff in writing, preferably the moment it happens, so the facts are fresh in your mind.
Natalie Goldberg in her classic book “Writing Down the Bones,” a book for writers on writing, spends a small chapter talking about why it’s important to have a good notebook for writing practice, and why it doesn’t matter if it’s lined, hard-backed, or, as she loves best, covered with cartoon characters. My notebook is a bright yellow, 3-ring binder, and I’ve stuck post-it notes with the heading “OY VEY” on them to delineate the various types of infarctions. There’s a section for emails, a section for texts, and a section with loose leaf, college ruled paper where I have journal-type entries. It’s not at all technical, but it works for me.
I’m only slightly proud of my notebook. I know I’m doing a good thing by sticking to my rule of documentation. But the feelings associated with it are not always tidy. In fact, if I think about it, they are relatively messy.
Documenting violations of your parenting agreement is super important. The fact is, you’re not going to run to your attorney every time your ex doesn’t pay for their half of an activity, or when they bring the kids on your weekend 45 minutes late. You can’t. The call to complain to your lawyer alone costs more than the other parent’s share of the soccer camp or whatever. And for many of us, writing to our ex to remind them of their court-ordered duties doesn’t always end up in us getting paid back. Well, not in money anyway. So, writing it all down in your notebook helps you keep track of these things in a sort of “it’s there if I need it” kind of way.
When you might need it depends on how badly your ex behaves. If your high conflict is very high conflict, you might be stockpiling violations, especially early on in your divorce, to prepare for some near-future court date. Good idea. Having it all neatly arranged for your judge helps you look like the reasonable parent—versus the one who tosses back an email chain accusing the other parent of royally fucking up. That does not look good, and your judge will think you are just as much a part of the problem as your ex. So, if you’re keeping a running list of all the times they’re late for their custody exchanges, you’ve got—I hate to say it this way but all’s fair in love and war—ammo for the next time you have to go to court over something major.
This is the aspect of documentation that feels productive. We might even say it feels good. That they do enough bad shit to fill a notebook is totally depressing but it is healthy to keep it all in one place. So document we must, because we know that there may come a time where we’ll want all those things organized and clear for someone else to read in order to help ourselves and our kids at a later date. It’s worth doing, and doing so with care, and in blue or black ink, to make sure we keep accurate track of what’s gone wrong. We will thank ourselves later for having done it if it ever comes to that.
Admittedly though, documentation feels a little…obsessive. There was a period of time where almost daily I was writing things down and three-hole punching print outs of texts, which is a funny feeling. Going to your journal, pulling it out from that secret place so no one will accidentally come across it, breaking out your pen and “telling” it the terrible things that just happened, it feels almost juvenile. Like being 13 and unlocking your little faux-leather journal with its tiny hidden key, detailing the dramas of the 8th grade lunchroom, “Dear Diary,” you write furiously, “Today that guy was such a dick….” We are of course professional and deliberate with our words when we document for the courts, but in our hearts, maybe just a bit, we feel a little shame. This is ok, and normal. Talking about your high-conflict divorce with anyone can be embarrassing, and the amount of over-thinking we do, especially in the beginning, about what we’re saying and how we’re handling our ex’s insane behavior can feel a little, well, dirty. But this is too is a reason why documentation is an important and meaningful habit to get into.
The fact is, if we’re not putting this all somewhere, it stays inside. If your co-parent is doing unbelievable things around your kids, things that no parent should do around their kids, you’ve got to put that somewhere outside you so it doesn’t eat you alive. And some of that stuff you just can’t tell other people. One, because it’s truly unbelievable and two, because not everyone can handle or wants to hear you talk about your bad, bad ex one more time. And frankly, you might not even want to hear yourself talk about them anymore. It gets old, quickly, and you feel like Ms. Havisham or some other bitter alone woman who never got over the one wrong thing someone did to them long, long ago. At some point, we have to start letting go, and documentation helps us do that. The sooner I write it down the sooner I feel free of it. My body and mind feel calmer, and I don’t have to hold on to what I’m going to do about it.
And that’s the rub: there’s often nothing you can do about any of it anyway.
What documenting does is it allows you to relate calmly and clearly to the facts of an incident with your high conflict co-parent first, before jumping into an action you might regret later. Rather than feeling compelled to run to your friends for collusion, or to immediately react directly with your ex, or to call your attorney, you get a chance to slow down and explain exactly what went wrong. Taking the time to document is just like any other journaling exercise—like writing practice for writers, or the journaling your therapist tells you to do—it provides space from the situation so you can relate to it from a place of wisdom. Once you’ve written it down you no longer feel the need to fix the problem—a problem that is usually unfixable anyway. Our high conflict exes will do anything to create friction in the parenting relationship, and they do this because all contact, even negative contact, creates for them a kind of false intimacy. This doesn’t justify it, but if we remember that, we can choose to document their bad behavior and avoid gratifying their need to “connect” by leaving them the fuck alone. When we do that, we become less interesting, and as time goes on, we become less of a target. In the long run, documentation becomes a big step toward the peace we sought when we left the relationship. It allows us to have the freedom from conflict and dignity that we couldn’t get in the marriage because, at last, we simply don’t have to go there with them anymore.
