You sent the text at 4:47 on a Thursday. Something simple. Please keep him off screens after eight, he had a rough night last week. Three hours later the reply comes back. Cold. Clipped. Or worse, a little essay about how you’re being controlling, how the kids are fine with him, how you always do this.
Recognize yourself in this?
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Your chest goes tight. Your throat closes up. You stand at the kitchen island staring at your phone and the whole room tilts. There’s a specific loneliness to this. The person you built a family with, the person whose job it is to hold the floor with you for these kids, is standing on the other side of the driveway acting like you’re the enemy. You feel a hot rush of righteousness followed immediately by a sick, disoriented panic. Am I crazy. Am I the controlling one. Is he doing this on purpose. Why does every simple co-parenting exchange feel like I’m being drowned.
You type “ex undermining parenting” into the search bar for the fourth time this month. You’ve read the checklists. Parallel parenting. Grey rock. Document everything. None of it touches the actual thing happening in your body, which is that your nervous system is registering a threat to your children’s floor and cannot stand down.
I want to slow you all the way down. I’ve been sitting across from couples and post-couples in this exact bind for seventeen years, and I can tell you that almost everything the internet has told you about this problem is aimed at the wrong target. Not wrong, exactly. Just aimed at the symptom while the actual wound goes untreated.
Here is the first thing I need you to hear. What is happening between you and your ex right now is not primarily a legal problem, or a communication problem, or a personality problem. It is an attachment injury still doing its work through the co-parenting channel. The romantic bond ended. The biology did not.
The Real Question Underneath “Why Is He Doing This?”
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The internet wants to give you a diagnosis for your ex. Narcissist. Passive aggressive. High-conflict personality. And listen, sometimes those labels point at something real. But in my clinical experience, they are almost always deployed too fast and too cheaply, and they lock you into a courtroom posture that makes the actual problem worse.
Here is what I actually see when a mother lands in my office describing exactly what you’re describing. Two adult nervous systems who used to co-regulate each other, now trying to co-parent across the wreckage of that bond, running the same two ancient questions they always ran. Grounded in attachment theory, those questions never turn off. They are the same questions running underneath every adult bond.
Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.
You probably feel the first one louder. When his message comes in cold, when he sends the kids home wired on sugar and screen-time, when he “forgets” the thing you asked him to remember, your body registers it as: I am alone in this. Nobody has my back with these kids. The floor is not there.
He probably feels the second one louder. When your text lands with an instruction inside it, when you correct him in front of the kids, when you email his lawyer, his body registers it as: I am failing again. She is going to prove I am a bad father. The mother of my children thinks I am not enough.
Two people, same threat, opposite moves. You reach in with structure, correction, information, coordination. He retreats into silence, defensiveness, or the specific weaponized leniency that says: I don’t need your rules to be a good dad. Every move each of you makes to protect the children triggers the exact shame or panic the other one cannot metabolize. And around and around it goes.
This is a version of what I call the Waltz of Pain, still playing, just in a new venue. The romantic partnership is done. The choreography is not.
What the data shows: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, 74.1% of the 6,159 couples where both partners completed were in the pursue-withdraw cycle. Both partners typically describe the other as the one withdrawing.
What “Undermining” Usually Actually Is
I need to make a distinction here that most articles on this topic completely refuse to make, because the distinction is uncomfortable and does not sell.
There is a difference between an ex who is dangerous and an ex who is dysregulated.
A dangerous ex is coercive. Controlling. Deliberately targeting the children as instruments of harm against you. Persistently dishonest. Refusing all accountability. There are relationships like this and if you are in one, this article is not what you need first. You need safety planning and a lawyer who understands coercive control.
The far, far more common situation, the one that fills my consultation calls, is this. An ex whose nervous system is on high alert every time your name comes up on his phone. Whose body registers your parenting requests as capability tests he is guaranteed to fail. Who copes by minimizing your concerns, contradicting your rules just enough to feel like his own man, saying yes to the popsicle you said no to, letting bedtime slide because “the kids are fine, relax.”
From your side of the driveway, that behavior looks like sabotage. And functionally, for the kids, it is undermining. But underneath his behavior, ninety percent of the time, is not a strategy. It is a protector part scrambling to keep him out of the freezing pit of feeling like a bad father.
This does not excuse it. Not for a second. But it changes what actually works to shift it.
Because if the behavior is driven by shame, then every move you make that increases his shame will double the undermining. Every documented email, every corrective text, every “I’m just letting you know for the record,” lands in his body as more proof he is failing. And a shame-flooded nervous system does not become a better co-parent. It becomes a more defensive one.
This is the part nobody wants to hear. You are almost certainly, without meaning to, part of the loop that keeps the undermining alive. Not because you started it. Not because you deserve any of this. But because the tools you are using, the ones the internet keeps handing you, are gasoline on a fire you’re trying to put out.
The Sibling Society: What’s Happening to Your Children
Here is where I want to slow down and say something I don’t often see said out loud in articles like this.
When two divorced parents get locked in the loop I just described, something specific happens to the children. The parents drop out of adult, grounded, floor-holding posture and become peers competing for the child’s validation. I call this the sibling society. The mother and father are no longer above the child holding a stable ceiling. They are alongside the child, jockeying, each subtly recruiting the child to their side of the story.
Your ex sends the kids home saying “your mother is uptight about bedtime.” You unpack their bags and mutter “of course your father let you eat that, I’m not surprised.” Neither of you means to do it. Both of you are dysregulated. And the child, whose entire developing nervous system depends on the parents together forming a floor, is instead handed a hairline crack to stand on. They can feel it under their feet.
This is not a small thing. When a child has to hold information about one parent that they can’t share with the other, when they learn to code-switch between two houses that are secretly at war, when they sense they must comfort or manage a parent’s distress about the other parent, they are being asked to carry weight that belongs to the adults. In my published work I’ve called this being pulled into orphan parenting, the hyper-independence you develop when the co-parent is treated as an opponent rather than a teammate. The child pays that bill for decades.
I say this not to layer more guilt onto you. You are already carrying too much. I say it because the stakes are why this matters. The goal is not to win the co-parenting war. The goal is to rebuild something I call the Sovereign Us of parents, the floor two adults hold together for a child, even when the romantic bond is over and the wounds are still fresh.
That floor is possible. But not through the strategies you’re being sold.
Ready to work on this?
Figlet is AI relationship coaching grounded in attachment science and Figs O’Sullivan’s clinical work, LMFT. First messages free, no signup.
Why the Standard Advice Fails: Parallel Parenting My Arse
Now let me tell you what most of the internet will hand you.
Parallel parenting. Grey rock. Two separate households running two separate operating systems. Communicate only through an app. Never explain, never defend, never engage. Protect your peace. Become an island.
I understand where this advice comes from. It comes from the very real fact that many mothers in this situation have been getting hurt in every direction they turn, and someone needed to give them permission to stop bleeding into every text thread. As harm reduction, in the highest-conflict cases, it has a place.
But as a philosophy of co-parenting, parallel parenting my arse.
Here is why. Human children do not have two nervous systems, one for mom’s house and one for dad’s house. They have one. That one nervous system needs to feel that the two adults responsible for their existence are, at some floor level, on the same team about them. Not in love. Not friends. Not even friendly. Just on the same team about the child.
You cannot achieve that through an app. You cannot achieve it by treating your co-parent as an opponent you manage. You cannot achieve it by becoming a sovereign island who “protects her peace” by refusing all contact. Because the child, watching from the middle, will still feel the war underneath the silence.
The dominant framing tells you that independence is the goal of healing. Get yourself to a place where you don’t need him. Become unbotherable. This is one of the great lies of our therapeutic moment. Real security is not independence. Real security is the capacity to stay present inside your body while another person is affecting you, and to still know your own ground. In post-divorce co-parenting, that means being able to receive a cold text from your ex and not have your entire day hijacked. Not because you don’t care. Because you have interior ground he cannot take from you.
That is the actual work. And it doesn’t come from a checklist.
The Move That Actually Shifts It
If you want the one clinical move that shifts this pattern more than any other, here it is. It is not going to feel intuitive.
Turn the flashlight around.
The energy of the mother in the co-parenting bind is almost entirely aimed outward. At him. What he did. What he said. What he’ll do next. What his new partner is telling him. What his lawyer said. You are running a full time forensic operation on another human being’s motives, and every hour of that operation is one more hour your own nervous system stays in threat mode.
Turn the flashlight around. Point it at what is happening inside your chest when the text arrives. Point it at the four-year-old part of you that is terrified of being alone with these children. Point it at the specific ache of having built a family with someone who is no longer safe to lean on. Point it at your own body, and stay there for a minute, before you type anything back.
This is not “self-care.” This is the interior sovereignty piece. You cannot regulate him. You cannot make him a better co-parent by strategizing harder. You can, and this is the whole game, work on being the parent whose nervous system does not go offline every time his name lights up your phone. Because the moment yours steadies, the loop has one less accelerant.
And here is the strange clinical thing I have watched happen hundreds of times. When one parent genuinely, slowly, over months, gets their own ground back, the co-parenting field around them changes. Not always. Not fast. But often. Not because they’ve won. Because the fire has one less log on it.
The other move: when you must communicate with him, and you must, lead with the child’s experience rather than his failure. “Oisín had a rough Monday, seemed off, I wonder if the weekend was full-on for him.” Not “you kept him up too late again.” Same information. Radically different nervous-system landing. One is a capability verdict. The other is a shared observation of a child you both love. The first shuts him down. The second, sometimes, cracks a door.
I’ve written more about this reframe in my piece on how to get your partner to open up emotionally, and while it’s aimed at intact couples, the mechanism is identical. Shame-flooded nervous systems don’t open. They close harder.
What About the Times He’s Actually Wrong
I need to say this directly, because a version of you is reading this getting angry. But he IS undermining me. He IS being awful. Are you telling me to just accept it.
No. I am not telling you to accept it. I am telling you that the sequence matters.
There are absolutely times when your ex is doing something that needs to be addressed. Rules broken. Safety compromised. Agreements ignored. When those moments come, you address them. Directly, clearly, in writing, sometimes with lawyers and mediators involved. You do not roll over.
But you address them from a regulated nervous system, not a flooded one. You address them after your own body has come back online, not in the first hot minute of activation. You address them one at a time, on their own merits, not as installments of a larger case you are building. The difference between those two postures is the difference between accountability and warfare, and your child can feel which one is in the room.
The clinical reality I’ve watched again and again is that mothers who understand what secure functioning actually looks like can hold their ex accountable in ways that actually land, because the accountability is not tangled up with the desperate protest of an activated attachment system. He can hear it. Sometimes. Not always. But more than when it comes wrapped in the old choreography.
Common Questions
Is my ex-husband deliberately undermining me to hurt me?
Usually no. In my clinical experience, most co-parenting undermining is not strategic malice, it’s a dysregulated nervous system defending against the shame of feeling like a failed father. Your requests land in his body as capability tests, and undermining is the protector part that keeps him out of the freezing pit of “I’m not enough.” True deliberate targeting exists but is rarer than the internet suggests. The behavior still needs addressing. The frame changes what actually works.
How do I co-parent with an ex who won’t respect my rules at his house?
Start by giving up the fantasy that his house will run like yours. It won’t. Focus instead on the two or three things that genuinely matter for your child’s regulation, screens, sleep, medication, safety, and lead with the child’s experience rather than his failure when you raise them. “She’s been dysregulated Mondays” opens a door. “You let her stay up again” slams it. Save the fight for what matters.
Should I tell my kids their dad is wrong when he badmouths me?
No. Every time you correct the record you are stepping into the sibling society, dropping to peer level with your ex and competing for the child’s alliance. What children actually need is a parent who stays adult. You can say “that’s not how I see it, and I don’t want to talk about dad that way, I love you.” Then hold the floor. The child registers the steadiness, not the argument.
Is parallel parenting the answer if he keeps undermining me?
As a harm reduction tool for high-conflict or coercive cases, sometimes yes. As a long-term philosophy, I’m skeptical. Children need to feel their parents are, at some floor level, on the same team about them, even without romantic connection. Full parallel parenting can lower conflict short term while quietly teaching the child that their two parents are permanent enemies. Interior regulation plus minimal, warm, child-focused communication usually beats total separation.
How long does it take for co-parenting to feel less awful?
Longer than you want. In my clinical work, meaningful shifts usually take twelve to eighteen months of consistent interior work, and that’s when only one parent is doing it. It gets easier not because your ex changes, but because your own nervous system stops firing red alert every time his name appears. The choreography needs both dancers. When you stop dancing your part, the whole pattern eventually has to reorganize.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“You are not fighting a broken partner, but rather a tragic, co-created system where you both hurt because you mean so much to each other.”
“Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What to Do Next
Do not just close the tab on this.
Bring what surfaced here into a real conversation. Figlet coaches you through it, grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start.
Your ex is not the project. Your ground is. Get that back and everything downstream of it, including how your children experience this whole mess, starts to change. Do the interior work. That is the whole game.
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