Every week in my San Francisco office, separating parents sit on my couch and offer me the exact same silver lining [1]. They tell me the children are doing exceptionally well. They describe kids who are resilient, quiet, agreeable, and asking for very little during the first six months of the split. I have to look at these exhausted, heartbroken people and gently dismantle their entire narrative. If your children are suddenly perfectly behaved while the foundation of your family is fracturing, they are not fine. They have simply realized that you are not okay.
Children are brilliant adapters. Everything occurring in a family, regardless of how carefully it may be hidden, impacts the children [2]. When a marriage breaks down, parents fall into a cycle of mutual protest and withdrawal. Your nervous system is flooded, and because children are biologically wired to need you for their survival from the cradle to the grave, they constantly read your emotional weather [3]. If they sense their primary attachment figures are too overwhelmed to handle any more distress, they will stop asking for help.
I saw this adaptation perfectly demonstrated on a flight to Hawaii [4]. A baby in the row ahead of me was wailing in full-bodied distress. The parents were frantic and distracted, worried about bothering the other passengers. They shook a rattle and whispered for the child to be quiet. They were telling the baby, without words, not to feel what he was feeling [4]. Eventually, the baby stopped crying, and relief washed through the cabin. But the baby had not been soothed. He had simply given up, learning in his body that no one was coming [4].
That baby will grow up being praised for his independence. People will remark on how easy he is to handle [4]. When divorcing parents see this exact same withdrawal in their own kids, they mistake shutting down for resilience. They praise their children for coping instead of offering true presence [4]. The deepest heartbreak is not always the loud cry, but the quiet child who learned too early not to ask [4, 5].
You cannot protect your kids by pretending the pain does not exist. The Sovereign Us of parents is the first experience of healthy stability a human being ever has [6]. When that ground shifts, children need you to be honest. They need to witness two people who love each other get their feelings hurt, experience reactivity, and find their way back to a baseline of respect [7]. Repairing emotionally with each other is the greatest gift you can give your children [7]. It shows them that even when love temporarily breaks down, there is a path back to compassionate connection [8].
The Third Chair: Three Sovereign Entities at Every Conversation
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When I teach family law attorneys in the CFLR course, I ask them to stop looking at divorce as a legal division of assets and start seeing it as the reorganization of a biological system. To do this effectively, parents must step out of their subjective experience and adopt what I call the drone’s eye view [1, 2]. When you are embedded in a conflict, you are like a tree in the woods, unable to see the whole forest [3]. The drone’s eye view allows you to rise above the immediate argument and look at the system you are co-creating [2, 3].
From this elevated vantage point, I teach that there are always three entities in any relationship [4]. There is me, there is you, and there is the system we create together [2, 4]. In the context of a co-parenting relationship, that third entity takes a very specific, living form. I call it the Third Chair.
The Third Chair is the child’s nervous system, and it is energetically present at every single conversation, negotiation, and conflict between the separated parents. Children are born completely dependent, relying on their caregivers to be their external regulators [5, 6]. If the parents are chaotic, the child internalizes that chaos [5, 6]. Therefore, the Third Chair is not a physical piece of furniture, nor is it a position from which either parent can argue or seek validation. It is the living entity whose safety and regulation is the entire point of the ongoing relationship.
When a marriage ends, parents inevitably fall into two separate suffering bubbles [7, 8]. Your protector meets your partner’s protector, two childhood strategies collide, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds [9]. Caught in this waltz of pain, parents believe they are fighting about schedules or money, but underneath, their limbic systems are desperately reacting to a perceived existential threat [10, 11]. The tragedy is that while the parents are locked in this cycle of mutual protest and withdrawal, the child sitting in the Third Chair absorbs every frantic step of the dance. You cannot protect a child’s nervous system when your own nervous system is on fire.
To protect the Third Chair, separated parents must build a new kind of Sovereign Us [12]. I explain this using the metaphor of a multi-sig wallet [12]. Think of the Sovereign Us as a secure vault where one parent holds their key, the other parent holds their key, and together they unlock a value that neither of them could access alone [12, 13]. True individual sovereignty in parenting does not mean hyper independence or cutting yourself off from your co-parent [12, 13]. It is the capacity to stand on your own two feet while remaining deeply responsible to the shared system.
The child requires both keys to access the stable ground of a regulated environment. Neither parent can force the lock open by themselves. They must work together to provide the emotional architecture the child needs to survive.
Individual sovereignty and emotional self-regulation are not starting conditions for families in crisis. They are emergent properties that arise through secure attachment and sustained co-regulation. If parents cannot co-regulate each other enough to maintain the safety of the Third Chair, the child will adapt by shutting down or hiding their needs [14, 15]. By keeping your eyes on the Third Chair, you stop treating your ex as the enemy. You start treating the negative cycle as the common enemy, ensuring your child’s nervous system remains anchored in truth and safety [16].
What the Loop Does to a Child’s Nervous System
Parents going through a high-conflict divorce often sit in my office and obsess over the logistics. They think they can protect their children by shielding them from the legal details or the exact content of their arguments. But here is the biological reality. Children do not metabolize the content of your words. They metabolize your regulation.
When you are locked in a bitter conflict with your co-parent, your attachment system is under a massive threat [1]. In those moments, your neocortex is six seconds behind your amygdala [2]. You have at least six seconds where you simply cannot stop your reactivity [2]. Your brain is hijacked, and you are operating out of your survival responses [3]. Your child’s nervous system, which is hardwired to rely on you for survival from the cradle to the grave, senses this threat immediately [4]. If the people tasked with keeping them safe are entirely dysregulated, the child faces an existential threat [4].
This is what forces a child’s nervous system out of its window of tolerance [5]. When the emotional environment is too terrifying to process, the child either under-regulates by exploding in anger, or over-regulates by dissociating and disappearing [6]. We see the extreme, multi-generational consequences of this in a show like HBO’s Succession. As my wife Teale and I discussed on our podcast Come Here To Me, that show is a masterclass in failed attachment [7, 8]. There is no amount of money or power that will ever make up for how unloved those kids are [9]. They are completely committed to survival strategies because they never had a secure base [10].
Many divorcing parents believe the only solution is to completely hide all conflict from their children. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of human biology. Disconnection is a natural part of relationships [11]. The developmental gift that parents completely overlook, even in the middle of a separation, is witnessed repair [12].
One of the most important things for children to witness is the repair happening [12]. They need to see two people that love each other get their feelings hurt, have moments of reactivity, realize they are both hurting, and find their way back to repairing emotionally with each other [13]. When children witness their parents re-bond after a temporary moment of disconnection, it builds their trust [13]. It teaches them that they can risk connecting in their own lives and not take their marbles and go home after a rupture [14].
Ultimately, that is the greatest gift we could give our children [15]. You show them that even when a relationship breaks down temporarily, there is a path back [15]. You do not have to give up on yourself or the other person [15]. You can still find your way back into a compassionate connection [15]. That is what actually regulates a child’s nervous system. They do not need you to be perfect. They just need to see that the ground beneath them can be repaired.
Trying to protect your kids through this without losing yourself
I trained Figlet on twenty years of work with couples and co-parents going through exactly this. It is not a quiz. It is a place to think out loud with something that has read the work and can ask the question your friends are afraid to ask.
What to Actually Do This Week
In these sources, the author provides a specific, practical roadmap for coaching a parent in session on how to protect their children during a separation [1]. When parents arrive desperate to protect their kids, they immediately want to discuss logistics, such as schedules, drop-offs, and exactly what to tell their ex [2], [3]. The author intervenes to stop the tape, warning that you cannot fix a relationship or protect a child with logistics when your nervous systems are on fire [4]. It is irrational to expect yourselves to communicate well when you are both experiencing a massive threat to your attachment bond [5].
The first clinical step the author teaches is establishing a somatic boundary. The author tells clients that seventy five percent of your awareness should be on yourself, inside your own body, even when you are in a heated discussion with your co-parent [6], [7]. If your focus is entirely locked onto what the other person is doing wrong, you have abandoned your own body and exited your window of tolerance [6], [7]. You must bring your attention back home first before you can truly track what is happening between you [7].
To successfully navigate this dynamic, the author guides parents toward Empathy Cubed [8]. This requires having compassion for me, compassion for you, and compassion for us all at the exact same time [9]. In a family system, the author frames that “Us” as the living entity where the child’s safety and regulation live [8], [10]. If you two are locked in a bitter waltz of pain and fighting for survival, the child absorbs every frantic step of that disconnection [11], [12].
When sitting down at the kitchen table to talk to the kids about the divorce, the author insists that parents must throw out the instinct to give their kids a quick fix or try to make them feel better [13]. Instead, the author provides the RAVE method, which stands for Reflect, Accept, Validate, and Explore [14], [15], [16]. The author advises parents to start with one simple question: “What is it like for you right now?” [13]. Then sit on your hands, be quiet, and actually listen to the answer [13]. Reflect what you hear, accept that their pain is true for them, validate that their sadness makes absolute sense, and explore what they need in that moment [14], [15], [17].
The author shares a vivid case example of a father who exploded at his son over reading a book [18], [19]. The father was terrified he was failing as a parent and losing his connection [20]. The author instructed the father to go back and do the repair by owning his vulnerability without making demands [20]. The father had to say he got scared the son was not there, he could not tolerate his vulnerability, and so he got mad at him [21], [20]. That is the level of emotional honesty required to rebuild trust [20].
Finally, the author teaches that parents mistakenly believe a successful separation means hiding all conflict [22]. The author states that one of the most important things for children to witness is the repair happening [22]. Children need to see two people who love each other get their feelings hurt, have moments of reactivity, and find their way back to repairing emotionally [22]. When children witness their parents re-bond after a temporary moment of disconnection, it builds their trust that they can risk connecting in their own lives without having to take their marbles and go home [23], [24].
Your kids are not standing on the ground of your perfection, they are standing on the ground of your willingness to come back when you stumble [25], [26].
Trying to protect your kids through this without losing yourself
I trained Figlet on twenty years of work with couples and co-parents going through exactly this. It is not a quiz. It is a place to think out loud with something that has read the work and can ask the question your friends are afraid to ask.
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